[Various suggestions for the presentation of manuscripts in biomedical journals]

The role of biomedical journals is to spread scientific knowledge. For the appropriate communication of this information, editors require that manuscripts sent for publication have a formal structure according to international standards. This paper makes suggestions to the authors on the preparation of the manuscript and its publication. Special emphasis must be made by the author on the selection of the right title and on the contents of the summary as they are a basic guide to the reader. The "introduction" includes, a description of previous data, the formulation of a hypothesis and the objectives of the paper. "Material and methods" includes the description of the methodology used which should be precise and complete enough so as to allow reproduction of the experiment. In "results" the data should be shown objectively making correct use of tables and figures. The "discussion" brings out the most important and new findings, and emphasizes future applications and projections. The conclusions must be backed up by the data presented. The wording must be simple and the manuscript as short as possible to make the reading easy and to spare the reader's time.