Instructions to Authors
EP Europace - The European Journal of Pacing, Arrhythmias and Cardiac Electrophysiology - is an official Journal of the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the ESC Working Group on Cardiac Cellular Electrophysiology. The journal aims to provide an international avenue of communication for top quality original scientific work and reviews in the fields of arrhythmias, cardiac electrophysiology, and pacing. Clinical investigations, basic science translational research, technical issues, short case reports, comprehensive reviews, editorial comments, educational articles, images in pacing and electrophysiology, book reviews and correspondence are included.
Papers that do not adhere to the following instructions will be returned for revision before assessment.
Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Forms
Open access option for authors
Submission of manuscripts
Article categories
Manuscript preparation
Self-archiving and post-print policy
Increase readership and citations to your research articles
Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
EP Europace and Oxford University Press are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). This journal follows the guidance provided in COPE’s Core Practices. The journal also subscribes to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals. The journal expects all parties involved in the publication of content in EP Europace (the publisher, editors, authors, and reviewers) to follow these guidelines on best practice and publication ethics. The Editors are further supported by the ESC Journal Family Ethics Committee.
Forms
Conflict of Interest
All authors must declare any conflicts of interest. When submitting your manuscript via the online submission system (Editorial Manager), you will be asked whether you have any conflicts of interest. As submitting author, it is your responsibility to ascertain any conflicts of interest from your co-authors and to highlight these accordingly. If you are unable to declare any conflicts of interest on behalf of your co-authors, all contributing authors will need to complete and upload Conflict of Interest forms to the journal submission site.
Any potential conflict of interest that might constitute an embarrassment to any of the authors if it were not to be declared and were to emerge after publication should be declared. Such conflicts might include, but are not limited to, author (or first degree relative) shareholding in or receipt of a grant or consultancy fee from a company whose product features in the submitted manuscript or which manufactures a competing product.
In addition, all authors must submit a statement of Conflict of Interest to be published at the end of their article. If no Conflict of Interest is declared, this will be stated in the article using the following wording:
'Conflict of interest: none declared'
Open access option for authors
Assignment of copyright
EP Europace offers the option of publishing under either a standard licence or an open access licence. Please note that some funders require open access publication as a condition of funding. If you are unsure whether you are required to publish open access, please do clarify any such requirements with your funder or institution.
Should you wish to publish your article open access, you should select your choice of open access licence in our online system after your article has been accepted for publication. You will need to pay an open access charge to publish under an open access licence.
Details of the open access licences and open access charges.
OUP has a growing number of Read and Publish agreements with institutions and consortia which provide funding for open access publishing. This means authors from participating institutions can publish open access, and the institution may pay the charge. Find out if your institution is participating.
Offprints and Single Issues
Upon online publication, the corresponding author for each article will receive, automatically and free of charge, a url giving free access to the article online. This url may be distributed among co-authors and interested colleagues. Additionally, authors may order copies of the issue in which their article appears by using the Oxford Journals Author Services website, through which they signed the licence form.
The European Society of Cardiology may promote and make available to certain parties the finalised version of an article shortly prior to publication in the journal.
Submission of manuscripts
EP Europace operates a web-based system for submission and peer-review, Editorial Manager. This system is intended to reduce manuscript processing times. The Journal does not require the first submission of an article to be formatted to the EP Europace style. Further details can be found under "First submission of articles". Text, tables and figures should be prepared in accordance with the instructions given under "Preparation of Manuscripts" below.
Authors must specify the category for which their submission is intended.
If you need help with the electronic submission process please contact the editorial office (europace.editorialoffice@oup.com). Enquiries about the review process and other journal matters should also be directed to the Editorial Office.
Please note that by submitting an article for publication, OUP will retain the email address of the corresponding author for the purpose of further communication regarding the article. In the event of a change of personal information, OUP must be informed immediately. Upon acceptance for publication, OUP will contact the corresponding author directly. Please add europace.oup@kwglobal.com to your safe senders list to avoid key emails about the publication of your article potentially going into your spam folder. Please note that OUP does not retain copies of rejected articles.
Online submission
Please go to the Editorial Manager website for EP Europace, and follow the instructions given on screen. First-time users must click 'Register' on the navigation menu at the top of the screen, and enter the required information. The system will send you an automatic e-mail with your username and password. Detailed guidelines are available at the Editorial Manager site, by clicking on 'Help' or viewing the author or reviewer tutorials.
You will be asked to supply information about your manuscript and then attach your files containing the text and any figures and tables. Editorial Manager will create a PDF from your data, which is the format in which the manuscript will be made available to the editors and referees during the peer-review process.
The manuscript text, references and figure legends should be prepared in a single file; if at any point in the process a manuscript with tracked changes is uploaded as well, this should be uploaded as a supplementary file. Papers should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents where possible, although other standard word-processing formats may be acceptable. The manuscript must not be submitted in .pdf format.
Any appendices must be supplied separately, and will be published as online-only supplementary data. Please change any references to Appendices in the manuscript to 'Supplementary', e.g. Supplementary Table S1, Supplementary Appendix 2.
Tables and figures may be included in the manuscript file, but must appear at the end of the text on separate sheets (and not embedded in the text).
If preferred, tables and illustrations may be prepared and submitted in separate files. Electronically submitted figures should be in high resolution and in one of the following formats: tiff, bitmap (.bmp), jpeg (.jpg), postscript (.ps or .eps) or as PowerPoint or Excel files. (Should the manuscript be accepted, the original photographs may be required for use in the production process.) Tables may be submitted as Word tables, or in .rtf format.
You will be required to enter the Abstract, Representative Figure and Keywords during the submission process. These may be copied and pasted from the manuscript document, but must still appear in the manuscript itself. Please supply the names and addresses of three referees to whom your manuscript may be sent for review in the 'Enter Comments' section of your electronic submission.
When completing the 'Add Authors' section, please enter the names and countries of all the authors listed on the manuscript.
Fast Track Review Process
Please note: Fast Track petitions are only considered for original research contributions.
To petition for fast track review status, corresponding authors must send their manuscript by e-mail to: europace.editorialoffice@oup.com, ensuring that the manuscript adheres to Europace’s Instructions to Authors. An accompanying cover letter should detail why the authors deem the manuscript suitable for fast track review. All files accompanying the petition should be attached individually (no ZIP file). The Editorial Board will decide as to whether the manuscript is suitable for fast track or regular review. When petitioning for fast track review, corresponding authors should not enter their manuscripts simultaneously as regular submissions
The Editorial Office will communicate within 48 hours whether or not the fast track review process has been approved. Alternately, the submission may be considered in a standard review process. Please note that fast track review does not in any way guarantee acceptance of the manuscript.
The Europace Editorial Office will notify the corresponding authors if their manuscript has been selected for fast track review. At this time they must then submit the manuscript in its entirety in the Editorial Manager system and notify the Europace Editorial Office immediately after submission (europace.editorialoffice@oup.com). The article type will then be converted into a Fast Track and reviewers will be invited.
For manuscripts entering fast track review, the initial Editorial decision will be made within 5 consecutive days. If provisionally accepted, a revised manuscript must be returned to the Europace Editorial Office as stipulated in the relevant decision letter. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, it should be published online 10 working days after acceptance and in print as soon as possible, provided galley proofs are returned to the publisher within 48 hours. The corresponding authors will receive a ‘Welcome to Oxford Journals’ email, which will notify them of the DOI of their paper and contain a link to the online license to publish, which must be completed before the paper can be published.
First submission of articles
We will consider initial Original Article and Review Article submissions in which the manuscript file is not formatted according to the EP Europace journal style. Manuscripts can be submitted in any common document format that can be easily opened and read by others. A single PDF or Word file is usually reliable.
All elements must be completed within the online submission form including manuscript title, author names, affiliations, and address (including email).
Manuscript file must contain page numbers and figures may be embedded within the manuscript or in separate files.
Supplementary Material files must be uploaded separately.
References can be formatted in any readable style at submission. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the references. Later, authors will be asked to comply with the journal’s citation convention.
Include acknowledgements, details of funding sources and grant numbers at the end of the text. Use author initials to indicate which authors were in receipt of grants.
Upon request, authors should be prepared to provide high-resolution figures separately, in a common image format (e.g. tif, jpg).
Those papers that are revised or ultimately accepted will be required to be formatted by the authors according to Europace format requirements.
Manuscript resubmissions
Authors resubmitting manuscripts to the journal after a previous decision of 'reject with opportunity to resubmit' shoud ensure that they respond to all the points raised by reviewers in the inital peer review. Details of these changes can be included in the covering letter.
Pre-print policy
Authors of all article types, excluding ESC Guidelines, retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (pre-print) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the Journal provided that the following conditions are met:
During submission, authors must acknowledge pre-print server deposition and provide any associated accession numbers or DOIs;
Versions of a manuscript that have been altered as a result of the peer review process may not be deposited;
The pre-print version cannot itself have been indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed;
Upon publication, authors are responsible for updating the archived pre-print with a DOI and link to the published version of the article.
Should the paper be accepted and published in the Journal, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page. The Journal DOI should be considered as the one representing this published work in all credits, citation, and attribution. Sharing of data from manuscripts that are under review or accepted but not yet published is expressly forbidden, unless permission is received from the Journal Editorial Office.
For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies.
Article categories
EP Europace accepts the following categories of articles:
Clinical Research: Clinical investigations based on either normal subjects or patients. This category ranges from case series to large scale clinical trials. Papers dealing with trial designs are not encouraged unless the trial concerns more than 500 patients, is novel in design and subject and the authors are prepared to unreservedly offer the full paper dealing with the primary endpoint to Europace. Articles are usually limited to 3,500 words (not including references, tables and figures), up to 4 figures and 4 tables (or a combined total of tables and figures that is not greater than 8) and 20 references. Authors should include a list of two to six bullet points outlining the key, novel outcomes of the research they present. These should be listed under a heading called ‘What’s New?’ at the start of the paper and should come to no more than 150 words in total.
Basic science papers: The results of cardiovascular pre-clinical research will be considered for publication provided they have potential clinical relevance. Translational research is of particular interest to the journal. Articles are usually limited to 6000 words (not including references, tables and figures), up to 7 figures or tables and 20 references. Authors should include a list of two to six bullet points outlining the key, novel outcomes of the research they present. These should be listed under a heading called ‘What’s New?’ at the start of the paper and should come to no more than 150 words in total.
Technical issues: This category includes articles on new methods or devices for the diagnosis or treatment of patients with cardiac arrhythmias, conduction disturbances or ventricular dyssychrony. Articles are usually limited to 3,500 words (not including references, tables and figures), up to 3 figures and 3 tables and 20 references. Authors should include a list of two to six bullet points outlining the key, novel outcomes of the research they present. These should be listed under a heading called ‘What’s New?’ at the start of the paper and should come to no more than 150 words in total.
Reviews: Europace publishes a number of scholarly, comprehensive reviews the aims of which are to summarize and critically evaluate research in the field addressed and identify future implications. Reviews should not exceed 5000 words, 5 figures, 5 tables and 150 references.
Editorials: Papers in this section will either provide comment, context and critique of articles published in EP Europace or provide our readers with focused coverage of topical issues in cardiovascular medicine and related disciplines which are of high current interest and potential. All editorials should be limited to 1500 words and 10 references, which must include a reference to the original article where applicable.
Correspondence: Letters to the Editor must not exceed 500 words and should focus on a specific article published in the EP Europace within the preceding 12 weeks. No original data may be included. The number of references for this type of paper is restricted to a maximum of 5. Authors will receive pre-publication proofs, and the authors of the article cited will be invited to reply.
Please note that the journal no longer accepts Short Communications.
Case reports: Please note that the format of Case reports has been revised. This category is intended for brief highly informative cases illustrated with a single critical image or table. The full length version, which should include a single image or table, maximum six authors, a short title, between 250 and 500 words including a 60 word abstract, and up to three references, will be published on the European Heart Rhythm Association/European Society of Cardiology website. The submission of videos is encouraged; these will be hosted as supplementary data with the summary version in EP – Europace.
An unstructured summary version will be published in EP – Europace as an ‘EP Express’ article. The summary should be no longer than 200 words and must not include an abstract or references. It must include a clear image at a size of 6x6cm, with no more than 2 panels. This image should be cited and described in the text. No figure legend is permitted. The summary version will be fully citable with a doi (digital object identifier) number and will be indexed on PubMed. Please provide the full version and the summary version in separate Word documents, with the files clearly named. Submissions that do not satisfy all of the above requirements will not be considered.
If a high quality case report is submitted but not appropriate for EP – Europace it may be offered for transfer to European Heart Journal - Case Reports (EHJCR). EHJCR is the international, online-only, fully open access journal of the ESC. The Journal publishes high quality, educationally valuable case reports, images, and quality improvement projects in all aspects of cardiology and cardiovascular medicine. More information can be found on the journal website.
Images: This category is intended for striking, illustrative, or rare single clinical images such as electrocardiograms, echocardiograms, tomograms, x-rays or pathology specimens Images may be published on the cover of the Journal or within the pages of the journal. Images should be submitted as one figure, with at most 2 separate lettered panels if required. The complete image should also have an Aspect Ratio 1:1. It will occupy a single column in the journal and should be approximately 6cm x 6cm in size. The image should be submitted with the names of no more than three authors and the clinical message contained in the picture should be amplified in a 100 word description, which will be included with the image. No references or figure legend should be included. The title should have no more than 8 words.
Manuscript preparation
Text
The manuscript should be typed on one side only of A4 paper, double spaced using 2.5 cm wide margins all round. The text should be arranged as follows: Title page, Structured Abstract and Keywords, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, Appendices, Tables, Figure legends. (For review articles, the format may be altered, if necessary; an abstract is not required but keywords should be supplied.) References, figures and tables should be numbered in the order in which they are cited in the text. Generic names should be used for drugs and instruments whenever possible.
Title page
The title page should bear: (a) title, (b) name(s) of authors, (c) institution(s) where work was done, (d) addresses of all authors, (e) name of author to whom proofs should be sent, with complete postal address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail details.
Abstracts and keywords
An abstract (maximum 250 words) should be typed double spaced. The abstract should be structured under the headings (1) Aims, (2) Methods (3) Results (4) Conclusion, followed by a list of three to six keywords.
Authors of Clinical Research and Basic Science articles are encouraged to submit a graphical abstract (schematic figure) as part of the article, in addition to the text abstract. The graphical abstract should clearly summarize the focus and findings of the article, and will be published as part of the article online and in PDF. The graphical abstract should be submitted for peer review as a separate file, selecting the appropriate file-type designation in the journal’s online submission system. The file should be clearly named, e.g. graphical_abstract.tiff. See this page for guidance on appropriate file format and resolution for graphics. Please ensure graphical abstracts are in landscape format.
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https://academic.oup.com/europace/pages/General_Instructions
