Submitting your work to the JCI

The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) is a general-interest biomedical journal with a broad readership. Among top-tier research journals, the JCI is alone in providing barrier-free online access to its research articles, and it has done so since 1996. The JCI is the publication of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and has been published continuously since 1924.

Revised January 4, 2010.

Scope of publication

The JCI publishes original articles of the highest quality pertaining to the genetic, molecular, cellular, or physiological basis of human biology and disease. Single, complete papers are preferred to a series of interdependent ones. The JCI considers the following categories of manuscripts:

• Regular manuscripts, which should describe substantial new mechanistic insights into biology and disease.
• Technical Advances, which should report new and important research tools and techniques that could have broad impact. Technical Advances optimally will also include application of the technique to a specific question relevant to understanding or treating a disease.
• Brief Reports, which are discrete, highly significant findings reported in a shorter format.

Manuscript submission

The JCI requires manuscripts be submitted online by a corresponding author. An account is required to proceed with submission; authors can register for accounts or access their existing accounts by following the instructions at https://www.the-jci.org. Briefly, a submission must be prepared as described below in Manuscript preparation and format, with particular attention paid to the submitted PDF:

• The manuscript must be supplied in a single PDF and must include all information related to the submission: the complete manuscript text, all figures, and all tables. (Supplemental data, information for reviewers, and PDFs of manuscripts in press must be uploaded separately.)
• Each figure (including all parts, if applicable) with its corresponding legend must be presented together on its own page within the manuscript PDF.
• Each table must be presented complete on its own page within the manuscript PDF.

Other information about the submission — for example, title, author list, and abstract — will need to be supplied as required during the submission process. Once all required information has been provided, submitters of original and de novo submissions will be asked to pay a processing fee.

Submission fee. A nonrefundable fee of US$75 is required for original and de novo submissions. The fee is not required for revised submissions. Payment by credit card (Visa/MasterCard/American Express only) is strongly encouraged; checks drawn in US dollars are acceptable (a US$25 fee is assessed for returned checks). The JCI does not accept purchase orders or bankwire transfers. Manuscripts will not be considered until payment is received. Please note that the submission fee is charged regardless of whether the manuscript is sent for external review.

Policies

The corresponding author must verify that the manuscript, including related data, figures, and tables, has not been previously reported or published; that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere; and that it will not be submitted elsewhere while under review by the JCI. If any related preliminary report (for example, in symposia, proceedings, transactions, books, invited articles, etc.) other than an abstract of 400 words or fewer has been published or submitted, a copy must accompany the submission. Related unpublished articles by any of the authors must also be submitted online for editors and reviewers.

All clinical investigation must have been conducted according to Declaration of Helsinki principles. All human and animal studies must have been approved by the appropriate institutional review board(s) and a specific declaration of approval must be made within the Methods section. Patients mentioned in human studies should be identified by number, not by name, and a statement indicating that written informed consent was received prior to inclusion in the study must be provided in Methods. Manuscripts without declaration of ethical approval for experiments will not be reviewed.

All authors must disclose any commercial affiliations as well as consultancies, stock or equity interests, and patent-licensing arrangements that could be considered a conflict of interest. A detailed conflict-of-interest policy is available on the JCI website (http://www.jci.org/kiosk/coi). Specifics of such disclosures will remain confidential until publication, when an appropriate statement regarding any conflicts will be noted in the manuscript. Please note your conflict of interest statement on the title page.

As a condition of publication, authors are required to make materials and methods used freely available to academic researchers for their own use. This requirement includes antibodies, cell lines, and the constructs used to make transgenic animals, but not necessarily the animals themselves. Mice generated without the use of constructs must be submitted to a public repository at the time of publication, unless authors can ensure prompt distribution to academic researchers on request. Transgenic animals or mice with induced mutations required to confirm the conclusions of the experiments reported must be made available to academic scientists under appropriate conditions. Other reagents, methods, and cell lines must be made freely available to the academic community. A pictoral representation of the structure of any new drug described in the manuscript must be provided.

Authors must submit original nucleotide or amino acid sequence data to GenBank, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), DNA Databank of Japan, or another appropriate publicly available database in general use in the field that gives free access to researchers from the date of publication. Accession numbers should appear in the manuscript. Microarray data should be made freely available to academic researchers on authors' own web sites or other freely available websites (the URL to be provided in the paper) until a public database is available in accordance with the MIAME convention. Other supporting data sets must be made available to any interested reader on the publication date from the authors directly. Researchers who encounter a persistent refusal by an author of a paper to comply with these guidelines should contact the Executive Editor by e-mail at editors@the-jci.org.

For all experiments involving genetically engineered mice, inbred strain background effects have become an important concern. The Editorial Board generally prefers littermate controls, but will evaluate the controls used on a case by case basis (authors must fully describe the source of animals and number of backcrosses). If an alternative control was used, an explanation must be included in the cover letter to the Editor and within the manuscript.

Authors may suggest a member of the Editorial Board with appropriate expertise to handle their submission. In addition, authors may note up to 2 reviewers they wish to exclude and reason(s) for exclusion.

Manuscript preparation and format

Manuscripts should be double-spaced (including references and tables). However, figure legends may be single-spaced if necessary to keep a figure and its corresponding legend on the same page). Number all pages. Regular and Technical Advance manuscripts average 8,500 words, including all legends and references; however, the JCI does not enforce a strict word limit. Brief Reports are limited to 3,500 words, with 3 figures and 1 table. At first use, nonstandard abbreviations should be spelled, with the abbreviated form appearing in parentheses. Thereafter, they may be used without definition. On the title page, provide an alphabetical list of all nonstandard abbreviations and their definitions. Undefined abbreviations must not be used. A list of JCI standard abbreviations is available at http://www.jci.org/kiosk/publish/abbreviations.

Start each section (title page, abstract, introduction, results, discussion, methods, acknowledgments, references, figures, and tables) on a new page using the guidelines that follow. Note that Brief Reports should have a combined Results and Discussion section. Authors are encouraged to provide a concise summary (1–2 paragraphs) of the key findings in the cover letter.

List the manuscript title, first and last names of all authors, as well as their affiliations (departments, institutions, and locations) during the period when the work was performed. Assign affiliation footnotes consecultively using superscript numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.). If any author's affiliation has changed since completion of the work, specify the present affiliation and location. The complete name, address, telephone and fax numbers (including country code, where applicable), and e-mail address of the corresponding author must be provided. Also include a conflict-of-interest statement on the title page.

The manuscript title should be concise while conveying the essential conclusion of the paper. Titles must be no longer than 15 words. Subtitles, colons, and nonstandard abbreviations are unacceptable. The title should mention the species in which the study was performed, for example, “in humans and mice,” “in a mouse model of cystic fibrosis,” and “in rhesus macaques.” For publication, titles may be revised by the JCI to ensure clarity and accessibility to our wide readership, with the final approval of the authors.

The abstract may not exceed 200 words and should state the rationale, objectives, findings, and conclusions of the manuscript. References and primary data should not be presented in abstracts, and nonstandard abbreviations must be defined. For publication, abstracts may be revised by the JCI to ensure clarity and accessibility to our wide readership, with the final approval of the authors.

In Acknowledgments, state sources of support in the form of grants, equipment, or drugs. Authors may include other appropriate acknowledgments (for example, to other scientists for their help or advice).

Indicate references in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses (do not use superscript). In the Reference section, list references numbered in the order in which they appear in the text. Follow AMA style (AMA Manual of Style, 10th edition, pages 39-79), and abbreviate names of journals according to the PubMed Journals list. Here are various reference styling examples.

Upload all related unpublished manuscripts cited. Submitted manuscripts, manuscripts in preparation, unpublished observations, personal communications, and preliminary report citations must appear parenthetically in the text and not in the References section. Obtain and submit written permission (an e-mail is sufficient) when citing a personal communication or unpublished observation.

Figures and tables

Detailed instructions for figure preparations

Style:Type appearing within figures (axis labels, for example) should be in Helvetica or a similar typeface, and it must be of sufficient size and contrast to retain clarity if reduced in size. When using scale bars, define scales in figure legends, not in the figures themselves. Use standard abbreviations whenever possible. Avoid gratuitous use of color for decorative effect, boxes around graphs and figures, and small type and symbols on large graphs. Whenever possible, do not place labels over any part of a color figure. Do not include tabular material within figures.

Figures must be cited sequentially in the text using Arabic numerals (for example, Figure 7). Provide a short title (in the legend, not in the figure itself) and an explanation in brief but sufficient detail to make the figure intelligible without reference to the main text (unless a similar explanation has been given in a preceding figure). Do not exceed 250 words for each legend. Provide a key to any symbols used. Each figure (including all parts, if applicable) with corresponding legend must be presented on its own page.

All tables should be double-spaced on manuscript pages. Tables should be self-contained and self-explanatory. Provide brief titles, and assign footnotes to tables by superscript capital letters starting with A and continuing in alphabetical order. Tables with sections (for example, Table 1A, 1B, 1C) are not acceptable. Each table must be presented complete on its own page.

For graphic material, we have adopted a policy taken from The Journal of Cell Biology: No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. The groupings of images from different parts of the same gel, or from different gels, fields or exposures must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure (e.g. using dividing lines) and in the text of the figure legend. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if and as long as they do not obscure or eliminate any information present in the original. Nonlinear adjustments (e.g. changes to gamma settings) must be disclosed in the figure legend.

The Editors reserve the right to consult the Office of Research Integrity or the appointed official at the authors' home institution if the figures appear to have been manipulated.

Accepted manuscripts

The following items are of note to authors of accepted manuscripts, although all authors submitting their work to the JCI should be aware of the journal's policies regarding accepted manuscripts.

The JCI deposits all articles in PubMed Central immediately upon publication. Authors of articles published in the JCI do not need to submit their accepted articles separately to PubMed Central. This satisfies the NIH Public Access Policy and other similar funder requirements.

Authors of accepted manuscripts should be prepared to supply figures as TIFF files produced at appropriate resolution: 1200-DPI bitmap mode for black-and-white images such as graphs and log scales, 600-DPI grayscale mode for images such as gels or blots, and 300-DPI CMYK mode for color images. The JCI cannot accept application files (for example, Powerpoint). Each figure should be no larger than 16 cm in width and 20 cm in height at the appropriate resolution. Authors should also provide hard copy for reference purposes.

Authors of accepted manuscripts may provide related supplemental data to be posted online along with the published manuscript. This data may include figures, tables, videos, or appendices. Before submission, carefully review all files because they will not be checked by a copy editor. The JCI is not responsible for any errors contained in data supplements.

All JCI research articles are freely available online immediately upon publication (and, in most instances, prior to print publication). Charges assessed to authors help support publication of the JCI. Authors are billed at the time of publication. For publication of Regular articles and Technical Advances, Authors will be assessed US$0.22 per word, including the text of legends, tables, and references, based on the word count of the accepted manuscript. Authors will be billed $100 per figure and $50 per table. When a manuscript requires color printing, authors will be assessed an additional $1,000, regardless of the number of color figures. Color figures can generally be reproduced in grayscale if authors are unwilling or unable to pay for color charges. Authors must inform the JCI upon manuscript acceptance if they wish to convert color figures to grayscale. For publication of Brief Reports, the publication fee is US$2,500. Supplemental data: Authors will be charged $300 for supplemental data to appear online with accepted articles. The JCI is not responsible for assuming the cost of correcting errors in supplemental data or the cost of scanning supplemental images.

Upon acceptance of an article, all authors associated with the submission are sent an e-mail requesting assignment of copyright to the ASCI prior to publication.