Submissions

Author Guidelines

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EDITORIAL POLICY

Mission

Disseminate scientific knowledge about practices and processes in Microbiology, Bioanalysis and other disci- plines related with health, industry, environmental and education areas. Support knowledge and experience ex- change between disciplines whose scope covers basic and applied research in Colombia and other countries.

Vision

The scientific journal Hechos Microbiológicos will be classi- fied by Colciencias and indexed under Publindex cate- gory A1 in the medium term. In addition, it will be ack- nowledged as a highly reliable periodic publication due to its contents and relevance in the field. This journal will assist in the dissemination of advances in scientific research carried out in Colombia and abroad.

Target audience

This publication is aimed at all professionals interested in Clinical, Environmental and Industrial Microbiology, together with their applications, as well as Bioanalysis and other laboratory disciplines. In addition, this publi- cation is also a tool for undergraduate and postgradua- te students whose studies involve, directly or indirectly, concepts related with Microbiology and Laboratory in all their fields of competence.

Publication frequency

Journal sections will be published collectively in their print and digital version, as part of an issue with its own Table of Contents, every six months.

Open access Policy to digital Version

In accordance with Budapest Open Access Initiative criteria, Hechos Microbiológicos authorizes reading, printing, down- loading, sharing and reproduction of the contents in- cluded in its digital version, as long as the source is adequately referenced.

Statement of ethical animal treatment guidelines

Care and management of experimental animals should comply with all regulations, guidelines and national and

international policies related with animal welfare, as well as with an statement emitted by an Institutional Ethics Committee, containing the following criteria:

1. Animal trials in the experimental model must be aimed at improving human or animal health, com- mon benefit of society and advance of fundamental knowledge. Approval to perform certain part of a re- search depends of the results of a cost-benefit analy- sis, whose conclusion should be sent to the
2. As far as possible, alternative processes to the use of animals, such as mathematical models, computer simulations or biological systems in vitro will be em- ployed, whether in part or In cases where these are not practicable, the minimum number of animals necessary to reach the objectives of the stu- dy will be employed, while all efforts to reduce their suffering will also be made.
3. Animals employed for any procedure must be ca- refully selected to ensure their belonging to the appropriate
4. All possible measures to ensure animal welfare and reduction of suffering, pain or discomfort will be implemented. Researchers must be aware that any kind of procedure that inflicts pain and suffering on humans will also do so in animals. Any procedure that could cause even mild discomfort should be performed under anesthesia, aseptic measures and adequate postoperative Procedures must not be carried out in animals without anesthesia or paraly- zed by chemical agents such as muscle relaxants.
5. Animals in severe or chronic pain that cannot be re- lieved must be put to sleep painlessly, according to international provision regarding euthanasia, such as the United Kingdom Central Office or the American Veterinary Association Panel on Euthanasia guideli- Other animals must not be present while painful procedures or euthanasia is being performed.
6. Animal life conditions will be safe and comfortable at all times, whether or not animals are being used for an experiment at a certain
7. Veterinary care must be available at all times in such a way it can be provided in the course of the
8. Only properly qualified and trained staff, who pos- sess relevant specialized knowledge to carry out the different procedures, must be in charge of use and manipulation of animals. Qualifications should be regularly
9. Protocols for the use of animals should be subject to ethical revision, both by animal use and care institu- tions -or likewise- and by properly trained scientists. Both protocol revision methods and its result must be communicated to the director of the
10. Gender, species, breed, procedures, analgesia, anesthesia, euthanasia, pain and suffering level and the number of animals used in each experiment must be submitted and available to the manuscript upon
11. Same evaluation criteria employed to minimize hu- man suffering must be employed and communicated by written
12. Any necessary exception to the criteria above, as well as the justification for it must be subject to ethical

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Format aspects

Articles should be written using Arial Font size 12 pt, 1.5 line spacing, and letter size pages. Page numbers should be located in the bottom right corner.

Article submission instructions

The manuscript should include the following presenta- tion and format requirements before its submission. Lack of any of these characteristics may mean article rejection:

1. All articles should be unpublished and should not be under process of evaluation or accepted for publication in other
2. Extension and maximum number of figures and tables allowed are detailed in Table
3. For article writing, authors may use the Uniform Re- quirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Jour- nals, established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors -ICMJE-, also known as the Vancou- ver Group, available in its latest version at http:// icmje.org/urm_main.html
4. Articles submitted may be written in Spanish, English or
5. Authors may suggest the section they consider adequa- te to their article. However, the Editorial Board does not commit itself to attend such
6. The article should basically comprise three parts: The first part should contain the title of the article, name and last name of each one of the authors, name(s) of the institution(s) where research or investigation was carried out, acknowledgements, support or sources involved in the total or partial financing of the re- search, conflict of interest - or its absence -, abstract and The second part should contain the body of the article, which will be distributed in the following sections:

Original research articles

Document containing detailed research results. It should be arranged as follows:

Table 1. Maximum extension and number of figures, tables and bibliographic references, according to article type.

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Materials and Methods
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusions

Review articles and systematic reviews

These are publications originated in an extensive and significant bibliographic revision about a specific topic of interest for the target audience. If the review is ca- rried out using a systematic methodology, the IMRD (introduction, methodology, results and discussion) methodology may be employed.

Short communications

Their aim is to publish relevant data about a limited stu- dy or a report on scientific or technical research under progress. It may contain preliminary research results about a topic of current importance and relevance.

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Materials and Methods
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusions

Case reports

These include a case or case series of particular interest due to its scarce occurrence or singularities. Ideally, in- clude a commented systematic review of the literature on similar cases.

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Description of the case or case series
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions

Reflection articles

Documents presenting research results from the author’s analytical, interpretative or critical perspective on a spe- cific topic, based on original sources. These need not be prepared in accordance to any standard presentation guidelines and the subtitles are left to author’s criteria. However, general data (name of the article, name of the author, academic background and institutional affiliation) must be included in all cases.

History articles

This section contains a brief written piece, per issue, where some major event in any of the interest areas of the journal is highlighted. Articles need not be prepared following any standard presentation guidelines. Howe- ver, the director reserves the right to edit the content as agreed with the author.

Letters to the editor

This section contains critical, analytic or interpreta- tive articles on the documents published in the ma- gazine, which from the perspective of the Editorial Board, are considered of relevance to the discussion of the topic by the referenced scientific community. There are not standard presentation guidelines, but should include exact reference to the article or topic appointed. In addition, the letter should also include personal details, including academic background and institutional affiliation.

Images in Microbiology

This section contains images with features of special interest for the reader. Images will be obtained upon re- quest by the Editorial Board or by selection among the ones sent to the journal.

The third part of the article will include tables, each located on a separate sheet or after a page break. Corres- ponding headers and footers -if any- should be included. The figure caption should be located at the end of the document, after the references.

TEXT ARRANGEMENT

Abstract

It may not exceed 250 words and should be structured in accordance to the organization proposed for each section of the journal (introduction, objective, materials and methods, results and conclusions).

Note: An English version should be forwarded together with the abstract in its original language. When the ori- ginal language is English or Portuguese, the additional version must be written in Spanish.

Keywords

At least six keywords to enable manuscripts content clas- sification and identification should be included. Terms included in the Medical Subject Headings of Index Medicus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html) or in

the Health Sciences Descriptors (http://decs.bvs.br/E/ho- mepagee.htm) should be used in preference.

ARTICLE PREPARATION

Introduction and Main objective

Presents previous research on the topic and the objective of the work referred in the article, as well as a summary of the motivation that originated its achievement.

Materials and methods

All criteria related to selection of material, patients and design of study should be clearly described. All statistical analysis methods, as well as power and significance levels should also be referred.

Case or case series description (as applicable)

Clinical and paraclinical aspects of each case should be described in detail. Drugs should be referenced using their generic names. Units of paraclinical and labora- tory parameters should be stated in accordance to the International Unit System.

Results

Only the most relevant data should be described and repetition should be avoided if information has already been shown in tables or figures.

Discussion

All data must have been described in the results. Discus- sion regarding comparable published studies is considered of special interest.

Conclusions

Basically, consist of a series of remarks, by the author, about the contribution the article makes to scientific knowledge.

References

Citation of works published within a period of six years before current date is recommended. Articles published previously to such time period may be referred in on the grounds of historic and academic importance for the ela- boration of the manuscript or lack of more recent articles. References will be numbered in correspondence with their order of appearance in the text, as a superscript, in Arabic numbers, aligned with writing (e.g. X1, 3-5). These will be described in the corresponding page in accordan- ce to the format for references adopted by the Uniform

Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals

(http://www.icmje.org).

The year of publication should appear next to the journal short title. If publication of a reference is still pending should be described as in press or forthcoming pu- blication; verification of authenticity lies with the author. Journal titles will be abbreviated in accordance to the recommendation of the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed).

Examples of bibliographic references can be found at the end of this section. The maximum number of citations allowed for each type of  article is indicated   in Table 1.

Tables

These should be presented in text format, never inserted in the document. Each table or group of tables(n) should be submitted in a separate Word or Excel file, numbered in correspondence with their order of appearance in the text. The meaning of the abbreviations in the table, as well as their marks, presented as a superscript, in alpha- betical characters, also correlative to their order of ap- pearance in the text (e.g. a, b), should be located in the table footer. In cases where the author uses a table from another publication, such source must be referred at the end of the article in the corresponding section, and taken from: n or taken and modified from: n should be written in the footer, accordingly.

Figures

For photographs (digitized), TIFF or JPEG are the best format choices. The author should also ensure adequa- te image resolution for printing process. Regardless of the program used for its elaboration, all figures -particu- larly graphs- should allow the editors its later computer processing and manipulation, which is why these should never be inserted in a document without the link to the program employed for its creation. Each figure should be submitted in a separate file.

As possible, all figures should be in color, although the publication of such feature is left to the criteria of the Editorial Board. Letters, numbers and symbols in the figures should be clear and uniform, sufficiently large to avoid illegibility caused by image reduction. Figures should be numbered in correspondence with their or- der of appearance in the text, with Arabic numbers. The figure(s) caption(s) should never be inserted as part of the image and should be included in the manuscript at the end of the references.

Abbreviations

Only standard abbreviations should be used, since the use of expressions that do not comply with such requi- rement could lead to confusion in the reader. Abbrevia- tions should be avoided in the title of the article and minimized as much as possible in the abstract.

Abbreviations employed by the author should be de- fined and described in the text after its first mention.

Article on web

Author(s). Title [Internet]. Publishing place: Publisher; Pu- blishing date [update date;access date]. Available in: web link Cancer-Pain.org [Internet]. New York: Association

of Cancer Online Resources, Inc.; c2000-01 [updated 2008 May 16; cited 2008 Jul 9]. Available from: http:// www.cancer-pain.org

REFERENCE EXAMPLE

Sample bibliographic references, in accordance with Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals:

Journal article

Author(s). Title of the Article. International journal short title. Year Month Day; volume (issue): first page- final page of the article.

Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ trans- plantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002 Jul 25; 347(4): 284-7.

If authors are more than six, only the first six are men- tioned followed by the abbreviation et al.

Team or organization as author

Name of the team or organization. Title of the Article. International journal short title. Year; volumen (issue): first page-final page of the article.

Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. Hyper- tension, insulin, and proinsulin in participants with impai- red glucose tolerance. Hypertension. 2002; 40(5): 679-86.

Book

Author(s). Title of the book. Issue. Publishing place: Publishing house; year.

Ríos L, Mesa A. Introducción al pensamiento cientí- fico en Microbiología. 1ª ed. Medellín: Corporación para Investigaciones Biológicas; 2009.

Chapter in a book

Author (s) of the chapter. Title of the chapter. In: Book Director/Coordinator/Editor. Title of the book. Issue. Publishing place: Publishing house; year. first page-final page of the chapter.

Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromoso- me alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002. p. 93-113.

SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT TO THE JOURNAL

You may send your articles to Hechos Microbiológicos journal by e-mail to: revistahechosmicrobiologicos@udea.edu.co

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Hechos Microbiológicos journal accepts scientific articles in Spanish, English or Portuguese which are related with practices and processes in Microbiology, Bioanalysis and other disciplines related with health, industry, environ- mental and education areas.

Articles submitted are evaluated as follows:

Editorial evaluation

Initially, an internal process of evaluation (or edito- rial) is carried out. The Editor may reject an article without forwarding it to peer reviewers in one of the following cases:

1. A similar article was recently published in Hechos Microbiológicos
2. The topic is not included in the editorial policy of the
3. The article does not represent a significant contribu- tion to the target
4. There is remarkable lack of scientific
5. The work does not comply with submission

Selection of Peer reviewers

After successful editorial evaluation, the Editor will iden- tify potential academic peers (ideally two, at least one) to provide feedback on the article.

Even though the members of the Editorial Team may participate as reviewers, ideally, academic or professional researchers working in the field will be ap- pointed by recommendation of the board members or through bibliographic search that could even originate in the references included in the article itself.

Recommendations by Peer reviewers

The reviewer will be provided with a format containing three parts: 1) about the characteristics of the article and its coherence; 2) for the reviewers to make open remarks

3) where the peer reviewer will make recommendations in the following terms:

1. Accept the article without
2. Accept the article with minor modifications to be done by the Editor of the journal; for example, spe- lling mistakes or typographical
3. Return the article to the authors for major correc- tions to be made, with an open possibility to res- ubmit it for evaluation. In such case, a list with re- viewers’ comments is sent to the
4. Definitive rejection of the article, without opportu- nity to reconsider. In such case, recommendations will not be sent to the author, since articles thus clas- sified generally display scientific validity

Editorial board decision

When only one reviewer is appointed due to topic speci- ficity, their recommendation will be considered essential for article acceptance or rejection.

In the cases where there are two peer reviewers per article, opinions by consensus will be taken into account. However, if there is any difference among their concepts, a third reviewer will be appointed to settle the issue.

Hechos Microbiológicos will make all effort to prevent reviewers from meeting each other. In addition, will en- sure the documents sent to evaluation do not contain authors’ personal details. Such measures aim at securing objective recommendations.

When necessary, once the Editor is in possession of all elements necessary to arrive at a conclusion, puts them forward for consideration of the Editorial Board to make a final decision, which is then communicated to the authors.

Decision time

From article submission for evaluation, response about its acceptance or rejection will never take longer than three (3) months, unless selection of peer reviewers is hindered by topic specificity. In such case, the author will be informed in writing.

Publication order

Accepted articles are included in a waiting list and are published in strict order, by issue.