Author Guidelines

Preparing for submission

Submitted manuscripts should follow the recommendations stated in Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. In addition, for Observational studies please follow the STROBE guidelines and for Fields/Clinical trials the CONSORT guidelines.

Please refer to the information provided below as well as the submission preparation checklist to be sure that you have conformed to the requirements before beginning the submission process. Incomplete submissions will not be considered. 

In his/her covering letter, the corresponding author should reveal whether the submitted article – or very similar work - has been previously published or orally presented, or is under consideration elsewhere.

Authors should suggest 3-5 potential reviewers. Reviewers will not know the author suggested them. Make sure that your suggestions are not current or recent colleagues of you or your co-authors. Complete names, affiliations and email addresses must be provided as missing information may lead to delays in initiating the peer review process.

NB! If the guidelines are not properly followed or if required data or information is missing from the manuscript, please note that this will lead to delays in the initial review process. Submissions lacking required documents/information and/or that have not been set up correctly may be archived.

Reporting Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should follow the recommendations stated in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. In addition, please follow the respective guidelines for different study designs:

  • For fields/clinical trials, please follow the CONSORT guidelines
  • For observational studies, please follow the STROBE guidelines
  • For systematic reviews and meta-analysis, please follow the PRISMA guidelines
  • For health economics papers, please follow the CHEERS guidelines
  • For diagnostic tests papers, please follow the STARD guidelines
  • For original qualitative research papers, please follow the COREQ guidelines
  • For synthesis of qualitative research papers, please follow the ENTREQ guidelines
  • For health care quality papers, please follow the SQUIRE guidelines

These and other guidelines are collated on the EQUATOR Network website. Food & Nutrition Research asks its authors to follow these reporting guidelines and to complete the respective checklists before submission. Compliance with appropriate guidelines will be considered in the evaluation of the manuscript and will contribute to the final decision on the manuscript. The checklist should be uploaded as a Supplementary file in the online system.

Cover Letter and suggesting Reviewers

In his/her covering letter, the corresponding author should reveal whether the submitted article – or very similar work - has been previously published or orally presented, or is under consideration elsewhere. In addition the author should suggest 5 potential reviewers. Names, affiliations and email addresses must be provided! The FNR policy is that authors must suggest peer-reviewers, which we may or may not use.

Please note that the submitting author will be the principal contact for editorial correspondence, throughout the peer review and proofreading process, if applicable.

Plagiarism Detection

Food and Nutrition Research uses Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate) to screen all submissions for plagiarism before publication, but authors, researchers and freelancers can also use iThenticate to screen their work before submission by visiting http://research.ithenticate.com.

Manuscript preparation

Language All articles should be written in English - British or American as long as consistency is observed. SI units should be used. Please subject the manuscript to professional language editing before submitting the final version if you are not a native speaker. A list of services can be found here.

Acknowledgements All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section of the title page, i.e. not listed in the main manuscript.  Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. NB! Acknowledgements should be added to the Title page that is separated from the main manuscript.

Conflict of interest and funding Authors are responsible for disclosing financial support from the industry or other conflicts of interest that might bias the interpretation of results. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘Conflict of interests and funding’ section listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). If no competing interests exist, please state in this section, "The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest". NB! Conflict of interest and funding should be added to the Title page that is separated from the main manuscript.

Statistic validity If complicated statistical data are provided, the authors may be requested to submit a statement issued by a certified statistician regarding the validity of methods used.

Ethics and consent When reporting experiments on patients or animals, please indicate whether the procedures followed were approved by your local ethics committee and in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Publication Fee

The publication of an article in Food & Nutrition Research incurs a charge of  EUR 2250/USD 2500, for up to 11 pages. Articles exceeding 11 typeset pages incur an additional charge of: EUR 90/USD 100 per page. VAT will be added to customers within Sweden and the European Union, except non-Swedish organizations that provide their VAT-number.

The total sum will be charged to the author(s) upon acceptance of his/her article. It is the publication year that governs the publication fee, not the submission year.

Withdrawal of Manuscript  

If you withdraw your manuscript after it has been peer reviewed, or after it has been typeset (but not yet published) you will be charged according to the following: EUR 275/USD 325 per article (after peer review) and EUR 415/USD 490 per article (after peer review and typesetting)

Manuscript Layout

Wherever possible, the paper should follow the traditional layout: introduction (motivation, problem identification and a short literature survey), present investigation (background, method, materials, subjects, results and discussion), and conclusion. Line numbers should be used.

Begin each section, including figure and table legends, on separate sheets; insert running page numbers. Line numbers should also be inserted.

Popular scientific summary: Each article in Food & Nutrition Research carries a short paragraph (maximum 75 words) of bullet points that helps the reader understand what the paper adds to the topic (what’s new), and what the implications of the paper are (e.g., what action needs to be taken). You cannot say a lot in 75 words, so it is important to choose words and phrases carefully.

Title page Organize the title page in the following way: 1) title of manuscript, 2) name of author(s), 3) name of department(s) and institution(s),  4) name and full postal and email address of the corresponding author who also acts as 'Guarantor' for all parts of the paper and 5) Acknowledgements – Note that the Title page should be submitted separately and separated from the main manuscript. To support our double-blind peer review process, be sure to remove identifying information from all documents, both metadata and text. Substitute "masked for review" for identifying text (such as the institution granting institutional approval) during the review process. Learn how to remove identifying metadata from Microsoft Word.

The title should be informative and accurate and at the same time trigger the interest of the reader. A short running head will be derived from the title to appear on each page of the paper.

Abstract Articles must include a structured abstract of 200-300 words. The abstract should be able to provide sufficient information for a reader to be able to decide whether or not to proceed to the full text of the article. The abstract should be structured in the following way: Background, Objective, Design, Results, Discussion, Conclusions. After the abstract, please give 5-10 key words; avoid using the same words as in the title.

Section headings Please do not number section headings. Use a maximum of three levels of headings made clear by orthographic indicators, i.e. capitals, italics, bold etc.

References Number the references consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. Identify references in the text by arabic numerals and in parentheses [e.g. (14)]. References should follow the standard biomedical format (so-called Vancouver style), recommended by ICJME. DOI numbers must be included where available. ARTICLES FAILING TO FOLLOW THIS STYLE WILL BE RETURNED TO THE AUTHORS FOR CORRECTION.

Proprietary names We require that non-proprietary names are used in submissions. When proprietary brands are used in research, use the non-proprietary name throughout the text. You may include the proprietary name(s) with the non-proprietary name(s) in parentheses immediately after the first mention then use only the non-proprietary name thereafter (once in the Abstract and once in the body of the manuscript is acceptable)

Information from papers in manuscript but not yet accepted should be cited in the text as 'unpublished observation(s)' or 'personal communication'.

For a key of how to abbreviate journal names, please consult the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus, accessible at http://www.nlm.nih.gov

Some sources and documents are available in print, but also reproduced electronically for wide dissemination—government publications are an obvious example. If you use the electronic version of such a document, please give the URL and date on which you last accessed the electronic file to the citation.

Books and journals

Journals 

More than six authors:

Montlahuc C, Julia C, Touvier M, Fezeu L, Hercberg S, Galan P, et al. Association between dietary polyphenols intake and an oxidative stress biomarker: interest of multiple imputation for handling missing covariates and outcomes . BMC Nutrition. 2016; 2: 71. doi: 10.1186/s40795-016-0114-2.

Up to six authors:

Chen Y, Qian Q, Yu J. Carbenoxolone ameliorates insulin sensitivity in obese mice induced by high fat diet via regulating the IκB-α/NF-κB pathway and NLRP3 inflammasome. Biomed Pharmacother 2019; 115: 108868. doi: 10.1016/j.biopha.2019.108868

Books

  1. Bandura A. Social foundations of thought and action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986.
  2. Norman IJ, Redfern SJ, eds. Mental health care for elderly people. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1996.
  3. Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP. Hypertension and stroke. In: Laragh JH, Brenner BM, eds. Hypertension: pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York: Raven Press; 1995. p. 465-78.