Submitting an Article

Getting started

Are you submitting through one of our Cureus Channels? Are you entering a competition? Designate your article as a channel or competition article here, then choose the article type (original, review, case report, technical report, editorial). This information cannot be changed after moving on to the Title, etc. section of the Cureus submission process.

Study Design (Original Article submissions only)

If you’re submitting an original article, you’ll be prompted to answer a few questions regarding the study design. These questions and your answers are meant to confirm that you have correctly labeled your study design (e.g. prospective interventional study, retrospective study, randomized controlled trial, etc.).

The corresponding IRB and clinical trial registration requirements will be displayed based on your study design. If the study design label does not match what you’ve included in your manuscript, you’ll need to confirm that 1) you’ve correctly labeled your study design, and 2) that you correctly answered the study design questionnaire.

Title, etc.

Title

Beginning with this step, you may preview your draft at any time to see how the published version will be displayed.

Abstract

Categories

Keywords

Authors

Include all Authors

Add your co-authors. Authors cannot be added after submission, so make sure to include all authors before submitting your article! The submitting author is listed as the first author by default; this can be changed by dragging and dropping the authors into the desired order.

Check Author Names and Affiliations

While your co-authors can edit their name and affiliation in their Cureus profiles, their changes will not be reflected in article submissions or published articles in Cureus. Author names and affiliations for all authors listed in an article must be edited by the submitting author.

It is the submitting author’s responsibility to enter or revise all co-author name and affiliation information to ensure accuracy, consistent formatting, and compliance with these article submission guidelines.

Affiliation Consistency Required

All authors must have an accurate and consistently formatted affiliation name and location. Medical students should list ‘Medical School’ or the relevant article category as their department during submission (e.g. neurosurgery, family medicine, etc.).

Titles such as Professor, Assistant Professor, Medical Student, Resident, Department Chair, etc. are not permitted in the author affiliation and should not be included in the Department field.

If two or more authors are from the same hospital or academic institution, the hospital or institution name entered in this field must be identical for those authors. If these authors are also from the same department, then the information in the department field must also be identical. This includes spelling, capitalization, spacing, etc.

Article submissions with inconsistent affiliation formatting will require the purchase of our Preferred Editing service to proceed, so this step is very important.

No Suffixes for Seniority in Author List

Suffixes denoting author list seniority or professional standing (e.g., Senior, Junior, II, III) should not be included in your Cureus submission.

Contributions

All authors must meet ICMJE guidelines for authorship to be listed as an author. Open the dropdown menu next to each author to select their contributions to the work.

Authors who do not satisfy ICMJE authorship criteria should be removed from the author list during article submission and mentioned in the Acknowledgements section (consent needed).

Disclosures

Please provide all relevant information about human or animal subjects and disclose relevant conflicts of interest (COI). You may also add acknowledgments at this time.

If human or animal subjects are included in the article, please provide the relevant IRB names and approval numbers and confirm that informed consent was obtained or waived. If an IRB or ethics committee reviewed your study, you will also be required to upload documentation from the IRB or ethics committee indicating that your study was approved or determined to be exempt.

The submitting author is responsible for including all co-author COI and disclosure information. Are you unsure about potential conflicts of interest among your co-authors? You can send an email to your co-authors requesting this information directly from the article submission process.

Conflicts of interest may involve:

• 3rd party payment or service for any aspect of the submitted work
• Relevant financial activities outside the submitted work
• Patents that could be considered broadly applicable to the research
• Any relationships not covered previously

Based on the information and disclosures provided in the submission, Cureus will automatically generate an Ethics Statement and Conflict of Interest Disclosures to be included alongside the published article. Please see the Publication Ethics and Conflicts of Interest sections of the Author Guide to view a detailed breakdown of required statements and disclosures.

Article

Enter the main article content here. Article sections will vary depending on the article type selected earlier in the submission process. Do not compose your article directly in the text field. Instead, first write your article in the word processor of your choice and then copy and paste your article text into the appropriate section. Please do not include section names (e.g. Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results, etc.) as these are added automatically.

Previously Presented as Abstract or Poster

If you previously presented your article as an abstract or poster, this must be mentioned in the introduction section of your Cureus submission. Please include the meeting or conference title and date. For example, “This article was previously presented as a meeting abstract at the 2020 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting on April 27, 2020.”

Previously Posted to Preprint Server

If you previously posted your article to a preprint server, this must be mentioned in the body of the article. For example, “This article was previously posted to the medRxiv preprint server on April 27, 2020.” Medical research article submissions currently available on a preprint server will be accepted if they are not pending full publication elsewhere.

Text Formatting

All medical research articles must adhere to Cureus formatting styles and submission guidelines:

• No paragraph indentations or bulleted lists
• Only one line return after each paragraph
• Only one space between sentences
• Please remove any text styling before copying and pasting your text into the appropriate field

Scientific Nomenclature

Please adhere to CDC guidelines for writing scientific nomenclature when referring to topics like bacteria and genes. (Italics cannot be used in article titles.)

Conclusions

The conclusions should be concise and exclude any data or other information that requires citations.

Numbers

Numbers 1-9 should be spelled out in your Cureus submission, except for measurements (e.g. 7 mm). Numbers higher than nine should be entered numerically (10, 100, 463, 1,932, etc.).

Citations

References should be cited using square brackets. Square brackets should not be used anywhere in your article except for the in-text citations. Reference citations may be placed mid-sentence or at the end of a sentence (but before the period).

If multiple references are cited in one place, please list them as follows: [1-4], [1,3], [5,9-12], etc. Footnotes are not permitted. Citations are not allowed in figures, tables, videos, or 3D model titles. They should instead be included in the media legend or table cells.

Media

To add media to your article submission, place your cursor in the desired location in the text field and click one of the 'Insert Figure, Table, Video, or 3D model' buttons on the article section toolbar. You will then be prompted to upload the figure, paste or create the table, paste the video or 3D model URL, and add a title and optional legend.

Cureus does not accept images created or modified by generative AI tools. Please refer to the Artificial Intelligence section for additional details and potential exceptions.

Please visit our Media Guide for detailed instructions on adding each media type and examples of unacceptable media.

Subheaders

In every submission, Cureus allows for three levels of subheaders:

Major subheaders should be formatted using the subheader style in the 'Styles' dropdown menu. Major subheaders should be in sentence case, i.e. the first word should be capitalized, and all other words should be in lowercase, except proper nouns and acronyms/initialisms (such as GBM, SRS, etc.).

Minor subheaders should be in title case and italicized. Both major and minor subheaders should be followed by a line return before the next paragraph begins.

If the medical research article you’re submitting contains a third level of subheader, it should be in sentence case and lead off the paragraph, followed by a colon (e.g. Patient Zero: This patient exhibited signs of…).

Formulas

Cureus supports LaTex. During submission, you can build formulas using LaTeX. You can also copy/paste and convert your pre-prepared formulas. Please keep this in mind when preparing your manuscript.

Appendices (Optional)

Add supplemental information here.

Questionnaires, Scales and Tests

All questionnaires, tests, and medical scoring systems/scales that have been previously published must be properly cited in the article. To cite a test, scale, or questionnaire, provide a citation for its supporting literature (e.g., its manual, which may be an authored or edited book, or the journal article in which it was published).

Some questionnaires and medical scoring systems/scales are copyrighted and require permission or a fee to use. It is the responsibility of the authors to understand and confirm copyright prior to submission.

Questionnaires, etc. developed by the authors must be included in the Materials & Methods, Results, or Appendices.

Miscellaneous

Please refer to IBM Support for information on how to cite IBM SPSS statistics or Stata Support for citing Stata software within the article body. (These do not require a corresponding reference entry.)

Any medical device or similar technology referenced in the text should be immediately followed by the manufacturer name and location in parentheses for the first instance in both the abstract and the body.

Brand name drugs should be treated as a proper noun, but generic brands should remain lowercase.

References

Creating references for article submission is simple with our automated converting tool. Please format all references in a text document according to the Cureus style guidelines before copying and pasting the list and selecting 'Convert references'.

Once all references have been converted, please preview (and edit as necessary) each reference to ensure it has been converted correctly. We’ll do our best to detect each reference type based on its formatting, but the conversion tool is not perfect and the results will require your review.

When editing your converted references, please do not add punctuation at the end — punctuation will be added automatically. If you prefer, you can also enter your references one by one.

Please view the References section of the Cureus submission guide for more detailed instructions.

Advisers

Adding Advisers

The submitting author must suggest at least five colleagues or mentors to act as potential advisers on the manuscript draft. Advisers provide valuable feedback and suggestions that can strengthen your work, but are not considered formal peer reviewers. Our editors will not consider adviser feedback when evaluating your manuscript for publication approval. Advisers are intended to serve as a resource for authors and you may decide whether to incorporate their feedback into your manuscript.

What about peer review?

Six peer reviewers will be invited by the journal to review your manuscript with additional peer reviewers added as needed. The Cureus peer review panel consists of relevant specialists who have either volunteered for the panel or previously published as an author in Cureus. To prevent a potential conflict of interest, peer reviewers with the same listed affiliation as you or your co-authors will not be invited to review your manuscript. Submitted peer reviews lacking in constructive feedback will be rejected by Cureus editors.

How many reviews do I need?

Two completed peer reviews are required. You’ll receive an email when the second review is submitted, at which point you can proceed with revisions and request publication, or wait for more peer reviews to be submitted. Adviser feedback is not required, and incorporating it into your article is optional.

Files for Editor Review (Optional)

If relevant to your article, please provide the following: written informed consent to publish identifying patient information, license to use copyrighted scales or questionnaires, license to reproduce copyrighted figures or tables, etc. Do you have any other material to upload for editorial review? All uploaded material is for editorial review only and will not be shared with peer reviewers or published alongside your article.

You’ll be prompted to answer a few questions regarding informed consent and use of scales, questionnaires, borrowed images, etc. These questions and your answers are meant to confirm that you have obtained informed consent from the patient(s) and obtained the proper permission or license to use a particular scale or questionnaire, or reproduce a non-original image.

Summary

The summary contains a section-by-section outline of your article. You can review each aspect of your article and jump directly to a specific section of the submission process if you’d like to make changes.

If any issues with the reference citations are detected, you will receive a notification and list of the citation or reference-related issues (e.g. missing citations, missing references, incorrectly formatted citations).

It’s your responsibility to identify and address all listed issues to proceed to the next step and submit your article.

Submit

Please preview your article draft one last time to ensure everything is in order. You cannot submit your draft without first previewing your work. When you’re sure the draft complies with our article submission guidelines, click the ‘Submit my article’ button.

Peer review invitation emails will be sent out, and the peer review process will begin when your article is approved during our preliminary editorial review.

Please refer to The Cureus Publishing Process section for a detailed description of what happens next in the Cureus medical research article submission process.

Purchasing Preferred Editing Service or Uploading Third Party Editing Service Receipt

If, after submission, you receive an email from Cureus stating that our Preferred Editing service is required, you will be prompted to enter your payment information and resubmit the article. Your article cannot be edited while deferred for Preferred Editing.

If, after submission, you receive an email from the Cureus journal stating that professional third-party language editing is required, you will be prompted to enter the name of the service and upload an invoice or receipt when resubmitting the revised article.