General Information

• The manuscript to be submitted should not be published previously, except in the form of preprint, abstract, poster, or academic thesis, and it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. It should be an original work and it will be checked for plagiarism.
• All manuscript submissions must be submitted through our website. No submission sent by email will be considered for publication. Authors can reach out to the Editorial Office for any additional information or help with the online platform.
• After submission of the manuscript, the corresponding author will be able to track its progress through the online submission system of the journal and follow up on the reviewers' feedback, revisions and final approval of the proofs before publication.

Submission Checklist

When submitting an article to be considered for publication in PoEM, please check the following files are included:

• A cover letter that includes:
  • Title of the manuscript
  • Authors' names, affiliations, and ORCID (https://orcid.org/)
• Author's declarations that include, if applicable:
  • Statement about financial support for the submitted work,
  • A conflict of interest form filled out by each author,
  • Statement of authorship and contributorship,
  • Acknowledgements,
  • Ethical approval statement
• The manuscript and references list.
• Table(s) and figure(s), as separate files properly named.
• Permission statement(s) for any copyrighted material, as a separate file
• Electronic copy of the IRB permission letter when applicable, as a separate file, may be submitted, as well as patients' consent forms if they are identifiable.

Reporting Guidelines

When submitting your research to PoEM, please make sure to follow the proper checklist recommended by the EQUATOR Network. Adding the CONSORT flowchart or any other applicable flowchart to your submission is encouraged.

EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines for main study types

Article Types Characteristics

Article Types Definitions

RCT (Randomized Controlled Trial)

A clinical trial is a research project where people are assigned to an intervention to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome, with concurrent comparison or control groups.

A clinical trial should be registered in a registry of clinical trials approved by World Health Organization (WHO) or the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). https://clinicaltrials.gov/ or The Lebanese Registry of Clinical Trials are possible options.

For research conducted with human subjects, an informed consent shall be obtained. Besides, Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Research Ethics Committee (REC) obtained approval shall be included in the "Methods" section. For those who do not have IRB or formal ethics review committees, the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki should be followed and that should be mentioned as well in the "Methods" section.

Case Report

A case report is the detailed report of a single patient's experience in the Medical Center including aspects like exposure, symptoms, signs, intervention, and outcome. PoEM favors case reviews that address unusual or puzzling clinical features, a challenging differential diagnosis, rare or novel adverse reactions to care, rare disease, improved or unique technical procedures, unusual benefits or deleterious effects of a therapeutic or diagnostic procedure, management of a medical condition with multiple comorbidities, an unusual setting for care, or those that provide insights on clinical or administrative nursing practice in terms of emergency medicine/critical care.

It is preferable, when applicable, to present the literature review in a table format highlighting the references titles, authors, date, case management and outcome, to provide a complete perspective to the reader. In the conclusion part, the take-away message, relevant learning points should be underlined.

An informed consent should be obtained from the patient to report his/her case.

Brief Reports

Original research papers are published in a brief format when they utilize a simple research design or a small sample size and that they produce limited pilot data and initial findings for which further research is warranted.

Letter to the Editor

A letter may be written in response to a published article to inquire about a point or constructively criticize the article, and the author will have the right to reply. The letter as well, may address a special topic related to emergency medicine, critical care, education, leadership, etc. To be considered for publication, letters should be relevant to the scope of our journal.

Manuscript Formatting

General formatting requirements: The manuscript and references list are to be submitted in blinded form, together with the tables and figures. They should be clearly called in the main text body, before the references list.

Title and Keywords

• Title: The title should provide an accurate description of the article and should include information about the study design, especially when it comes to randomized trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses. Limit the title to the shortest possible, try not to exceed the 40 characters.
• Keywords: Immediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 6 keywords, according to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, using American English spelling.
• The words or phrases used in the title or keywords should be selected wisely for a better dissemination of the article.

Abstract

• The abstract should be concise, precise, self-explanatory, and should not be misleading. Even for an unstructured abstract, you should provide an idea about the topic, a purpose statement, and highlight your findings and their relevance to the general topic.
• No abbreviations or references/citations should appear in the abstract.

Key Message

Key message with maximum 5 sentences, after the abstract with the following headings answered:

• What is already known on this topic – Give a clear picture of the existing scientific knowledge about the topic and why there was a need to conduct your study
• What this study adds – Summarize which value did your study add to the currently published literature
• How this study might affect research, practice or policy – Summarize the implications of your study

Tables

• Tables should be in Word format
• Number tables consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a title for each, the title should precede the table.
• Titles in tables should be short but self-explanatory,
• Abbreviations should be redefined under the table even if already defined in the text
• Be sure that each table is cited in the text.
• Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading.
• Use alphabet letter to explain information if needed.
• Identify statistical measures of variations, such as standard deviation and standard error of the mean.

Illustrations (Figures)

• Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been cited in the text.
• Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends—not on the illustrations themselves.
• Abbreviations should be redefined under the figure even if already defined in the text
• Send high-resolution photographic image files
• Figures should be made as self-explanatory as possible
• If a figure has been published previously, acknowledge the original source. Written permission is required from the copyright holder to reproduce it, except for documents in the public domain.

Units of Measurement

• Measurements of length, height, weight, and volume should be reported in metric units (meter, kilogram, or liter) or their decimal multiples.
• Temperatures should be in degrees Celsius.
• Blood pressures should be in millimeters of mercury.
• For reporting hematologic, clinical chemistry, and other measurements, use laboratory information in both local and International System of Units (SI).
• You may report drug concentrations in either SI or mass units, but the alternative should be provided in parentheses where appropriate.

Abbreviations and Symbols

• Abbreviations should be spelled out at first mention, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses, unless the abbreviation is a standard unit of measurement.

Drug Name

• Whenever possible, the generic name of a drug is to be used instead of the proprietary name. If it is necessary to use a trade name for a drug, it should be mentioned between parentheses after the generic name.
• For all look-alike, sound-alike medications, use the FDA/ISMP tall lettering system. Product names are treated similarly, and the manufacturer's full name, city, and state are cited in parentheses in the text after mention of the product name.

References

• Reference numbers in the text should be inserted immediately after punctuation (with no word spacing)—for example,[4] not [4]. Where more than one reference is cited, these should be separated by a comma, for example,(3, 5, 22]).
• Use of DOI numbers in references.
• References should not be used by authors, editors, or peer reviewers to promote self-interests.
• Provide the URLs for the references, when applicable
• When a reference is accepted but not published yet, denote that it is "in press" or "forthcoming".
• Information from a manuscript that was submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as "unpublished observations" with written permission from the source.
• "Personal communication" should be avoided unless it offers important information that cannot be retrieved from a public source. In this case, the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text. Besides, written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of communication should be mentioned.
• Number references consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text.
• Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in parentheses.
• The titles of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used for MEDLINE (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals).
• Cite electronic references in numbered references following the text.
• References should follow the standards of the NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers, that you can also find at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/pmcdoc/tagging-guidelines/citations/v2/citationtags.html. For a summarized version you may check the NLM's Sample References.