Patient Care welcomes submitted articles that accord with our goal of providing practical, up-to-date clinical information to the 150,000 community-based primary care physicians who are our readers. Patient Care articles provide practical advice on dealing with clinical problems commonly encountered in day-to-day patient care.

Practical focus
Consistent with this mission, we prefer a less academic tone than that of most medical textbooks and scholarly journals. For example, you can use the first person ("I," "we"), address readers directly (as in "If this treatment is unsuccessful, your next step is referral"), and adopt medical colloquialisms ("exam" instead of "examination," "lab" instead of "laboratory"). We look to combine scientific preciseness and evidence-based content with a concise, lively style that's easy to read. Keep these guidelines in mind as you're preparing your manuscript, but remember also that we have highly skilled professional editors on staff who are prepared to give you as much help as you need.

Originality, objectivity, goals
Content in Patient Care magazine must be original and previously unpublished. Authors must indicate that the work is not intended, and has not been written, to publicize or promote any company's products or their own. The goal of the article should be the education of primary care physicians. Note that we do not publish original research.

The editing and review process
When your manuscript arrives, we'll send you an acknowledgment and send your article to our Board of Editors, who recommend for or against publication. We'll let you know their decision within a few weeks. If accepted, the manuscript is scheduled for an upcoming issue of Patient Care and assigned to a staff editor. After the first round of editing, the article is sent to several outside physician readers and board members for comment, as well as to the author for review. Based on responses from these readers, the article is revised once more. A courtesy copy of the final version is then sent to author, and the article goes to the production department to be prepared for publication.

References
We try to limit references and suggested reading to 25 items per article. Our policy is to provide a reference in only two instances: (1) when citing the results of a single study, or (2) when making statements that readers are likely to question, find unusual, or want to follow up on. You needn't reference information that most readers would accept as true or statements that numerous studies over time have borne out.

Also keep the following guidelines in mind:

• References and suggested reading should be recent: Unless a publication is a seminal work, limit citations to material published in the past 5 years.
• References should be limited to review articles, clinical trials, and other scholarly material published in research journals. Patient Care rarely cites textbooks or other clinical journals.
• Primary rather than secondary sources should be cited.
• Articles need not have a suggested reading list, although if your reference list contains fewer than 10 items, you may want to include 5 or 10 items that interested readers may find valuable.

Tables, figures, sidebars, and other accessories
Please send tables, graphs, and sidebars (boxes) whenever possible. Our readers appreciate well-chosen accessories that add practical value to an article. Indicate whether you have compiled accessories yourself or reproduced them from a previously published work. Please provide copies of the originals when items are borrowed, since we will need to write for permission to reuse this material.

Two standard features of our articles are "This Article at a Glance" and "Clinical Pearls." For the first, please provide at the end of your manuscript a brief list of bulleted points (usually sentences culled right from the article) that embody the main teaching points of your article. For the second feature, just bold 1-2 sentences of your text that might make especially useful clinical pearls that we can highlight in the published article.

We also welcome any ideas you have for illustrative materials to accompany the article, including material that can be adapted or redrawn.

Length
Limit the manuscript to 10 to 15 double-spaced manuscript pages (including tables, figures, and other accessories). Articles that are longer will in most cases need to be cut during editing.

Submitting the manuscript
We prefer submissions by e-mail, sent as Word file attachments (with multicolumn tables created in Word) and addressed to pdepiro@advanstar.com. The first page should include the title of the article, the names of all the authors in the order they are to appear, and the name, address, and contact information (mailing address, phone, fax, e-mail) for the corresponding author. (If you work on a Macintosh, please e-mail your file as saved in text format.)

If you need to send photos, images, scans, or hard copy of tables that may be difficult to create electronically, please label your materials clearly (regarding which article they are meant to accompany), and mail to Peter D'Epiro, PhD, Patient Care, Five Paragon Drive, Montvale, NJ 07645-1742. All art materials will be returned to the authors.

Time frame
Articles are typically scheduled to appear in Patient Care within 6-12 months of acceptance. The editing and review process occurs 3-4 months before publication.

Payment
An honorarium is issued after you have read and approved the edited manuscript and answered any final queries the editor may have.

Publication copies
You'll receive a copy of Patient Care when the article appears. If you'd like more than one copy of the issue containing your article, please ask; extras are often available. Patient Care retains the copyright to articles, but we freely allow authors to photocopy or otherwise reuse their material for educational purposes. Write to the Editor for permission.