Author Guidelines

Annals of Long-Term Care: Clinical Care and Aging® (ALTC) is a peer-reviewed medical journal featuring research and insights on the care and management of residents in long-term care settings. The aim of the journal is to provide long-term care clinicians with timely, evidence-based, practical information that can be used to improve the care of their residents.

ALTC features peer-reviewed educational and informational articles on topics including: clinical diagnosis and management; quality improvement initiatives; care transitions; medication safety and deprescribing; prevention of hospital readmissions; and end-of-life care planning.

ALTC is published in conformance with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. No fees or charges are required for manuscript processing and/or publishing materials in the journal.

ARTICLE TYPES
ALTC accepts for consideration the following types of manuscripts:

Practical Research is a report of original research outlining the methods and results of a study conducted in the long-term care setting. These reports should have immediate practical implications. Articles discussing experimental treatments will not be considered.

Review articles provide a thorough, critical, up-to-date overview of the existing literature on a clinical topic relevant to the long-term care setting.

Quality Improvement articles describe a quality improvement project that has been implemented in a long-term care setting. Reports should include step-by-step methods, outcomes, and a discussion that outlines suggestions for implementation.

Clinical Experience reports detail an initiative that has the potential to improve quality of care in long-term care settings. They describe an innovative clinical strategy, such the use of a novel assessment tool or intervention, that is preliminary but that may be of clinical interest. The manuscript should contain a short introduction and an evidence-based rationale for the initiative.

Case Reports should be relevant to the long-term care setting and should have instructional value, such as revealing successful interventions in managing uncommon syndromes, highlighting rare diagnoses that may be overlooked, or cautioning against the use of a particular treatment that may have a poor outcome.

Ethics articles focus on ethical issues and dilemmas that caregivers, patients, and their families may encounter in the long-term care setting.

Perspectives articles are less formal in style and should provide personal perspectives or experiences regarding an aspect of long-term care.

Commentary and Letter to the Editor include opinions and commentaries on topics of interest to ALTC readers. Letters to the Editor should be written in response to a particular article appearing in a previous issue of the journal or on the ALTC website. These submissions are evaluated by at least one expert reviewer prior to acceptance. The Editors reserve the right to decide whether these submissions require full peer review and may invite a response from another contributor to present a counterpoint to the piece.

SUBMISSION
Authors interested in submitting to ALTC should follow the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. All articles submitted to ALTC must be original; the journal does not accept manuscripts whose content has been previously published elsewhere, in print or online. Any instances of research and publication misconduct will be handled in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.

Manuscripts can be submitted online here. Authors should fill out the requested information and then upload their manuscript and supporting files in the required formats. Alternatively, authors may email their submissions directly to the Editors at: editors@populationhealthnet.com.

A full submission should include:

• The blinded manuscript
• Accompanying figure/table/images (if any)
• Cover letter
• Completed Copyright form for manuscript
• Completed Author Disclosure forms for each author

To facilitate blind peer-review of manuscripts, please do not include author names, affiliations, or contact information in the manuscript document. Please provide this information separately in a cover letter submitted with the manuscript. The manuscript as well as the cover letter should be submitted as Microsoft Word files.

Disclosures of funding sources and financial conflicts of interest must be provided for all authors at the time of manuscript submission. As a matter of editorial policy, we will not publish manuscripts that have been written by, or whose development was funded by, a pharmaceutical company, public relations agency, or similar outside source without full disclosure.

Authors also must complete and sign a Copyright Transfer form. All required forms can be requested from the Editors via email at: editors@populationhealthnet.com.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission and paying fees to reproduce any tables, figures, or other illustrations that were originally published elsewhere; written documentation of this permission should be submitted with the manuscript. For photographs in which patients are identifiable, authors must include a signed Patient/Parent Consent Form.

STYLE
The journal requests that authors use the term “older adult” when describing individuals aged 65 and older. Authors also are asked to provide a specific age range (eg, “older adults between the ages of 75 and 85”) when describing their research or making recommendations about patient care or the health of the population. Terms like “(the) aged,” “elder(s),” “(the) elderly,” and “seniors” should not be used. This is because such terms connote discrimination and certain negative stereotypes that may undercut research-based recommendations for better serving our needs as we age.

On the title page of the manuscript, please provide a title and up to six keywords for your article. An abstract of 100 to 175 words should be included in the manuscript document. It should be factual, not descriptive, and outline the main points of the paper. Manuscript text should be 500 to 3000 words in length, not including the Abstract and References. 

Values should be reported using conventional units of measure. All medications should be referred to by their generic names throughout the manuscript and in all illustrations.

All references should be cited in full and provided in American Medical Association (AMA) style. Please do not use EndNote formatting, as this makes editing difficult. References should be cited in chronological order in the text using superscripted Arabic numerals and included in a citation list at the end of the article.

Tables and figures that reflect the general subject matter of the article are encouraged and should accompany the manuscript when first submitted (preferably in their original Word, Excel, or PowerPoint formats). For print-ready figures and photos, high-resolution (300 dpi, 4” x 5”) JPEG images are preferred. Other acceptable image formats include EPS, PICT, BMP, and TIFF. Please submit images separately from Microsoft Word files. All graphics should be numbered in proper sequence. Legends should be included in the manuscript document.

REVIEW PROCESS
All manuscripts submitted to ALTC for consideration are first reviewed by the editors for quality and appropriateness for the journal. Selected manuscripts are then peer-reviewed by two or more referees. The corresponding author is notified of the reviewers’ decision within approximately 6 to 8 weeks of submission, dependent upon reviewer availability.

During the review process, the reviewers or Editors often request that the authors revise their manuscript. The final decision on acceptance for publication can be made only after the revised version of the manuscript has been reevaluated.

Accepted manuscripts are edited according to AMA and house style. The corresponding author will receive a copyedited manuscript for review prior to publication.

All articles published in print are subsequently published open access on the ALTC website at www.annalsoflongtermcare.com.

ETHICS
The author is responsible for the contents submitted in the paper. Authors must comply with FDA guidelines, human studies guidelines, and animal welfare regulations of the authors’ institution. Authors should include signed consent forms with their submissions from human subjects who can be identified in photos or in text and indicate in the paper that human subjects have given informed consent. Articles will not be published without the appropriately submitted forms. Any instances of research and publication misconduct will be handled in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.

Opinions expressed by authors are their own and not necessarily those of HMP, the editorial staff, or any member of the editorial advisory board. No claims made by authors or advertisers are guaranteed by the publisher or the editors. While revenue for ALTC is ad-based, editorial content is evaluated and published independent from advertising influence.

PLAGIARISM
By submitting your manuscript to Annals of Long-Term Care, you agree to a plagiarism screen via iThenticate. All submissions will be screened for plagiarism before being reviewed by the peer-review panel.

PREPRINT SERVER POLICY
ALTC will consider manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers as long as they are posted to the preprint server prior to submission. These submissions should follow our other guidelines, and in the cover letter the authors must mention and provide a URL and/or DOI for the preprint version of the manuscript. The submission will go through our standard editorial evaluation and peer review processes; if accepted, the preprint version must link to the final, published version of record at ALTC once it is available.