Authors Guide

The Family Practice Management Authors Guide

We try to make writing for FPM as easy and rewarding as possible.

Robert L. Edsall

The AAFP launched Family Practice Management (FPM) in 1993 to help family physicians survive and thrive in today's constantly changing health care system. To accomplish that mission, we need articles written by progressive, insightful family physicians and others with pertinent expertise. We are eager to publish articles that can help family physicians in every area of practice except the strictly clinical, which is the purview of our sister journal, American Family Physician. For guidance on the kinds of topics we are looking for, see "What FPM is about."

FPM publishes articles offering advice based on practical experience and on special knowledge or expertise. We don't normally publish formal review articles or research. While we prefer articles that reflect expert opinion or broad practice experience, we do occasionally publish first-person accounts or case studies when they are likely to have practical application for readers. The test of a manuscript we are considering will always be whether it is immediately useful to the family physicians who read FPM.

To get the best possible sense of what an FPM article is like, browse back issues of the journal, which may be available through your medical library and can be viewed online at www.aafp.org/fpm.

In keeping with the informal approach of FPM, we encourage authors to use a reasonably informal, conversational writing style rather than "journalese." But don't worry too much about style. Our editors are experts at making articles as readable and accessible as possible. What we need most from authors is knowledge, practical experience and insight.

Submitting a manuscript

While we encourage preliminary contacts and prefer having a chance to offer guidance in the process of article preparation, neither is a requirement. If you have a finished or nearly finished article, don't hesitate to submit it to FPM for review (see "Getting in touch with FPM," page 88).

We welcome manuscripts submitted in virtually any form, although we prefer electronic submissions: word-processing files on diskettes or attached to e-mail messages. We can read and translate files created with most popular word-processing programs. If you do submit a manuscript on paper, either by mail or by fax, please have it double-spaced with generous margins to allow space for reviewers' comments.

We try to keep FPM articles short ­ say, 2,000 to 3,000 words at most. That's about eight to 12 pages, double-spaced. If your manuscript includes a number of illustrations, graphs or tables (and we're eager to get them), try to keep the manuscript text even shorter to compensate for the space these elements take up. We are also happy to have very short articles ­ in the neighborhood of 600 to 1,000 words ­ for the regularly appearing FPM departments such as "Getting Paid" and "Balancing Act."

Manuscript accessories

If you have written for publication before, you know that the elements that need to accompany a manuscript can be almost as much of a challenge to assemble as the manuscript itself. Here's our list of things to keep in mind:

Contact information. Make sure the title page includes each author's name with highest academic degree and institutional affiliation as well as contact information for the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript. The more contact information you include, the better. If possible, we'd like your mailing address, fax number, e-mail address and telephone numbers.

Credentials. With each article we publish, we include brief statements of the authors' current professional responsibilities. Please include no more than a sentence or two for each author (for instance, "Dr. Smith is medical director of Pine Forest Family Practice Clinic, Pine Forest, Ky.").

References. Please keep references to a minimum. FPM is deliberately informal; it is a practical journal rather than a research journal. Supply references only when you quote from or refer directly to a publication or when you wish to support a statement that you believe readers are likely to question.

Graphs, tables and illustrations. We encourage authors to think about illustrations and graphic displays of data when preparing manuscripts. Our aim is to make FPM articles as easy to understand as possible, and if a graph is worth a thousand words, or even a hundred, we consider it worthwhile. Given the importance we ascribe to such aids to reading, it's only right that we stand ready to help. Where we see the need, we are available to help authors create or refine graphs and artwork to illustrate articles we publish. In fact, we may propose additional elements in the process of editing. (By the way, unlike some clinical journals, we provide this service at no charge to authors, we don't charge for the use of color photographs or slides, and we encourage color illustrations where appropriate.)

As a rule, we want tables, graphs and illustrations that build on information provided in the body of the article rather than duplicate it. They should be understandable on their own, not dependent on the article for explanation. If you supply illustrations, please include descriptive material that can be used in a caption. We're happy to have color photos or slides for publication, although we may decline to use photos that are not sharp, well-lit and interesting. On a slip of paper taped to the back of each photograph or slide you submit, indicate the subject of the photo, your name and, if necessary, which edge is the top. If you supply photographs of people, please include signed photo releases from the subjects. (We can supply photo-release forms to use.)

On request, we will return original artwork and photographs submitted with manuscripts, although for manuscripts we accept we will normally need to hold onto these items until the article is published.

Copyright and related issues

If you incorporate previously published material into your article ­ a table from another source, for instance ­ please label it clearly with its source and add a prominent note saying "COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL; PERMISSION REQUIRED." We prefer to ask permission to reprint such material ourselves.

If we accept your manuscript for publication, we will send you two documents that you and any other authors of the article will need to complete. One is a release form transferring copyright of the article to the AAFP; the other is a conflict of interest disclosure. The former asks you to affirm that no portion of your manuscript has been previously published (other than borrowed material of the sort discussed in the previous paragraph) and that the manuscript is not being considered for publication elsewhere. The latter asks you to disclose any financial relationship you have with an entity that may have an interest in the subject matter of your article. A conflict does not, in itself, affect our acceptance of an article. From time to time we do publish articles by authors with significant conflicts of interest; in such cases we include a disclosure statement in the article. If you have concerns about copyright or about something that may represent a conflict of interest, please talk with me or one of the other editors.

Review and editing

When we first receive a manuscript submitted for publication, we send the corresponding author a brief acknowledgment of receipt and start the article through the review process, which involves two steps. Each manuscript goes through an in-house review, during which the editors evaluate its suitability for FPM and its editability. Manuscripts that pass this review are then sent for peer review. We may reject a manuscript or ask the authors to revise it after either review stage, but we can formally accept manuscripts for publication only after they have made it through both stages. If no revisions are required, the process from submission to acceptance or rejection typically takes six to eight weeks.

If your manuscript is accepted, it will go through three editing stages at the hands of three different members of the FPM staff: a substantive edit, a light "polishing" edit and a review for correctness. Some manuscripts are edited heavily in the first stage, and we sometimes ask authors to fill gaps in their presentation at that point. We will ask you to review and approve all substantive changes. Once the content is essentially final, we won't ask you to review subsequent versions of the article. Time from acceptance to publication varies, but you should expect it to take several months.

If you think you have an FPM article in you, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We will make the manuscript preparation process as painless as possible, and you will have a chance to be published in the practice management journal of the AAFP ­ and to help nearly 100,000 family physicians.

Robert Edsall is editor-in-chief of Family Practice Management.