Guidelines for Authors

Manuscripts will be carefully scrutinized for evidence of plagiarism, duplication and data manipulation; in particular, images will be carefully examined for any indication of intentional improper modification.

Any suspected misconduct ends up with a quick rejection and is then reported to the US Office of Research Integrity.

Authors are requested to submit their papers electronically using the Reumatismo online submission and review website. The Publisher and Editor regret that they are not able to consider submissions that do not follow this procedure.

Submission checklist

You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check the relevant section in this Guide for Authors for more details. Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission.

Ensure that the following items are present:

One author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

• E-mail address
• Full postal address

All necessary files have been uploaded:

• Manuscript file
• Include keywords (no more than five)
• All figures (include relevant captions)
• All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
• Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided

Further considerations

• Please prepare your manuscript for the single-blind peer review;
• Ensure that all references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa
• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)
• A competing interests statement is provided, even if the authors have no competing interests to declare
• Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed
• Referee suggestions and contact details provided, based on journal requirements
• Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'. Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission. Note that submitted manuscripts will not go through language-focused copyediting with the journal prior to or after acceptance; language-focused copyediting is the responsibility of the authors prior to submission. Professional copyediting can help authors improve the presentation of their work and increase their chances of being taken on by a publisher. In case you feel that your manuscript would benefit from a professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:

The Corresponding Author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) must submit the manuscript online-only through our Manuscript Submission System. The Authors' metadata must be duly completed, by adding "contributors" when needed. Metadata are crucial for the indexing of the paper and authors, and for attribution of copyright to ALL authors.

Attention: any submission received for a manuscript with more than one contributor, in which only one author has been inserted in the metadata, will result in immediate rejection, asking for a correct re-submission.

The author names and affiliations inserted in the online submission system will be those which will be published in PubMed. The Editorial staff is therefore not responsible for eventual inaccuracies or mistakes in the affiliations inserted during the submission process.

Authors are kindly invited to suggest potential reviewers (names, affiliations and email addresses) for their manuscript.

Reumatismo is a bilingual journal (Italian and English); manuscripts must be written and submitted in English. If the manuscript is accepted, the Italian translation must be submitted as well. Authors whose native language is not Italian will have their manuscript translated in-house free of charge for the printed version of the Journal.

Authors whose native language is not English are strongly advised to have their manuscript checked by a language editing service, or by an English mother-tongue colleague prior to submission.

Manuscripts must be prepared with a standard word processor (preferably Microsoft Word or OpenOffice). Pages should be in A4 format and numbered. Times New Roman 12 pt is the advised font. Lines should be left numbered in continuum, to make the referees’ work easier, double-spaced and without interruption of page. Every page of the manuscript must be numbered. Manuscripts with single spacing and/or with excessive corrections will be rejected.

The first page should include:

1. a running title;
2. authors' complete names;
3. Institution(s) where the work was done;
4. a list of 3-5 keywords;
5. first name and surname, mailing address, telephone, fax numbers as well as email address of the corresponding Author.

The summary in Italian must be no more than 100 words long and will explain briefly the aim of the work, what was done and the conclusion. The summary must be on the second page and be no more than 250 words long. The summary must be on the second page and be no more than 250 words long. The summary of Original Articles and Reviews must include the following sections: Objective, Methods, Results, Conclusions. References should include all of the references reported in the text and be compiled numerically according to the order of citation. The surname of every author should be quoted; when there are more than six authors, the first six names should be followed by "et al.". The remaining of the references should be ordered as follows: title of the article, name of the journal abbreviated in accordance with the style of Index Medicus, year, volume number, first and last page numbers, the latter properly abbreviated (e.g., 1023-5 or 1023-31). Italics, boldface and underlining should not be used, as well as capitalization of entire words. For punctuation, editorials, letters, journal supplements and abstracts, authors should refer to the reported examples. Unusual references should be conformed to the styles that can be found in the article "The Vancouver Group. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. JAMA 1993; 269; 2282-6".

 

Tables and Figures

If tables are used, they should be double-spaced on separate pages of the manuscript, not embedded throughout the text. They should be numbered and cited in the text. Tables should be provided as editable Word files, and authors should ensure that they are presented in a publication-ready format. Considering how a table fits on a page in a wordprocessing program can often provide insight into how it will appear on a journal page.

Larger or more complex tables will be made available online as supplementary material at the Editorial Office's sole discretion, including ensuring efficient readability of the paper publishing format.

If figures are used, they should be numbered and cited in the text and inserted at the end of the manuscript. Figures should be designed using a well-known software package. Please note that the Production Office will not redraw or re-letter any image.

A different caption for each figure must be provided at the end of the manuscript. Figures with different panels have to be grouped into a plate, and panels marked with letters.

In case of acceptance, authors are required to provide the figures as .tiff or .jpg files, with the following digital resolution:

1. Color (saved as CMYK): 300 dpi - maximum width 17 cm - minimum width 8.5 cm
2. Black and white/grays: 600 dpi - maximum width 17 cm - minimum width 8.5 cm

References to medical periods

• Standard article
  Maddison PJ, Lee L, Reichlin M, Sinclair A, Wasson C, Schemmer G. Anti p-57. A novel association with neonatal lupus. Clin Exp Immunol 1995; 99: 42-8.
• Article in volume supplement
  Magni F, Rossoni G, Berti F. BN-52021 protects guinea pig from heart anaphylaxis. Pharmacol Res Commun 1988; Suppl. 5: 75-8.
• Article in number supplement
  Gardos G, Cole JO, Haskell D, Marby D, Paine SS, Moore P. The natural history of tardive dyskinesia. J Clin Psychopharmacol 1988; 8 (4 Suppl): 31S-37S.

References to books and monographs

• With one or more authors
  Colson JH, Armour WJ. Sports injuries and their treatment. 2nd rev. ed. London: S. Paul, 1986.
• With Editor/s
  McCarty DJ, Koopman WJ. Arthritis and allied conditions. A textbook of rheumatology. 12th ed Philadelphia, London: Lea and Fabiger, 1993.
• Chapter in a book
  Sledge CB. Biology of the joint. In: Kelley WN, Harris ED jr, Ruddy S, Sledge CB, editors. Textbook of rheumatology, 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1989: 1-21.
• Proceedings
  Vivan CL, ed. Child abuse and neglet. A medical community response. Proceedings of the First AMA National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglet; 1984 Mar 30-31; Chicago, Chicago: American Medical Association, 1985.

References in the text should be given as number in brackets; Authors cited in the text should have their names entirely quoted if they are one or two; if they are more than two, only the first one should be mentioned, followed by et al.; in such cases the surname, or the two surnames, or et al. should be followed by the relative reference number. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their references.

Tables should be clear, consistent and necessary for the understanding of the manuscripts. Every table, marked with Roman numerals, should be cited in the text and have a short title; furthermore, its placing in the text should be specified. Figures, accompanied by a short heading, should be marked with Arabic numerals and have a precise indication about their orientation and placing in the text. Tables and figures should carry the title of the manuscripts as well as the relative number on the back. To ensure a clear reproduction of the figures, photocopies are not accepted; photographs and/or slides should be technically perfect. Authors should consider the effect of possible reduction in size of photographs.

In case of not adhering to the journal requirements, the manuscript will be sent back to the authors for amendments.

Declarations
All manuscripts must contain the following sections (compulsory):

• Ethical approval 
• Availability of data and material
• Competing interests
• Funding
• Authors' contributions
• Acknowledgments

 

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

Ethics approval and consent to participate
Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:
-include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
-include the name of the Ethics Committee that approved the study and the committee’s protocol number.
Studies involving animals must include a statement on Ethics Approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication
If your manuscript contains any individual person's data in any form (including any individual details, images, or videos), you must obtain permission to publish from that person, or, in the case of children, from their parent or legal guardian. All case report presentations must have permission to publish.
You should not submit the form to us immediately, but we may request a copy at any time (including after publication).

If your manuscript contains no data from any specific person, please indicate "Not applicable" in this section.

Availability of data and materials
All manuscripts must include a statement about the availability of data and materials. Data availability statements should include information on where to find data supporting the results reported in the article, such as hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study, if applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of several if multiple datasets are involved):

• The datasets generated and/or analyzed during this study can be found in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
• The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
• All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.
• The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC], but are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
• The data that support the study's findings are available from [third party name], but there are restrictions on their availability because they were used under license for the current study and thus are not publicly available. However, the authors' data are available upon reasonable request and with the permission of [third party name].

Competing interest
This section requires the declaration of all competing financial and non-financial interests. Please contact the editorial office if you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest. In this section, please use the authors' initials to refer to each author's competing interests. If you have no competing interests, please state in this section "The authors declare that they have no competing interests".

Funding
All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.
If you do not have funding, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Authors' contributions
The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Criteria for authorship can be found below (section Authorship and Contributorship). Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC, study concept, data analysis and interpretation, manuscript original drafting; RH, statistical analyses, histological examination, contribution to manuscript writing and editing. All the authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work”.

Acknowledgments
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed to the article but does not meet the criteria for authorship, including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials. Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.
If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

 

As a rule, manuscripts should be divided into the following parts:

1. title;
2. summary;
3. introduction, which should present the subject and explain the aims of the work with references to the most up-to-date literature;
4. materials and methods, which should inform with precision about the materials (clinical series, etc.) investigated and which should describe the methods employed by the authors;
5. results;
6. discussion, which should include the authors' conclusions;
7. references;
8. acknowledgments.

The same order should be observed also in the Italian-written manuscript.

Manuscripts MUST be accompanied by a cover letter indicating the type of article and including the statement that the article has not been published previously nor submitted elsewhere. Articles express the authors' opinion and do not commit the Journal.

Permissions

In case extracts (text/figures/tables) from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright holder(s) and credit the source(s) in the article, for example: 'Adapted from Sirotti S et al., Reumatismo 2021;73:1403; with permission.' The editorial office of Reumatismo needs to receive a copy of the written permission before proceeding with publication.

Disclosures

Please read this advice and download the associated files. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has recently published in all ICMJE journals an editorial introducing a new “Disclosure Form for Potential Conflict of Interest”, with the aim to establish uniform reporting system, which can go over the existing differences in current formats or editors’ requests. We at PAGEPress Publications welcome this initiative as a possible uniforming, standardizing way to have this important disclosure authorizing the publications of manuscripts. We are therefore asking you to duly fill in the “Uniform Format for Disclosure of Competing Interests in ICMJE Journals” and upload it on the Web site of the PAGEPress journal your work is involved with or email it back to us, in mind to allow PAGEPress to peer-reviewing your work. The document is in Adobe format, it includes instructions to help authors provide the requested information and the completion procedure is user-friendly. Kindly note that the forms should be completed and signed by each author of the work. We wait for the completed form to proceed with publication. Please be informed that if this Disclosure Form is missing, we will not be able to publish your work.

All submissions to Reumatismo are first checked for completeness (criteria for desk reject are available in the Guide for Authors) before being sent to an Editor, who decides whether they are suitable for peer review. If an Editor is on the author list or has a competing interest in a particular manuscript, another member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to oversee peer review. When making a decision, Editors will consider the peer-reviewed reports, but they will not be bound by the opinions or recommendations contained in them. A single peer reviewer's or the Editor's concern may result in the manuscript being rejected. Peer review reports are sent to authors along with the editorial decision on their manuscript.

Please see the About the Journal page for more information.
Manuscripts are accepted for publication according to their scientific interest and their relevance to a rheumatological journal. They are accepted on unquestionable Editor's opinion supported by a written evaluation by at least two anonymous referees. Manuscripts that require revisions are returned by the journal to the corresponding author for improvement. The revised manuscript, edited in .DOC format, should be resubmitted electronically to the Editor-in-Chief (on reumatismo.org) within 8 weeks from the date of receipt by the author. If the revised manuscript is returned to the journal after the allotted time, it will be considered a new submission.

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to each of the following: i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data, to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, on iii) final approval of the version to be published, and iv) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions. Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading. Authors can find detailed information on the Publisher's website.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology Authors must disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the creation of submitted work. Chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they cannot be held accountable for the work's accuracy, integrity, and originality, all of which are required for authorship. Because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that is incorrect, incomplete, or biased, authors should carefully review and edit the result. Authors should be able to assert that their paper contains no plagiarism, including text and images generated by AI.

Changes in Authorship Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal Editor: Authors are requested to sign and send to the Editors a statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author(s) to be removed or added. Please note that if your manuscript is accepted you will not be able to make any changes to the authors, or order of authors, of your manuscript once the editor has accepted your manuscript for publication. No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor

The corresponding author will receive a PDF proof and is asked to check it carefully (the publisher will execute a cursory check only).
Corrections other than printer errors should be avoided. Costs associated with such corrections will be charged to the authors.
Please be aware that the Publisher is unable to accept corrections made in ways other than specified at https://www.pagepress.org/site/guidance

Authors are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, it is recommended to state this.

The ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/faqs/clinical-trials-registration/). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.

When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. An Informed Consent statement is always required from patients involved in any experiments. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.  Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.