Guidelines for Authors

GENERAL INFORMATION

Publication in EURORAD

EURORAD is a peer-reviewed database of radiological case reports, provided and operated by the European Society of Radiology (ESR). It is an educational tool with the purpose to provide a learning environment for radiologists, radiology residents and students.

As of July 6, 2015, all cases submitted to EURORAD are published under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This means that
1. the authors remain the copyright holder of their case
2. readers are free to share and adapt the material, provided that they use it only for non-commercial purposes, and acknowledge the source properly.

Published cases are registered with a DOI (digital object identifier), which makes them fully citable. Once your case has received its DOI, you will find it in the ‘citation’ box (right below your case) on EURORAD.org.

Plagiarism

It is not allowed to copy text from other sources. If paraphrased material is included, it must be cited by source. Information taken from other studies must be referenced properly, i.e. the reference included in the reference list and the number indicated directly in the text. Copied and/or unreferenced text from other sources is regarded as plagiarism.

All cases of an author who committed plagiarism will be deleted from the EURORAD database.
For more information on correct referencing and scientific writing please see the ESR statement on good scientific practice and publishing.

Submission to EURORAD

For a successful submission, please follow closely the instructions shown here, the Eurorad standard template etc. For your convenience, please see all useful links below:

- Guidelines to follow: https://www.eurorad.org/author-guidelines

- Standard case structure template download: https://www.eurorad.org/EURORAD-Case-Structure-Template

- Published case report for reference: https://www.eurorad.org/case/17419

- Frequently asked questions: https://www.eurorad.org/faq

- Editorial Manager Author Guidelines: http://www.ariessys.com/wp-content/uploads/EM-Author-English.pdf

NOTE: All submissions must be made online through our submission system Editorial Manager. Please scroll to the end of the page to access the 'Submit a case' link.

With your submission to EURORAD, you accept the ESR’s data processing policy.

Three case types are available upon submission:
Clinical Case: A case that illustrates common pathology or normal variants, as well as rare or exceptional clinical presentation.
Anatomy and Functional Imaging: A case describing normal anatomy and functionality, as well as anatomical anomalies with up to date imaging techniques.
Case Series: A set of cases that illustrate common pathologies or normal variants, as well as rare or exceptional clinical presentation.

Please note that neither the team of authors (additions or deletions), nor their order of appearance can be changed after submission.

Once your case is submitted, you cannot edit it until the Section Editor has made a decision.
If any major conflicts occur after submission, you can withdraw your case by contacting the Editorial Office at epc@eurorad.org.

After publication, all cases can be approached as full cases including the diagnosis or as blinded Teaching Cases.

If you are an ESR member and have a EURORAD account, once your case is published and has been assigned a DOI, you can download a certificate in your EURORAD account.

Peer review

All cases submitted to EURORAD undergo a double blinded peer-review process, which is performed by the Section Editors and Reviewers of the editorial team. The decision whether to publish or not is at the sole discretion of the Editors.

After peer-review, you will be informed by e-mail of the decision.

Revisions

If you are asked to revise your submission, you can find your case under ‘Submissions Needing Revision’ in your ‘Revision’ menu. To revise your submission, click ‘Edit Submission’ and edit the case according to the reviewer’s comments that have been sent to you by e-mail in the decision letter.

Make sure to edit the original submission and submit a document with tracked changes.

In addition, please upload a separate Word document 'Response to Reviewers' in which you answer point by point to the reviewer's comments or questions.

Do not include your name, because the peer-review is blinded.

The timeframe for submitting your first revision is 3 weeks; and 2 weeks for additional revisions.

PREPARING YOUR SUBMISSION

Preparing your submission
For your submission, prepare one main text document, as well as an adequate number of figures in separate files. All cases should:

•   Provide a learning perspective and stress educational points
•   Short clear captions pointing to findings
•   A clinical context in the description
•   An adequate reference list

Number of authors
Starting December 1, 2022 the maximum number of authors allowed (including the corresponding author) is of 5 authors.

Abbreviations
The first time an abbreviation is used, the full name should be given with the abbreviation in brackets.

Language
Please make sure to check your text for spelling and typing mistakes, grammar and language style before submitting it. We recommend to use Grammarly.
Non-native speakers should consider having the text proofread by an English native speaker or language professional.
British English is preferred.

TITLE PAGE

Includes:
•    Case title
•    The name(s) of the author(s) in the correct order
•    The affiliation(s) and address(es) of the author(s)
Optional:
•    E-mail address of the corresponding author

Please note that any information included in this document about authors will be published as part of the case.
Important: Please note that the information included in this document is not accessible by reviewers, to safeguard a blinded peer-review.

MAIN TEXT DOCUMENT

Your main text document must contain the following 9 parts:
(Please do not mention any author names - or any other information that reveals your identity (e.g. name of your institution or other contact info) in your main text document to ensure blind peer review.)

1. Title

- max. 10 words

2. Clinical History

- max. 50 words
- Do not include the final diagnosis in the Clinical History, as this will be shown in the blinded Teaching Case/Quiz format to the reader.

3. Imaging Findings

- max. 150 words
- Description of the imaging techniques used and findings therein.
- Focus on the key findings in the images submitted.

4. Discussion

- max. 400 words
- Preferably provide a confirmation and/or pathologic correlation
- The discussion is meant to interpret the results and should contain essential findings, critical discussion, limitations, relevance to clinical practice and conclusions. It should contain the diagnostic clue, i.e. how the diagnosis was reached.
- Follow this structure and select those items relevant for the case:

•   Background: definitions, disease description, pathophysiology
•   Clinical Perspective: typical or usual clinical presentation, clinical problem, why is imaging needed, what do we have to convey to the requesting physician
•   Imaging Perspective: diagnostic pearls, key findings, which diagnostic procedures are helpful, how is the final diagnosis made
•   Outcome: therapeutic options, prognosis, impact of imaging on therapy planning
•   Take Home Message / Teaching Points

Statement of obtained patient consent

Important: In order to adhere to the current EU data protection regulations, we ask you to complete the below 2 steps before we can send your case out for review.

PATIENT CONSENT:

1. Please obtain written informed patient consent for publication from the subject(s) or their legal guardian. The patient consent documentation has to be kept by the authors and provided to ESR upon request.

2. Please include the following statement as a separate sentence at the bottom of the Discussion section of your case: ‘Written informed patient consent for publication has been obtained.’

Eurorad does not provide/require any patient consent form as you will not be asked to submit it anywhere on our platform. As long as this is obtained and recorded in writing by you any format is valid.

PATIENT CONSENT MISSING:

- If possible, we always recommend obtaining patient consent; should this not be possible we will send your case to an extra check process for a possible waiver. In the case of minors, deceased persons etc., please try and obtain consent from the next of kin (parents/legal guardians/spouses/other family members etc.)

- If consent cannot be obtained under any circumstances, to speed up the process of waiving consent, at the end of the Discussion section, please write in Bold / Italics the following text: "All patient data have been completely anonymised throughout the entire manuscript and related files."

5. Final diagnosis

- max. 10 words

*Final and differential diagnoses will be used in a quiz function once published on Eurorad. Please make sure that these only contain the relevant information (only the names of the conditions to choose from without detailed explanations).

6. Differential diagnosis list

- List of 3-5 options (in addition to the final diagnosis)

7. References

- Only cite references in the Imaging Findings or Discussion section of your text
- Indicate all references directly in the text in square brackets, not round or as notes– example: [1,2]
Use numerical order – references should appear in the reference list in the same order in which they are cited in the text (not alphabetical)
- Where possible, add the PubMed ID for each reference (can be found below each available abstract, marked with ‘PMID:’ on http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/)
- Example of the correct reference style: “Lee HF, Tsai CR, Chi CS, Lee HJ, Chen CC (2009) Leigh syndrome: clinical and neuroimaging follow-up. Pediatr Neurol 40:88-93 (PMID: 19135620)”

8. Figure titles and figure captions

- Figure titles are optional. Figure captions are mandatory for each image uploaded.

- Figure captions (without the Statements of Figure Origin) must be written directly in the Main Document, after the References section, as a list as follows: Figure 1A: caption text; Figure 1B: caption text; Figure 2: caption text, etc.

- Please do not paste the figures into the Main Document.

9. Statements of Figure Origin

In a separately uploaded Word document (Important: choose under Item 'Not for review' to ensure blind peer-review) please list the origin and property of the figures as below.

•   Example: © Department of Radiology, General Hospital Vienna, Medical University of Vienna, Austria, 2009
•   In case you use an image of already published material, state the full citation e.g. “© Maier M et al. (2007) CT of the chest. Eur Radiol 17:1-20"
•   Any permissions to use images from its original proprietor must be requested and kept in reference by the authors. The ESR / EURORAD will not take any responsibility for any claims occurring.

FIGURES

Minimum one figure per case is required. For figures, you can submit images in the supported file formats and videos as mentioned below.
Include only images of high quality that reflect the presented findings and results.

When uploading a combined figure consisting of several figure parts (e.g. figure 1a, figure 1b, figure 1c etc.), please make sure to upload those parts as separate files.

In order to protect the rights and anonymity of the patients please do not submit figures which could reveal the patient's identity, including the name and date of birth and/or figures with the hospital/institution name/country or any other identifiers so as to maintain the blind-peer review requirement.

- Supported figure formats: JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF
- Supported video format: MP4 (max. 8MB)

Please note, at this time Eurorad does not support DICOM and/or TIFF-figure files.