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Research

Criteria

Original Data and Image Availability
Biology of Sex Differences strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories. Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. A list of data where deposition is required, with the appropriate repositories, can be found on the Editorial Policies Page.

It is expected that authors comply with BMC's Editorial Policies and that all submissions involving animal research adhere to the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines. 

In addition to making data sets available, authors with articles that include Western blots or gels are expected to supply original, unedited image files with their submission for assessment by Editors and reviewers. To avoid delays with your manuscript, please ensure these raw files are supplied at submission as failure to do so will delay the review process.

Cover Letters
Cover letters are required as part of a submission to the journal. Please be sure to include the names of five reviewers who are not collaborators or at the home institute of any of the authors of the manuscript. Include the names, the email address, the institution of the reviewer and why they are appropriate to review this manuscript. Articles that fail to include recommended reviewers will be sent back.

Article Titles
The title should make the key point in language accessible to the general scientific reader.  Include the species (common name with Latin name as necessary), the study design, and the outcome. Do not use abbreviations in the title.

e.g.: "Chronic periadolescent leuprolide exposure affects the development of reproductive physiology and behavior of female and male rats differently, but both mature after treatment termination”, “Sex differences in early and term placenta are conserved in adult tissues”, “ A sex difference in mouse dopaminergic projections from the midbrain to basolateral amygdala”, or “Integrated chromatin accessibility and DNA methylation analysis to reveal the critical epigenetic modification and regulatory mechanism in gonadal differentiation of the sequentially hermaphroditic fish, Monopterus albus


Plain English summary (250 words)
All articles in Biology of Sex Differences require a Plain English summary of no more than 250 words, in addition to the Abstract. This should be a summary of the article written in language suitable for patients and the wider public to easily understand. It should not contain technical terminology or complicated statistics.By adding a plain English summary, we hope to broaden the reach of the article and bring it to the attention of a more general audience. Researchers are trained to be highly focused, specific, and conservative with extrapolation and speculation. These attributes are useful for scientific publications, but not for wider public understanding. Many non-scientists have difficulty understanding technical terms and jargon, and the public requires more context-setting by way of introduction and more help drawing a conclusion.

Highlights (<150 words)
Biology of Sex Differences asks all authors to include a ‘Highlights’ section, which should appear immediately after the Abstract and before the Introduction.

This section, which should not exceed 150 words, should take the form of a bulleted list of not more than five items summarising the key findings of the article and highlighting any novel or newsworthy aspects.

Tumour size

In accordance with Publisher policy, authors of submissions reporting experiments on live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates must identify in their manuscript the ethics committee/Institutional Review Board that approved the study. They must also include a statement confirming that all experiments were performed in accordance with the approved protocol and other relevant guidelines and regulations 

In relation to tumour size, authors must provide: 
(i) a statement describing the maximal tumour size/burden permitted by their ethics committee/IRB;
(ii) a statement confirming that the maximal tumour size/burden was not exceeded; in instances where it has been exceeded, justification should be provided. 

Authors must include source data for any figures that describe tumour growth when complying with the journal’s data availability policy.

The Editor will take account of animal welfare issues and reserves the right to reject a manuscript, especially if the research involves protocols that are inconsistent with commonly accepted norms of animal research. In rare cases, the Editor may contact the ethics committee or Institution for further information.

Preparing your manuscript

Title page

The title page should:
• present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
o "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"
o or for non-clinical or non-research studies a description of what the article reports
• list the full names, institutional addresses and email addresses for all authors
o 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
• indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. Reports of randomized controlled trials should follow the CONSORT extension for abstracts. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

  • Background: the context and purpose of the study
  • Methods: how the study was performed and statistical tests used
  • Results: the main findings
  • Conclusions: brief summary and potential implications
  • Trial registration: If your article is a systematic review or reports the results of a health care intervention on human participants, it must be registered in an appropriate registry and the registration number and date of registration should be in stated in this section. See our editorial policies for more information on trial registration

Keywords

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

Background

The Background section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study was necessary or its contribution to the field.

Methods

  • The methods section should include:
  • the aim, design and setting of the study
  • the characteristics of participants or description of materials
  • a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses
  • the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate

Statistical Analysis

When reporting the results of statistical tests, provide the value of the test statistic, degrees of freedom, and p value for each test. For example, for ANOVA, please report the F value, df, and p value for each main effect and their interactions, when significant. Please also report the effect sizes (e.g., Cohen’s d or eta squared)(Lakens, 2013) for those that are significant.

Manuscripts that report the analyses of multiple measurements from the same subjects should correct for multiple hypothesis testing. Several acceptable multiple correction methods are available such as the Bonferroni correction and the False Discovery Rate (Benjamini and Hochberg, 1990; Storey and Tibshirani, 2003).

Reporting a sex difference in a dependent variable requires that the measurements for females and males be compared using a single statistical test that allows an assessment of the statistical significance of the sex variable. For example, if one is testing the effect of a treatment (treatment vs. control) on males and females, an appropriate test would be a 2-way ANOVA, with factors of sex and treatment, assuming that the data meet the criteria for the ANOVA. Concluding that a sex difference exists would be supported by a statistically significant main effect of sex, or a significant interaction of sex and treatment. It is usually not sufficient to show a significant treatment effect in one sex but not the other, using one statistical test for each sex.

Hochberg Y, Benjamini Y. More powerful procedures for multiple significance testing. Stat Med. 1990 Jul;9(7):811-8.

Lakens D. Calculating and reporting effect sizes to facilitate cumulative science: a practical primer for t-tests and ANOVAs. Front Psychol. 2013 4:863.

Storey JD, Tibshirani R. Statistical significance for genomewide studies. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Aug 5;100(16):9440-5.

Results

This should include the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.

Discussion

This section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study.

The editorial board requests that you include a brief ‘Perspectives and Significance’ section at the end of the Discussion. This section should be clearly labeled with a separate heading. The purpose of ‘Perspectives and Significance’ is to: 1) provide an integrated perspective and to discuss the broad implications of the study, and 2) to permit reasonable speculation on the overall importance and future directions of the work. Such perspectives should not replace or be repetitious of the conclusions drawn from the study and should be limited to one paragraph. This section should, however, replace the ‘In Summary’ paragraph that is often placed at the end of the discussion.

Conclusions

This should state clearly the main conclusions and provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study reported.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Ethics approval and consent to participate
  • Consent for publication
  • Availability of data and materials
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Authors' information (optional)

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

  • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
  • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

See our editorial policies for more information.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Authors are also encouraged to preserve search strings on searchRxiv https://searchrxiv.org/, an archive to support researchers to report, store and share their searches consistently and to enable them to review and re-use existing searches. searchRxiv enables researchers to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) for their search, allowing it to be cited. 

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
  • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

BioMed Central strongly encourages the citation of any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

Competing interests

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

Funding

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.

Authors' contributions

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

Authors' information

This section is optional.

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

Footnotes

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

References

Examples of the Vancouver reference style are shown below.

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Smith JJ. The world of science. Am J Sci. 1999;36:234-5.

Article within a journal (no page numbers)

Rohrmann S, Overvad K, Bueno-de-Mesquita HB, Jakobsen MU, Egeberg R, Tjønneland A, et al. Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. BMC Medicine. 2013;11:63.

Article within a journal by DOI

Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Article within a journal supplement

Frumin AM, Nussbaum J, Esposito M. Functional asplenia: demonstration of splenic activity by bone marrow scan. Blood 1979;59 Suppl 1:26-32.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. p. 251-306.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito Y, Hyuga H. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Top Curr Chem. 2007. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Complete book, authored

Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.

Online document

Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase. US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. 1998. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J. Title of supplementary material. 2000. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

University site

Doe, J: Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html (1999). Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

FTP site

Doe, J: Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt (1999). Accessed 12 Nov 1999.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre: The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org (2006). Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

Dataset with persistent identifier

Zheng L-Y, Guo X-S, He B, Sun L-J, Peng Y, Dong S-S, et al. Genome data from sweet and grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). GigaScience Database. 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100012.

Figures, tables and additional files

See General formatting guidelines for information on how to format figures, tables and additional files.

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