Author guidelines

Submissions to Acta Oncologica are done on the basis that:

  • The work has not previously been published in any language or is under consideration in another journal
  • Previous or parallel publication of part of the work is specified in the manuscript and in the cover letter
  • All authors have read and approved the manuscript
  • Relevant permission for the reproduction of images has been obtained
  • Original data related to the manuscript should be retained and retrievable for a minimum of 10 years from the online publication date
  • Author(s) agree to all terms in Acta Oncologica’s submission checklist upon submission

The journal welcomes articles in the following areas:

Peer Review: 
Acta Oncologica conducts single-blinded peer review and requires evaluation by two independent experts who are asked to highlight the manuscript's general and specific merits and shortcomings. The process is expected to take 4-8 weeks but may vary. Most manuscripts undergo one-three rounds of revision prior to acceptance.
For more information please see: Editorial policy and review process

Preparing your manuscript

All authors submitting contributions to Acta Oncologica should meet the authorship requirements and conform to the requirements of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

Please supply the manuscript typed with double spacing throughout.

The text should be divided into the sections: Introduction, Patients/Materials and Methods, Results, and Discussion. For original articles and review articles a structured abstract should be provided.

Please use British or US spelling style consistently throughout your manuscript. Manuscripts are expected to have a high standard of English and should typically have undergone professional English review.

Acta Oncologica endorses the use of an appropriate reporting guideline when writing manuscripts. Please refer to the EQUATOR network (www.equator-network.org), which also gives general information on how to choose the correct guidelines. At a minimum, your article should report the content addressed by each item and provide the relevant checklist as supplementary information. Meeting these reporting requirements will improve the manuscript and facilitate/enhance the peer review process.

Abbreviations, which are not generally accepted, should be spelt out when first used in the text.

Title page
The title should be informative, reflecting the content of the study and should preferably be expressive.

Authors should be listed with first name, middle initial(s), and last name with department affiliations. An institutional e-mail address to the corresponding author should be provided. Please also add ORCID identifiers. Shared authorship of a maximum of two authors is allowed. 

Word limits
Please include a word count of your manuscript on the title page, excluding word count associated with tables, references, figures, and all information held on the title page.

Original manuscripts and reviews have a word limit of 3500 words and up to 7 tables/figures.

Short reports have a word limit of 2000 words and up to 3 tables/figures and require a structured abstract. Study protocols are published as short reports.

Letters and Commentaries have a word limit of 1000 words and may contain one table/figure, if relevant for the content. 

Editorials have a word limit of 2000 words and may contain 1 table/figure, if relevant for the content. 

Additional materials may be provided as supplementary materials without any cost. 

Abstract
Abstracts should be provided for original articles, short reports and review articles (but should not be provided for, letters, commentaries and editorials). The abstract should not exceed 250 words and should be structured into; Background and purpose, Patients/material and methods, Results and Interpretation.

The provision of a graphical abstract is optional and encouraged. The image should have a maximum width of 525 pixels and should be provided as a separate file in the formats .jpg, .png, or .gif.

Keywords
Please provide 4-7 keywords that should be selected from a search engine to optimize relevance and specificity. Avoid duplication of words already in the article’s title.

Introduction
The introduction should focus on the state of knowledge at the beginning of the study and should define the research gap. The aims and main hypothesis of the study should be stated clearly.

Patients/material and methods
Study type should be defined with reference to the relevant EQUATOR guideline. The manuscript should be formatted accordingly and as a minimum, the relevant EQUATOR guideline checklist should be provided as supplementary information. Statistics should provide relevant information on software and analytical procedures and should whenever relevant refer to a data management plan. Please use SI units (non-italicized) when relevant.

Results
Results should be structured into a logical flow. Text and figures/tables should be complementary and not overlapping. Measures of variability should be provided and a limited number of decimals should be provided.

Discussion
The discussion should critically discuss the findings, including data quality, and analytical limitations and should put the findings into perspective with reference to relevant literature. A section on strengths and limitations should be provided and the final section should present a study interpretation.

Tables

Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Tables should be provided double-spaced on a separate page as editable files in the manuscript file. Do not submit tables as photographs. Supply a brief title for each table. Each column should have a short heading. Explanatory matters should be placed in notes under the table.

Letters and Commentaries have a word limit of 1000 words and may contain 1 table/figure.

Editorials have a word limit of 2000 words and may contain 1 table/figure.

Illustrations
Illustrations should be of high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour, at the correct size) and should be submitted as separate files in the formats EPS, PS, JPEG, GIF or tiff. The figure number should be indicated in the file name. Figure legends should be provided on the last page of the main text. Letters and numerals should be large enough to allow the reduction of illustrations to one column. Illustrations should preferably be provided in colour (CMYK colours). The use of symbols should be consistent between figures.

Author contributions
Describe in short what each author did (initials).

Acknowledgements
Relevant funding should be reported and technical support may be acknowledged. Please include “This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].”
For multiple agency grants: This work was supported by the [Funding Agency 1];

References
The number of references should be limited to 25-35 (except for meta-analyses and review articles). References should be consecutively numbered and referred to in the text by their number within brackets. When available, DOI numbers should be added to the references.

For further details regarding references, see https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html#journals.

If there are six or fewer authors, state all in the reference list. If there are more than six, state the first six and use et al. for additional authors.

Clausen CT, Hasle H, Holmqvist AS, Madanat-Harjuoja L, Tryggvadottir L, Wesenberg F et al. Hyperthyroidism as a late effect in childhood cancer survivors - an Adult Life after Childhood Cancer in Scandinavia (ALiCCS) study. Acta Oncol. 2018;26:1-5

Johansen C, Dalton SO. Survivorship in new harbors. Acta Oncol. 2017;56:119–122.

Disclosure statements
Any financial or non-financial interest that has arisen from the direct applications of your research should be reported. If there are no relevant competing interests to declare please state “The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.” 

Data availability statement
Authors are required to provide a data availability statement that provides information on where data used for the paper can be found and how it can be accessed. If data cannot be made open, authors should state why in the data availability statement. If the data is open, please deposit the data in a recognized data repository prior to or at the time of submission and include the DOI, pre-reserved DOI, or other persistent identifier for the data set.

Ethics declarations & trial registry information
Please ensure that all research reported in submitted papers has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and is in full compliance with all relevant codes of experimentation and legislation. All original research papers involving humans, animals, plants, biological material, protected or non-public datasets, collections or sites, providing the approval number from the appropriate ethics committee or Institutional Review Board and that where relevant, informed consent has been obtained. For clinical studies, please provide trial registry identifiers/approval numbers in ClinicalTrials.gov.

Supplemental material
Supplemental material can be data, images, video or other relevant information that supports and is pertinent to the paper. Please submit supplementary materials as a separate file.

 

Before submitting your manuscript text – please make sure that it includes:

Data availability statement, Ethics Declaration och correct reference style (6 authors et al.) For guidelines – see above.

Thank you!