Instructions for authors

1. General

1.1 Conditions of acceptance

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing consult COPE.

Authors are invited to comply with the “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals”, which were established and made available by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) at: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.

1.2 Authorship

The ICMJE recommends that all those designated as authors meet all of the criteria they describe. The list of criteria is available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/. Those contributors who do not meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged.

1.3 Conflict of interest

Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.

Therefore the manuscript must be accompanied by the "Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form" at the initial submission.

Any additional conflict of interest, on personal or any other level must also be disclosed.

1.4 Publication Ethics and protection of research participants

All laws and regulations should be strictly followed. Authors are requested to indicate ethical declarations issued by their institution and concerning their research, including permit numbers, in the Material and Methods section. Authors are requested to fully comply with the ICMJE recommendations in this respect, particularly with the patient’s right to privacy, as well as the necessity to have the patient’s written consent.

1.5 Reporting guidelines and clinical trial registration

Depending on the study design, reporting guidelines such as CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, STARD should be followed. For more information about these guidelines authors should visit the websites of the EQUATOR network or the corresponding sources at the NLM website. The policy for clinical trial registration by the ICMJE is given in their recommendations. These should be followed by the authors in this journal.

1.6 Publication fees will be covered

Open Access journals have no income from institutional or membership subscriptions. The costs for the publication of these journals require the payment of article processing charges (APCs) or financial support.

For the journal Visualized Cancer Medicine, Zhongke Digital Publishing and Media Co., Ltd. (ZDP&M) will support the full publication costs of the articles. The authors have nothing to pay the first years before the journal gets indexed.

1.7 The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

Concerning the use of AI in writing the research content, EDP Sciences adheres to the position of COPE.

• AI tools cannot be listed as author of a paper.
• AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship and cannot take responsibility for the submitted work, assert conflicts of interest, or manage copyright and license agreements.
• Authors must be transparent in disclosing how AI tools were used in their paper, and are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work (in the ‘Materials and Methods’ or ‘Acknowledgements’), how the AI tool was used and which tool was used

1.8 Open access

All articles published in Visualized Cancer Medicine are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Articles are available from the website of the journal (https://vcm.edpsciences.org/), from PubMed Central as soon as the indexation of the journal is effective and from Europe PubMed Central, in various formats. Authors are the copyright holders of their articles. All articles bear the following mention: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1.9 Manuscript compliance with the instructions for authors

Authors are invited to carefully read the below instructions. Articles not compliant with these instructions will be immediately sent back to the author. In order to avoid these additional delays in the publication of their articles, authors should know that their articles will enter the peer review process only if they are compliant after re-submission.

A frequent reason of immediate rejection is plagiarism. Using the Similarity Check tool for the text, allows to detect even minimal plagiarism. Thus authors are invited to read the ethical standards and apply the given indications in order to avoid this sanction.

1.10 Data sharing policy

Authors may be invited to share with the peer reviewers during the article evaluation process in a confidential manner the data on which the research is based. Further, as long as the publication of data is not in opposition with patients’ privacy, authors are invited to upload supplemental datasets related to their research to an online repository. Doing so makes it available for both human and machine reading in order to further aid the acceleration of scientific discovery.

Authors are invited to prepare and deposit their data according to the FAIR data principles. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. The principles are available here. To summarize this, the dataset should be findable through a complete set of metadata, including a license for re-use and a data identifier (DOI or other). The dataset is accessible when access is open. Interoperable means that the data can be used and combined with other datasets in a format that is sufficiently widely distributed. Re-usability is achieved when the dataset is deposited with a corresponding Creative Commons open license and is downloadable. Furthermore, re-usability implies that parameters describing how this dataset has been collected needs to be disclosed. Machine and experimental conditions must be documented.

1.11 Scientific Integrity

We hold scientific integrity as the top priority in any consideration of publication. Therefore, our authors are strongly suggested to upload their raw data onto Research Data Deposit (RDD) for further verification in case our readers have any doubt on the scientific integrity of the studied project. Please use this link for uploading your raw data onto RDD: http://www.researchdata.org.cn.

1.12 ORCID

From October 2024, only authenticated ORCIDs will be published in this journal. Any ORCIDs included in the manuscript files or provided outside of the authentication process outlined below will not be included in the published article. Corresponding authors can link their own ORCID to their profile at the time of submission. They should also enter their co-authors details (names and email addresses) in the system at this time. Co-authors listed this way will be automatically invited to confirm that they are co-authors of the manuscript, and to validate their ORCID. This must be done before article acceptance. See also EDP Sciences ORCID policy https://www.edpsciences.org/en/publishing-policies-ethics#anchor_ORCID-policy.

2 Submission Checklist

Before the submission, please:

1. Read the Aims & Scope to gain an overview and assess if your manuscript is suitable for this journal.
2. Use the Microsoft Word template to prepare your manuscript.
3. Make sure that issues about ethical standards and instructions for authors have been appropriately considered.
4. Check the submission and peer-review system.
5. Prepare the appropriate keywords.
6. Check if your title and abstract are effective.
7. Prepare the cover letter.
8. Check if you have cited sources appropriately.
9. Make sure you have written permission for any third-party materials you’ve included.
10. Make sure you included the name and affiliation of any co-authors.
11. Make sure you included a disclosure statement and declared any competing interests.
12. Make sure you are transparent in disclosing how AI tools were used in your paper in the case you use such tools.
13. Please include/create your ORCiD.
14. Ensure that all authors have approved the content of the submitted manuscript.
15. Check the files ready to upload:
    • Your manuscript: including a title page with names of all authors and co-authors, abstract, keywords, main text and references,
    • Video Files,
    • Video thumb,
    • Figure files,
    • Table files,
    • Any extra files such as supplemental materials or biographical notes,
    • Cover letter,
    • Filled Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form.

You can submit at: https://vcm.nestor-edp.org/.

3. Types of papers

Eleven types of publications are considered:

• Original research article
• Review article
• Perspective article
• Technological and Methodological Advances
• Clinical case study
• Laboratory bases methods
• Surgical Techniques
• Commentaries and historical reflections
• Just movies
• Editorial
• Foreword

4. Presentation of manuscripts & videos

For manuscripts: Use Times 12 with 1.5 interline throughout the manuscript and avoid unnecessary formatting. Number pages. Use up to three subheading levels in total. Italics should be used in the text for all scientific names and other terms such as genes, mutations, genotypes and alleles. SI units should be used throughout the manuscript. Define acronyms/abbreviations upon first use in the main text. The manuscript must be submitted as an editable .doc or .docx or LaTeX file.

For the video files please follow the Guidelines for Video Production.

4.1 Limits of numbers of words, video duration, references, figures and tables

• Original Research Article: text between 2000 and 6000 words in length. There is no limit to the number of references, tables and figures. However, at least one video with (not longer than 10 minutes) is required to be included as data for publication.
• Review article: Authors should include an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph. Article should be between 2000 and 8000 words in length. There is no limit to the number of references, tables and or figures. However, at least one video (not longer than 10 minutes) is required.
• Perspective: Provide fresh insights on new advances of a specific research field of science and technology, or scientific policy and other issues related to science community. Authors should not primarily discuss their own work. While snapshot the issue or problem, perspectives are expected to propose a solution in detail. Perspective should be less than 3000 words with a maximum of 15 references and 1–2 displayed items.
• Technological and Methodological Advances: publishes innovative developments in clinical or research techniques and methods across the full range of areas and topics within cancer medicine, as well as unique protocols for cancer research or clinical investigation. A full article is expected in this category.
• Clinical Case Study: between 2000 and 6000 words in length. There is no limit to the number of references, tables and or figures. However, at least one video (not longer than 10 minutes) is required to be included as data for publication.
• Laboratory based methods: Article should be between 2000 and 6000 words in length. There is no limit to the number of references, tables and or figures. However, at least one video (not longer than 10 minutes) is required to be included as experimental procedures or data for publication.
• Surgical techniques: should be between 2000 and 6000 words in length. There is no limit to the number of references, tables and or figures. However, at least one video (not longer than 10 minutes) is required to be included as surgical procedures for publication.
• Commentaries and historical reflections: These articles will be organized as special invitation-only articles.
• Just movies. Do you have one or more movies showing in a self-explicative way, a set of data that does not require a full written paper? In this category of publication, you can publish one or more movies (10 minutes maximum for each movie) with an abstract and a minimum of 500 words of presentation. A soundtrack of English narratives and English caption are suggested for each movie to help our audience better understand your presentation.

4.2 Order of parts

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the following order (Reviews, very long articles may use a different presentation):

Original research article

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Background
• Methods and Materials
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusion
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

Review article, perspective article, and technological and methodological advances

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Introduction
• Conclusion
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

Clinical Case Study

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Background
• Case introduction
• Clinical Management
• Patient Outcomes
• Discussion
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

Laboratory based methods

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Background and Purpose of the Method
• Technical procedure
• Data analysis standards
• Discussion
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

Surgical techniques

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Background and Purpose of the Surgery
• Instruments needed
• Surgical procedure
• Patient outcome
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

Just movies

• Title Page
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Presentation
• Conflict of interest
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Data availability statement
• Ethical approval
• Informed consent
• Author contribution statement
• References

4.3 First page, title

The first page should include: title of paper, list of all authors with full given and family names, addresses of all authors, and name of corresponding author with email address.

Authors List and Affiliations: Authors' full first and last names must be provided. The initials of any middle names can be added. The format for affiliations: complete address information including city, and country. At least one author should be designated as the corresponding author, and their email address and other details included at the end of the affiliation section. After acceptance, updates to author names or affiliations may not be permitted. Equal Contributions: authors who have contributed equally should be marked with a superscript letter (to their names). The letter must be in footnote, and the following statement added: “These authors contributed equally to this work”. The equal roles of authors should also be adequately disclosed in the author contribution statement. Please read the Ethical Standards.

The Visualized Cancer Medicine encourages the listing of authors’ Open Researcher and Contributor Identification (ORCID).

The title should represent the content included in the videos, be short and descriptive. All individual disclosures of conflict of interest of all co-authors shall also be indicated on this page

The main manuscript shall be submitted without any information regarding the authors that are all available on the title page. The text file of the manuscript shall nevertheless contain all the other elements, including Title, Abstract, Keywords and the text structured as described in the sections below.

4.4 Abstracts

Abstract: The abstract should be a total of about 400 words maximum, describe the main objective(s) of the study, explain how the study was done, including any model organisms used, without methodological detail, summarize the most important results and their significance. Abstracts should not include citations and abbreviations.

Keywords: Four to six pertinent keywords need to be added after the abstract. We recommend that the keywords are specific to the article, yet reasonably common within the subject discipline.

4.5 Main text

4.5.1 Introduction or Background

No subsection. This section is headed “Introduction” or “Background”.

The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested. The current state of the research field should be reviewed carefully and key publications cited. Please highlight controversial and diverging hypotheses when necessary. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions.

4.5.2 Methods and Materials/ Case introduction/ Clinical management/ Patient outcomes/ Technical procedure/ Data analysis standards/ Instruments needed/ Surgical procedure

These parts may be presented as several subsections (up to two levels of subheadings).

They should be described with sufficient detail to allow others to replicate and build on published results. New methods and protocols should be described in detail while well-established methods can be briefly described and appropriately cited, but the submission should include sufficient information to be understood independent of these references.

4.5.3 Discussion

This section may be presented as a single part or as several subsections; maximum of two subheading levels. The last subsection can be “Conclusions”.

Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted. Future research directions may also be mentioned. This section may be combined with Results.

4.5.4 Conflict of Interest

This mandatory section must be inserted before the Acknowledgements. This section shall describe whether yes or no, each individual author has to disclose any kind of conflict of interest.

Depending on the type of conflict, the following sentences are recommended to be added for each author (please use the authors’ initials here):

• For author AA receiving directly research funding please state: "AA has received funding from" and note the source.
• In case BB’s institution received any sort of support, state: "The institution of BB has received funding from…" and note the source.
• If CC received no financial support please state, "CC certifies that he or she has no financial conflict of interest (eg, consultancies, stock ownership, equity interest, patent/licensing arrangements, etc) in connection with this article."
• If DD has received or may receive any personal payment or other benefit from a commercial entity (eg, serve as a consultant), please note: "DD has or may receive payments or benefits from … (note the source) related to this work."

If authors have no conflict of interest, make this clear by stating ‘The authors have nothing to disclose’.

4.5.5 Acknowledgements

This section must be concise. No subdivisions. Mention here colleagues and grants. See also the above section about authorship (see 1.2) and mention here all those persons not meeting all the criteria necessary for authorship.

4.5.6 Funding

All sources of funding of the study should be disclosed. Clearly indicate grants that you have received in support of your research work and if you received funds to cover publication costs. Please add: “This research received no external funding” or “This research was funded by [name of funder] grant number [xxx]” and/or “The APC was funded by [XXX]” in this section. Check carefully that the details given are accurate and use the standard spelling of funding agency names at https://search.crossref.org/funding, any errors may affect your future funding.

4.5.7 Data availability statement

In this section, please provide, if your study reports data, details regarding where data supporting reported results can be found. If legally and ethically possible, authors should indicate whether or not their manuscript has associated data and where positive (and appropriate), if the data has been deposited in a data repository [whose location should be disclosed here]. Alternatively authors could write: This article has no associated data generated and/or analyzed / Data associated with this article cannot be disclosed due to legal/ethical/other reason.

4.5.8 Author contribution statement

We expect that all authors will have reviewed, discussed, and agreed to their individual contributions ahead of this time. Contributions will be published before the references section, and they should accurately reflect contributions to the work. The following statements should be used "Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; Methodology, X.X.; Software, X.X.; Validation, X.X., Y.Y. and Z.Z.; Formal Analysis, X.X.; Investigation, X.X.; Resources, X.X.; Data Curation, X.X.; Writing – Original Draft Preparation, X.X.; Writing – Review & Editing, X.X.; Visualization, X.X.; Supervision, X.X.; Project Administration, X.X.; Funding Acquisition, Y.Y.”.

4.5.9 Ethical approval

This mandatory field should not be left empty.

• If your study requires ethical approval, please include the ethical protocols followed and the name of the committee, which approved the study. For example : “This study received ethical approval from the Ethics committee of X hospital under the protocol number XXXX.”
• If your study does not require ethical approval, please state that : “Ethical approval was not required.”

4.5.10 Informed consent

In accordance with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013, a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained must be included for experimentation involving humans.

When informed consent has been obtained, it must be stated in the published article: “Written informed consent was obtained from all patients and/or families”.

If not applicable, the following sentence should be used: “This article does not contain any studies involving human subjects”.

4.5.11 References

This section should be arranged according to the precise format detailed below. Only works cited in the text should appear here. Citation of unpublished papers and grey literature should generally be avoided. Software cited in the Material and Methods should have a citation. Papers may be cited as “in press” only when they have been accepted for publication (in this case, include the DOI).

5. Tables

Tables (numbered as Table 1, Table 2, etc.) should be presented as one per page. Avoid complex formatting and use the basic Table format in Word or Excel.

6. Figures

6.1 Figure numbers and legends

Figures should be numbered as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. They are referred to in the text as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Legends are grouped on a separate page.

6.2 Technical information

All figures are published free of charge (i.e. they are included in the publication fee), including color photographs and diagrams. However, only photographs of scientific interest and pertaining to the subject of the article should be included. Color illustrations, especially diagrams, should be understandable even, if they are printed as grey levels.

Figures should be prepared to be of good quality both when they are viewed onscreen as HTML and when the PDF is printed. Figures may be arranged as “plates”, but keep in mind that PDFs are prepared to be printed on A4 pages.

The electronic submission system will accept PNG (preferred), TIFF (with compression), and EPS files, with appropriate resolution (300 dpi for colour photographs, 600 dpi for halftone work, 1200 dpi for line work). JPG format is not recommended – PNG is preferred.

Manuscripts with figures of insufficient technical quality will be immediately sent back for revision by the editorial team and will not begin the review process before correct files are uploaded.

7. Videos

Videos should be numbered as Video 1, Video 2, etc. They are referred to in the text as Video 1, Video 2, etc. Legends are grouped on a separate page.

8. Supplementary Online material

Online material may include data too long to be included in the manuscript, additional illustrations and movies. Online material is subjected to strict refereeing. Formats accepted are: PDF, graphic formats for supplementary figures MPEG for videos. Files should preferably be less than 20 Mb.

9. Mathematics, statistics and significant figures

Write mathematical equations as simply as possible. Statistical software should be clearly indicated and cited.

Figures should be indicated with a reasonable number of digits, coherent with the significance of the result. This is especially important for the abstract.

10. References

Authors are encouraged to use a reference manager software. The below given format of the references is mandatory, authors are invited to strictly follow these guidelines.

Authors should provide direct references to original research sources whenever possible. References should not be used by authors, editors, or peer reviewers to promote self-interests. Authors should avoid citing articles in predatory or pseudo-journals.

Authors are responsible for checking that none of the references cite retracted articles except in the context of referring to the retraction. Authors can identify retracted articles in MEDLINE by searching in the PubMed's list of retracted publications.

9.1 References in the text

References are numbered as [1], [2,3,7] or [5–9]. This allows copious lists of references without lengthening the text itself. The use of numbered references does not mean that author names and dates of cited papers are prohibited in the text, but this should be used only if necessary.

Example: Many studies [1-9] have addressed … (no special need to indicate authors here). In 2013, Smith [10] claimed that … but Dupont [11,12] later demonstrated that… (names of authors and dates are useful here).

9.2 Presentation of references

References are numbered and sorted in the order of appearance in the text. Words in titles are not capitalised. No journal name begins with “The”.

All articles must be referenced in accordance with the Vancouver style. This style follows rules established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, now maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It is also known as Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical Journals.

The common structure of each reference follows always the below example:

Journal articles

Author AA, Author BB. Title of article. Abbreviated title of Journal [Internet]. Date of publication YYYY MM;volume number(issue number):page numbers. Available from: URL

Book chapter

Author AA, Author BB. Title of chapter. In: Editor AA, Editor BB, editors. Title of book. # edition. Place of Publication: Publisher; Year of publication. p. [page numbers of chapter].

Complete book

Author AA. Title of book. # edition [if not first]. Place of Publication: Publisher;Year of publication. Pagination.

Examples:

Journal articles

1. Petrie KJ, Muller JT, Schirmbeck F, Donkin L, Broadbent E, Ellis CJ, et al. Effect of providing information about normal test results on patients’ reassurance: randomised controlled trial. British Medical Journal. 2007;334(7589): 352–254. Available from: doi:10.1136/bmj.39093.464190.55.
2. Chhibber PK, Majumdar SK. Foreign ownership and profitability: Property rights, control, and the performance of firms in Indian industry. Journal of Law & Economics. 1999;42(1):209–238.
3. Errami M, Garner H. A tale of two citations. Nature. 2008;451(7177): 397–399. Available from: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7177/full/451397a.html[Accessed 20th January 2015].

Book chapter

4. Blaxter PS, Farnsworth TP. Social health and class inequalities. In: Carter C, Peel JR, editors. Equalities and inequalities in health. 2nd ed. London: Academic Press;1976. p. 165-78.

Complete book

5. Carlson BM. Human embryology and developmental biology. 4th ed. St. Louis:Mosby; 2009. 541 p.

11. Electronic submission

Authors should use the electronic submission system powered by Nestor. Please submit at: https://vcm.nestor-edp.org/. Before you begin submission, prepare the following:

• The video file prepared following the Guidelines for Video Production;
• A list of full names of all authors and a valid email address for each of them (copy and paste from first page of manuscript);
• A Word file of the manuscript;
• A Word file of the covering letter, explaining why the manuscript is of importance and any other detail.
• The electronic files of all figures, with appropriate resolution and technical quality (see 6.2).

The submission system will produce a PDF from these elements, which will be submitted for your approval, and will eventually be sent to the referees after evaluation by the Editors.

Authors who wish to send confidential comments about their manuscript to the Editor should send a separate email.