Instructions to Authors

Submitting to the Humanities Section of The Blood Project

Overview

We welcome submissions from thought leaders and scholars at all levels, from medical students to medical residents, established physicians, and non-physicians. Essays may be as short as several lines to as many as dozens of pages. Contributions may be written as poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction. Categories include essays, creative writing and poems. The only requirement is that they touch on blood in ways that help us understand its place in medicine and society. We encourage creativity. Work should be written with minimal jargon and be comprehensible to clinicians, public health professionals, medical educators and educated non-physicians.

All submissions will be reviewed, wherever possible, by the Editor-in-Chief (Charles Bardes), William Aird, and – if necessary – another qualified member of the Advisory Board.

If you are interested in submitting an piece, we encourage you to send us a short email (Charles Bardes, Clbardes@med.cornell.edu or Bill Aird, waird@thebloodproject.com) before a full submission hat explains what you want to write about, why it’s interesting, and how it will shed light on the blood.

Format

Manuscripts (including references, figure legends and simple tables) should be submitted initially in .pdf, .doc, .docx or .rtf formats as an attachment either to waird@thebloodproject.com or using the the contact form at the bottom of the landing page.

Title page

The title page should be free from jargon and intelligible to non-specialists. Full names (given name, middle initial if used and family name) must be provided for all authors, together with their institutional affiliations (with full postal addresses). Authors and their affiliations should be linked by superscript Arabic numerals. The name, address, telephone and email address of the corresponding author, and the email addresses of all other authors, should be listed. Try to keep title less than title of 60 characters (including spaces). Please add the word count of the text of the article and the numbers of tables and figures.

Lay summary

Where appropriate, a lay summary should clearly summarize the focus and findings of the article for non-expert readers. The lay summary should be no longer than 50 words. It should not contain citations or undefined abbreviations.

Text

Depending on the format of the essay, clarify early on why your topic is important by opening the paragraph with a connection to a major issue; by the end of the paragraph, state what new insight or progress can be experienced by reading further. Depending on the format of the essay, consider using subtitles to structure your topic and mark your progress through it.

Funding and conflicts of interest

Acknowledge relevant funding sources and disclose any affiliations or potential conflicts of interest.

One line bio

For example,  “Charles Bardes is a physician who practices internal medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.”

Acknowledgements

This section should be used to acknowledge individuals or organizations who have assisted in development of the essay in ways that do not qualify them for authorship, for example colleagues who have reviewed the essay or editors who have helped refine it.

References

All references will be included as footnotes. There will be no Reference section at the end of the essay. We will use the EMPH Endnote Output Style (https://endnote.com/style_download/evolution-medicine-and-public-health/):

• Journal articles:
  Kennedy T, Jones R. Effect of obesity on esophageal transit. Am J Surg 1985; 149 :177–81. doi: 10.1093/amsurg/ams001.
• Online journal articles:
  Chandras, C, Zouberakis, M, Salimova, E et al . CreZOO—the European virtual repository of Cre and other targeted conditional driver strains. Database 2012. doi: 10.1093/database/bas029.
• Books:
  Long HC, Blatt MA, Higgins MC et al . Medical Decision Making . Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.
• Chapters:
  Manners T, Jones R, Riley M. Relationship of overweight to haitus hernia and reflux oesophagitis. In: Newman W (ed). The Obesity Conundrum . Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1997, 352–74.
• Websites:
  Public Health Laboratory Service. Antimicrobial Resistance in 2000: England and Wales . http://www.hpa.org.uk./infections/topics_az/antimicrobial_resistance/amr.pdf (7 January 2004, date last accessed).