Guidelines

Aims and Scope

Journal Sections

Article Types

Contact Information

Getting Started

When preparing a manuscript, it is important to review the editorial policies. For full details, please visit the Publication Ethics and Editorial Policies page. Karger Publishers is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Karger journals aim to adhere to the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines.

The presentation of manuscripts should follow the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). We recommend preparing the manuscript using the dedicated article template for the manuscript type.

Only papers written in English are considered. The articles should be comprehensible to a reader who is fluent in English and should be edited prior to submission to ensure that standard English grammar and usage are observed. Use of a professional language editing service prior to submission can help avoid delays with the review process.

Karger recommends the use of original images and materials whenever possible. If a submitted manuscript contains third-party copyright material(s), it is the authors’ sole responsibility to obtain permission from the relevant copyright holder for reusing the material(s), including any associated licensing fee. The copyright and usage information needs to be checked carefully to avoid copyright infringement. The author(s) is and will remain personally liable for any copyright infringements.

Most publishers offer a quick and easy way to clear permissions for their content via the built-in website application RightsLink or via https://www.copyright.com/get-permissions/. Another widely used licensing tool is PLSClear. Please check the publishers’ websites for the available options and user instructions.

The authors agree that their name, affiliation with their institution and contact details will be available to third parties after the article has been published. Those third parties may be placed within or outside of the European Economic Area.

Research and Publication Ethics

When preparing a manuscript, it is important to review the editorial policies, including those on research ethics, consent, conflict of interest, data sharing and citation, text reuse and plagiarism, reproducibility and more. For full details, please visit the Publication Ethics and Editorial Policies page.

Karger Publishers is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Karger journals aim to adhere to the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines. Our policies on reporting and investigation of suspected misconduct in manuscripts and articles and how we handle potential errors in published articles can be found on the Publication Ethics and Editorial Policies page. Concerns regarding a manuscript in review or a published article should be raised to the Research Integrity and Publication Ethics team at Publication Ethics.

Statements

All submitted manuscripts must contain a statements section after the main body of the text, but before the reference list. A summary of the required information is given below, for full details please refer to the article templates and visit the Publication Ethics and Editorial Policies page.

Statement of Ethics

The Statement of Ethics must provide detail about the ethical approval process for the study reported in the manuscript, including the name and affiliation of the committee who approved the study and the decision reference number. For studies involving human participants, information must be provided about the consent provided to participate in the study. If information is included in the submission that may identify and individual or groups of individuals, specific consent to publish this information must be obtained and reported in the Statement of Ethics.

For complete information on our policies on Studies Involving Human Subjects, Identifiable Materials or Data or Studies Involving Animals, please see here.

Conflict of Interest Statement

Authors are required to disclose any relationship that could be perceived as a conflict of interest in the Conflict of Interest Statement. All forms of support and financial involvement which took place in the previous three years should be listed, regardless of their potential relevance to the paper. Nonfinancial relationships that may potentially influence the writing of the manuscript should also be declared. If there is no potential conflict of interest to report, please state this.

For complete information on our Conflict of Interest policy, please see here.

Funding Sources

Authors must give full details about the funding of any research relevant to their study, including sponsor names, written in full providing any associated grant numbers, and explanation of the roles of these funders in the study design, execution and analysis, and manuscript conception, planning, writing and decision to publish. If the sponsor or funder had no role in any of the above or if no funding was received for the study, please state this.

For complete information on our Funding Sources policy, please see here.

Author Contributions

In the Author Contribution statement, a short statement detailing the contributions of each person named as an author should be included. The CRediT taxonomy is a useful framework for preparing this section. Contributors to the submission who do not fulfil the ICMJE Criteria for Authorship should be credited, with their consent, in the Acknowledgement section.

For complete information on our Authorship and Contributorship policy, please see here.

Data Availability Statement

Authors are required to provide a Data Availability Statement that details whether data are publicly available and where the data supporting their study can be accessed. The journal’s data sharing policy strongly encourages authors to make all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to editors, reviewers and readers without unnecessary restriction wherever possible. In cases where research data are not publicly available on legal or ethical grounds, this should be clearly stated along with any conditions for accessing the data.

For complete information about our Data Sharing policy, please see here.

Further Conditions

Peer Review

Peer Review Policy

All Karger journals employ a rigorous peer-review process to confirm the validity and ensure scientific accuracy of published articles. Independent researchers with relevant expertise assess submitted manuscripts to help journal editors determine whether a manuscript should be published in their journal. All articles, except for Editorials and some Correspondence articles, are externally peer reviewed, typically by at least two individuals with expertise in the manuscript content area and/or research methods, before a final decision is made about acceptance for publication.

Peer Review Type and Process

Sexual Development uses a single-blind peer review system where reviewers know the names of the authors, but the authors do not know who reviewed their manuscript. For full details, including information about peer review policies and appeals process, please visit the Peer review – Karger Publishers page.

Formatting

• The preferred word processing program for manuscripts is Microsoft Word. Page and line numbering should be activated, and the level of subheadings should be indicated clearly.
• Footnotes should be avoided. When essential, they should be numbered consecutively and appear at the foot of the appropriate page.
• Abbreviations (with the exception of those clearly well established in the field) should be explained when they are first used both in the abstract and in the main text.
• Units of measurement should be expressed in SI units wherever possible.
• Generic names of drugs (first letter: lowercase) should be used whenever possible. Registered trade names (first letter: uppercase) should be marked with the superscript registration symbol ® or ™ when they are first mentioned.
• The manuscript text, tables and figures must be submitted in separate files. Figure legends should be included at the end of manuscript text, not in the figure file. Table headers should be included above or below the table in the table file.

For full technical specifications, including those regarding tables, figures, and illustrations, please refer to Karger’s Technical Instructions to Publish a Paper.

Further Formatting Instructions

Title Page

The first page should contain a short and concise title plus a running head of no more than 80 characters. Abbreviations should be avoided.

Below the title, list all the authors’ names as outlined in the article sample, which can be downloaded under Article Types. Each listed author must have an affiliation, which comprises the department, university, or organization and its location, city, state/province (if applicable), and country.

Corresponding author information: Please supply the first and last name as well as an e-mail address at the bottom of the title page.

Keywords relevant to the article should be listed below the corresponding author information.

Body

Please refer to the Article Types section of the Guidelines for Authors for information on the relevant article structure, including maximum word counts and downloadable samples.

References

In-Text Citation

References in the text should be identified sequentially using Arabic numerals [in square brackets].

Reference List

The reference list should include only those publications which are cited in the text, arranged numerically in the order in which they are cited. Please number the reference list as shown below (i.e., without using full stops, brackets, etc.). The authors’ surnames should be followed by their initials with no punctuation other than a comma to separate individual authors. A maximum of 6 authors should be listed (followed by “et al.” if there are more than 6 authors). Material submitted for publication but not yet accepted should be referred to as “unpublished data” and should not be included in the reference list. Other pre-published or related materials with a DOI, e.g. preprint manuscripts, datasets, and code, may be included. More information on good referencing practice, as well as further examples, can be found in National Library of Medicine Style Guide for Authors.

Examples

Articles published in journals: 1 Sawant KV, Xu R, Cox R, Hawkins H, Sbrana E, Kolli D, et al. Chemokine CXCL1-mediated neutrophil trafficking in the lung: role of CXCR2 activation. J Innate Immun. 2015;6(7):647–58. (Journal names should be abbreviated according to the Index Medicus.)

Articles published only with DOI number: 2 Chen C, Hu Z. ApoE polymorphisms and the risk of different subtypes of stroke in the Chinese population: a comprehensive meta-analysis. Cerebrovasc Dis. DOI: 10.1159/000442678.

Monographs: 3 Matthews DE, Farewell VT. Using and understanding medical statistics. 5th ed, revised. Basel: Karger; 2015.

Edited Books: 4 Cohen SR, Gardner TW. Diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. In: Nguyen QD, Rodrigues EB, Farah ME, Mieler WF, Do DV, editors. Retinal pharmacotherapeutics. Dev Ophthalmol. Basel: Karger; 2016. Vol. 55; p. 137–46.

Websites: 5 Karger Publishers [Internet]. Basel: Transforming Vesalius: The 16th-Century Scientific Revolution Brought to Life for the 21st Century [cited 2013 Feb 4]. Available from: https://www.vesaliusfabrica.com/en/new-fabrica.html.

Figures and Tables

The figure legend should be placed at the end of the article, after the reference list. The figure legend should not be part of the figure file. Tables require a heading above or below the table in the table file. For more details please download the relevant article template from the section “Article Types”.

Online Supplementary Material

Online Supplementary Material may be used to enhance a publication and increase its visibility on the Web. Supplementary files (directly relevant but not essential to the conclusions of the paper) will undergo editorial review and should be submitted in a separate file with the original manuscript and with all subsequent submissions. The Editor(s) reserve(s) the right to limit the scope and length of supplementary material. Supplementary material must meet production quality standards for publication without the need for any modification or editing. For ease of reader access, we strongly recommend that files be less than 10 MB. Authors wishing to associate larger amounts of supplementary material with their article should deposit their data in an appropriate public data repository. Figures must have legends and tables require headings. All files must be named clearly. Acceptable files and formats are Word or PDF files, Excel spreadsheets (if the data cannot be converted properly into a PDF file), and multimedia files (MPEG, AVI, or QuickTime formats). All supplementary material should be referred to in the main text. A DOI number will be assigned to supplementary material, and it will be hosted online at https://karger.figshare.com under a CC BY license.

Author Services

Karger Publishers offer a range of services to assist authors with the preparation of their manuscript, including discounts for language editing services offered by third parties.

More information is available on the Author Resources section of the Karger homepage.

When submitting a manuscript, authors can add their ORCID number to their Karger account to ensure that their paper is accredited to them correctly.

Page Charges/Article Processing Charges

Online Supplementary Material

Illustration Charges

Author's Choice

Copyediting and Proofs

Manuscripts accepted for publication by Karger Publishers will undergo basic proofreading to check for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. If you would prefer a more in-depth language editing service to improve clarity and style, please consult a service provider prior to submission. Please note that the use of a language editing service before submission is not a requirement for publication in the journal and does not guarantee that the manuscript will be considered for peer review or accepted.

Karger Publishers’ house style is based on internationally recognized standard manuals, including The Chicago Manual of Style.

Proof Central

An email containing a link to access the proofs will be sent to the contact author. The authors should check the document and respond to any questions that have been raised during copyediting within 48 hours. A provisional PDF can be viewed for an impression of the final layout of the manuscript.

Corrections to the text and tables should be made directly in the template. Changes to figures are discouraged but can be indicated with comments. Final layout and typesetting take place at a later stage.

Alterations made to proofs, other than the correction of errors introduced during production, are subject to review and may require editorial approval which could delay the publication of your manuscript

Please note that the revised proofs are not sent to the authors prior to typesetting and online publication unless there are exceptional circumstances. The article layout will be created according to the Karger standard.

NIH-Funded Research

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy mandates that AAMs must be archived in its digital database PubMed Central (PMC) within 12 months of the official publication date. As a service to authors, Karger Publishers submits the accepted, unedited version of NIH-funded manuscripts to PMC upon publication, where it is made available after a 12-month embargo period. Where the authors have chosen to make their paper freely available under Karger’s Author’s Choice™ service, this embargo does not apply.

Plan S

Karger approves authors, independently and without Karger`s action, to make their AAMs openly available in PMC or another repository under a CC BY license upon publication of the Version of Record (VOR, i.e post-production, final article version). However, when an article is published as Open Access, the Version of Record should be archived instead of the AAM. Some Coalition S funders, such as Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and FWF, designate PMC as the repository in which to make the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) openly available. For papers made Open Access via Author's Choice, Karger will deposit the article in PMC on the author’s behalf with a CC BY license. Authors should refer to their funders’ policies for details. Authors should check their funders’ requirements about how to declare their funding and any associated mandates within their manuscript.

Karger publishes some journals under the Transformative Journals model, compliant with Plan S. Find more information about Transformative Journals on the Karger website.

Other Funding Sources

Karger Publishers also complies with other funders’ requirements for submission to PMC. In some cases, doing so requires that authors select Author’s Choice™, which is generally reimbursed by the funder or is a permissible cost in the grant. Authors should include information on their grants in the Funding Sources section of their papers.

More information on funding sources can be found on the Karger website. 

Cover Letter

In your cover letter, please describe the gap in knowledge that this manuscript addresses, and discuss the implications, significance and novelty of your research for the Editor. Furthermore, please emphasize the unique and important contributions that your manuscript makes to our understanding of the field. If your submission is part of a special issue of the journal, please refer to the specific name of the special issue in your cover letter and specify who invited the submission where appropriate.

Manuscript Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online via the Sexual Development submission and peer review system by the manuscript’s corresponding author. The corresponding (submitting) author will automatically be the contact person for the manuscript for the peer review and production process. For fee payment and license signing, the contact author will be the first listed corresponding author.

The corresponding (submitting) author is solely responsible for managing all communication between the journal and all co-authors and acts on behalf of all listed authors. This ensures that all correspondence reaches a unique contact and thereby secures swift communication in particular throughout the submission, peer review and production process. Articles can be published with more than one corresponding author (usually limited to three), but only the submitting author can be accommodated during the submission, peer review and production process.

The corresponding (submitting) author’s specific responsibilities include:

• Ensuring all the listed authors have approved the manuscript submission to the journal and agreed to all of the content including the author list, including the Submission Declaration
• Handling the revision(s) and re-submission(s) of the manuscript until acceptance
• After acceptance, manuscript proof reading and approving the final proof
• Acting as the point of contact for queries about the published article. It is their responsibility to inform all co-authors of any matters arising in relation to the published article including questions relating to publication ethics, availability of data, materials, etc.

Where there are multiple corresponding authors, the first listed corresponding author’s specific responsibilities include:

• Upon acceptance, ensuring that all listed authors agree to the license agreement
• Arranging for payment of Page Charges/Article Processing Charges where required. The affiliation of the corresponding author will be used to determine eligibility for discounted or waived charges including discounted or waived APCs under read and publish/offsetting/OA agreements

Please note that the author names entered into the manuscript submission and peer review system should be identical to the information presented on the title page of the manuscript, including the sequence of authorship. The author names submitted should reflect the official publication names. It is the submitting (corresponding) author’s responsibility to ensure the accuracy of all content in the proof, including the names of co-authors, addresses and affiliations.

Before submission, please read the Submission Guidelines in full for specific requirements for manuscript preparation.

Submission Declaration

Documents

Submission Declaration (PDF, 89 KB)