1. Guidelines

Scope and Aims

The Smart Medicine Journal publishes high-quality original research that advances knowledge and practice in epidemiological medicine, public health, and translational biomedicine. Our scope covers population-level studies, clinical trials, policy analyses, diagnostic assessments, therapeutic interventions, and more. We welcome rigorous empirical and theoretical submissions in formats including research articles, methods papers, short reports, commentaries, case studies, systematic reviews, and letters to the editor. The journal aims to bridge research and practice to inform evidence-based solutions to pressing issues in medicine and healthcare.

Authorship

All listed authors should have made substantive intellectual contributions to the study conception, design, data acquisition, analysis or interpretation. Authorship should be defined in accordance with ICMJE guidelines. All authors must confirm their contribution, approve the submitted version, and agree to be accountable for the work. Changes to authorship require justification and consent.

Ethics Approval

For studies involving human participants, confirmation of institutional ethics committee approval and informed consent must be provided. For research using animals, institutional animal care and use committee approval is required. Relevant reporting guidelines should be followed.

Competing Interests

All authors must disclose any financial or non-financial interests that could be viewed as improperly influencing the work via the ICMJE disclosure form. Potential conflicts of interest should be declared in the cover letter and manuscript.

Data Availability

To enable reproducibility, data supporting the results must be made freely and publicly available in a suitable repository, and accession details provided in the manuscript. Any restrictions to data access must be disclosed.

Preprints

Preprints provide an opportunity for open scholarly exchange and feedback. Cited preprints must be deposited in an established server like bioRxiv or medRxiv. Public availability does not preclude the journal's assessment.

2. Manuscript Preparation

Manuscripts must be prepared in strict adherence to the Smart Medicine Journal’s formatting and style guidelines. We recommend authors utilize our manuscript template, which contains properly formatted section headings and other structural elements.

Use English to prepare your manuscript in a word file (DOC, DOCX or RTF format). Page and line numbers are required. Use a 5 size font and Times New Roman font in the manuscript. Manuscript text should be 1.5 spaced. Do not format text in multiple columns.

Your manuscript should contain these headings as they appear in the following order: Title, author names and affiliations, corresponding author information, keywords, abstract, introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion, conclusion, conflicts of interest, funding sources, acknowledgments, references, legend of figures and tables, table, figures, and supplementary files. All Figures and supplementary files should be provided in separate files.

Please see the below table for the requirements of manuscript:

Cover Letter The Cover Letter needs to provide the research significance, significant findings and impact of this study on the field. Use the covering letter to explain why your paper should be published in SMART Medical Journal of Hong Kong rather than elsewhere.

Title Page This is the first page of your manuscript. It should contain article type (Research/Review/Case Series/Case Report/Letter/Editorial/Comment) followed by the manuscript title. Manuscript title should be short and informative. Don't include abbreviations in the title.Short title should not exceed 50 characters.Provide list of authors (Last name, First name and initials of middle name) along with the highest academic degree. Their departments and institutions must be attributed. Name, highest degree, current affiliation along with email id and phone number must be provided in corresponding author column.

Abstract Abstract should not exceed 250 words. For research article, the structured abstract, including introduction, methods, discussion and conclusion, was provided. Non-structured abstracts were appropriate for other types of article. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

Keywords 5 to 10 keywords representing the main content of the article after abstract. 

Introduction

The Introduction 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.

Materials & Methods

The Methods should provide enough detail for reproduction of the findings. A full description of the methods should be included in the manuscript itself rather than in a supplemental file.

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 of primary and secondary outcomes in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study.

Conclusion

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':

• Authors' contributions

• Ethics approval and consent to participate

• Availability of data and materials

• Conflict of interest

• Funding

• Acknowledgements

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.

Authors' contributions

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: " CZ and JYY designed the research. CYXY, JBX, TYG and HYL collected the data and verified the accuracy of the data. YTM, JBX, NJD and CYXY verified the accuracy of the data. YTT, JBX, HJL and YTM contributed to data interpretation. CZ, CYXY and YTT performed the statistical analysis and visualization. CYXY, CZ and JYY wrote and revised the manuscript. All authors read, critically reviewed, and approved the final manuscript."

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.

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.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. 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.

Conflict of interest

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

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

If you do not have any conflict of interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no conflict of 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.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve funding, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

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.

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

References

Examples of the Vancouver reference style are shown below.

• Journal articles: Hajat C, Stein E, Shantikumar S, et al. A scoping review of studies on the health impact of electronic nicotine delivery systems. Intern Emerg Med, 2022,17(1):241-268.

• Book References: Borenstein M, Hedges LV, Higgins JPT, Rothstein HR. Introduction to Meta‐Analysis. 1th edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2009.

• Online document: World Health Organization. WHO publishes new estimates on congenital syphilis. https://www.who.int/news/item/26-02-2019-who-publishes-new-estimates-on-congenital-syphilis. Accessed 26 February 2019.

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

• Proceedings of Conference: Gee JC, Joshi S, Pohl KM, Wells WM, Zollei L, editors. Information Processing in Medical Imaging. Proceedings of 23rd International Conference; 2013 June 28--July 3; CA, USA. New York: Springer, 2013.

Tables

Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, Table 2 etc.).

Tables less than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed in the appropriate location within the manuscript.

Tables larger than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed at the end of the document text file. Please cite and indicate where the table should appear at the relevant location in the text file so that the table can be added in the correct place during production.

All Tables need to be inserted into after the references of manuscript.

Figures

Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in this order. Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc.) should be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure.

Figure titles and legends should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.

Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site.

Individual figure files should not exceed 15 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is adequate for extremely high quality figures.

Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non-open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

The Figure formats of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch), including TIFF, PDF, EPS, PowerPoint, are accepted. All Figures need to be uploaded separately, and cannot be inserted into the manuscript.

Supplementary Material

As the length and quantity of data is not restricted for many article types, authors can provide datasets, tables, figures, or other information as supplementary materials. All supplementary materials will be published along with the accepted article.

If supplementary material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text:

Legend of all individual file

Name of individual file (e.g. Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Figure 1)

Content of individual file

File format (.docx, .doc, .pdf, .xls, .txt, .pptx)

All individual files are kept on a single page.

Publication Charges The articles published in the SMART Medical Journal of Hong Kong journal are in full open access, and there is no charge for publication.

3. Submit Manuscript

Submission to the Smart Medicine Journal is by invitation only currently. 

Manuscripts should be submitted via email to submission_portal@smartmjhk.com

The submission must include a cover letter succinctly summarizing the background context, rationale, objectives, methodology, key results, and significance of the work. The cover letter should convince the editors that the research is novel, impactful, and appropriate for the journal scope.

In addition, suggest 2-4 potential expert peer reviewers with contact information and expertise relevant to evaluating the work. Recommended reviewers should have no conflicts of interest with the authors or work. Also indicate any reviewers who should be excluded.

Invited manuscripts must adhere closely to the journal's formatting and preparation guidelines. Failure to follow the author's instructions may delay the review process. Please contact the editorial office if guidance is needed on manuscript preparation or submission.

4. Review Process

Initial Editorial Assessment

Submitted manuscripts are assessed by the editors for scope, adherence to author guidelines, ethics compliance, and merit for peer review. Those selected for review are assigned to an academic editor who oversees and guides the process.

Peer Review

Experts in the field are invited to critically review the work under a double-blind process where author and reviewer identities remain concealed. Typically, two or more reviewers independently evaluate quality, validity, novelty, impact, and provide detailed, constructive feedback. They also indicate recommendations regarding acceptance.

Revision

Revised manuscripts addressing reviewer comments can be re-submitted for further evaluation. Additional peer review rounds may be necessary to satisfy all concerns prior to a final decision.

5. Decision Made

Once the handling academic editor determines all essential revisions are satisfactorily completed and concerns adequately addressed, a final decision to accept or reject the manuscript for publication is made.

6. Online Publication

Accepted manuscripts undergo professional copyediting, typesetting, and reference validation prior to online publication. Articles are published with a DOI under a CC-BY open access license, allowing immediate free access upon publication.  

We hope these comprehensive instructions will facilitate preparation and successful submission of your manuscript. Please contact the editorial office for any questions or guidance.