State the purpose of the article and summarize the rationale for the study or observation. Give only strictly pertinent 6-10 references and do not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.

Describe your selection of the observational or experimental subjects (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly identify the age, sex and other important characteristics of the subjects. The definition and relevance of race and ethnicity are ambiguous. Authors should be particularly careful about using these categories.

Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer's name and address in parenthesis) and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below), provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them and evaluate their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s) and route(s) of administration.

Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements including the protocol (study population, interventions or exposures, outcomes and the rationale for statistical analysis), assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups) and the method of masking (blinding).

A formal review article may be submitted, however JPSIM prefers to accept systematic review/meta-analysis for publication. Authors submitting systematic review/ meta-analysis must follow PRISMA guidelines. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract not exceeding 200 words.

Include the Key Words relating to the article subject as abbreviated in the Index –Medicus.

When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institutions or a national research council’s guide for or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurements error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Avoid relying solely on statistical hypothesis testing, such as the use of P values, which fails to convey important quantitative information. Discuss the eligibility of experimental subjects. Give details about rando-mization. Describe the method for and success of any blinding of observations. Report on complications of treatment. Give numbers of observations. Report losses to observation (such as dropouts from a clinical trial). References for the design of the study and statistical methods should be to standard works when possible (with pages stated) rather than to papers in which the designs or methods were originally reported. Specify any general use computer programs used.

Put a general description of methods in the methods section. When data are summarized in the results section, specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as "random", (which implies a randomizing device), "normal", "significant", "correlations" and "samples". Define statistical terms, abbreviations and most symbols.

Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables illustrations. Do not repeat in the text all data in the tables or illustrations emphasize or summarize important observations.

Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and conclusions that follow from them. Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the introduction or the results section. Include in discussion section the implications of the findings and their limitations including implications for future research. Relate the observations to other relevant studies.

Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not completely supported by data. Authors should avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless their manuscript includes economics data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority and alluding to work that has not been completed. State new hypothesis when warranted. But clearly label them such recommendations, when appropriate, may be included.