Short Communication

Short communications extend previously published work, including research applying well-established methods and approaches in new settings. Authors are also encouraged to use the article type to report negative results, field reports or case studies. Authors must clearly acknowledge any work upon which they are building. Short communications should be under 6000 words.

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page

The title page should:

• present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
  • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
  • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
• list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript
• indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

The Abstract should not exceed 350 words and should be structured with a background, main body of the abstract and short conclusion. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Background

The Background section should explain the background to the article, its aims, a summary of a search of the existing literature and the issue under discussion.

Main text

This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

Conclusions

This should state clearly the main conclusions and include an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.