Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira
Brief history
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira, founded by Prof. Saul Goldenberg in 1986, is the official journal of the Brazilian Society for the Development of Research in Surgery (SOBRADPEC). The journal has a Board of National Advisors and a Board of International Advisors. It is the only continuously published journal in English dedicated exclusively to experimental surgery in Latin America. The Editorial Board only considers articles that make significant contributions to surgical research. Manuscripts must be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief of Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira via the following link: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/acb-scielo. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is part of a group of leading medical journals that follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, updated in February 2025. Authors must follow the specific instructions published by the journal. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira publishes original articles on basic and applied research in surgery, with an emphasis on experimental surgery, new surgical techniques, education in surgery, and advances in the field. The abbreviated title of the journal is Acta Cir Bras and must be used in footnotes, bibliographical references, and subtitles. Case reports are not accepted. Reviews are published by invitation only. |
Open Access
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This journal follows the Open Access model, allowing unrestricted virtual access (including financial restrictions) to all scientific texts published by the journal. Open access is a condition in which the copyright holder of an academic work grants usage rights to third parties under an open license (Creative Commons Attribution, CC-BY), allowing immediate free access to the work and authorizing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, track them for indexing, pass them on as data to software, or use them for any other legal purpose. |
Compliance with Open Science
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira follows the Gold Open Access model, offering free and immediate access to its content, in accordance with the principles of free and democratic access to scientific knowledge. To maximize the dissemination and use of published material, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira adopts the Creative Commons Attribution BY (CC BY) license. Thus, copyright remains with the authors, and third parties may read, download, copy, distribute, print, index, create links to the full texts of articles, use them for data mining, integrate them into software, or employ them for any other legal purpose, including commercial use, provided that proper credit is given. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira requires the precise indication of the role of each author in articles with multiple authorship, as well as the sharing of analysis data sets, instruments, statistical analysis scripts, scripts, and additional materials made available in open online repositories, such as SciELO data, Zenodo, Figshare, and OSF, if they are not all published in the work itself, and this information must be indicated in the manuscript. Consequently, articles reporting research must indicate and reference the availability of the content underlying the research and the results obtained. Also in line with Open Science practices, the journal offers authors and evaluators the option of opening the peer review process, with or without identifying their names. Authorization to disclose their names can be given by the authors when submitting the article and by the evaluators when filling in the Open Science Compliance Form. Articles that have already been approved and are in the process of being edited for publication and already have a DOI can be deposited by the journal on the SciELO Preprints server and, in this case, count as published articles. All published articles will have a DOI number. |
Ethics in Publishing
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira follows the standards of conduct and good practice established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). According to these guidelines, noncompliance with the established conditions may result in the publication of an appropriate correction, a statement of retraction, or rejection of the article by the editor. Special attention must be paid to cases of plagiarism, duplicate or redundant publication, fabrication and falsification of data, corrections, and retractions.
Authors who submit articles to the journal declare that their content is original and guarantee that the work has not been published or is in the process of being reviewed/evaluated in any other journal. Research involving laboratory animals must be approved by the Institution’s Ethics Committee (send the approval opinion and the process number must be included in the article), in accordance with Brazilian legislation and the guidelines of the Council for International Organization of Medical Sciences (CIOMS). Research involving human beings must be approved by the Institution’s Ethics Committee (send the approval opinion and the process number must be included in the article), in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, revised in 2024 (World Medical Association) and Resolution 466/2012 of the National Health Council of Brazil. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a statement ensuring that the research was conducted with the informed and appropriate consent of each participant. For the publication of any detail or photograph that may identify an individual, written consent must be obtained from the patient (or legal guardian, where applicable). In addition, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is committed to ethics and quality in publishing. The journal supports standards of ethical behavior expected of all parties involved in publishing in our journal: authors, editors, and reviewers. Plagiarism or any other unethical behavior is not accepted. |
Focus and Scope
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes original articles on basic and applied research in surgery and biomedical sciences, new surgical techniques, teaching in surgery, advances in biomedicine, and scientific communication, with relevance to surgical practice and teaching. Manuscripts must be submitted exclusively in English, using clear and precise language, scientific style, avoiding the use of informal or colloquial expressions. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira adopts the continuous publication model and simple-anonymized peer review in its editorial process, in which the reviewers know who the authors are. In addition, it complies with the guidelines of funding agencies that require funded articles to be deposited in open access databases. Articles become freely accessible as soon as they are published. The journal accepts manuscripts previously published in preprint but will follow the normal peer review process. Articles with a purely advertising or commercial purpose will not be accepted. |
Digital Preservation
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is committed to guaranteeing long-term access to all its digital content, follows the standards defined in the SciELO Program’s Digital Preservation Policy, and is indexed in PubMed Central, which also has a digital preservation system. |
Indexing Sources
Bibliographic Journal Information
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Websites and Social Media
Preprints
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira recommends publishing preprints on public platforms, such as SciELO preprints, medRxiv, bioRxiv, and others, so that they can be openly discussed before being published. In the meantime, the journal’s review process will be followed without detriment. Information on prior publication must be declared on the Open Science Compliance Form, which must be submitted as a supplementary file with the manuscript. |
Peer Review Process
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The manuscript submitted to Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira will initially be evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief, taking into account the scope, compliance with the standards, and similarity index. At this stage, the manuscript may be rejected or returned to the author for adjustments. If it complies with the journal’s guidelines, it will be forwarded to the Associate Editor, who will appoint single-anonymized peer reviewers to analyze the scientific content. The review must be performed by at least two reviewers. The Associate Editor consolidates the reviews to send them to the Editor-in-Chief, who is responsible for the final decision. The manuscript must be reviewed by experts in scientific English before submission. However, all accepted manuscripts will undergo a final professional review in English, provided by the journal, and will be edited by the editorial team to conform to the journal’s format. Authors can follow the process through the editorial management system. Authors must carefully review the final version before approval, as it will not be possible to change, include, or exclude authors after publication. After approval by the authors, the manuscript will go through the publication process. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is committed to Open Science initiatives and offers the option of open evaluation, allowing the identities of authors and reviewers to be disclosed. Authors can also choose to interact directly with the reviewers responsible for evaluating the manuscript. Reviewers must maintain the manuscript’s confidentiality, and it is forbidden to upload the manuscript to software or other AI technologies where confidentiality cannot be guaranteed. |
Authorship Criteria
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The Authors’ Contribution section must include the contribution that each author made to the manuscript. To this end, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira adopts the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) specification system. The CRediT taxonomy includes 14 different roles that describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the academic production. The roles are: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing – original draft; and Writing – review & editing. All authors must have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) writing or critical revision of the article for significant intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted. It is not the editor’s role to arbitrate conflicts relating to authorship. The author responsible for the integrity of the article as a whole need not be the first author but must be the corresponding author. This person will be exclusively responsible for communication with the journal, including receiving emails about forms, authorship issues, manuscript files, among others. The editors of Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira will only discuss the manuscript with the authors. Before submitting the article, all authors must agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript. The journal does not accept undergraduate or graduate students as responsible authors. The responsible author must guarantee the effective participation of each author and their agreement on the content of the article.
Participants with an exclusively technical role (e.g., performing surgeries, reviewing literature, heading a department, providing services or funding) must be mentioned in the acknowledgments section.
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Open Data
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Article manuscripts must cite all the content underlying the text in order to facilitate and promote the understanding of the research, its peer review, reproducibility, reuse, preservation, and visibility. Therefore, before or in parallel with submission, authors must make the underlying content available in a data repository or in more than one in the case of different types of files and content. Authors can choose to keep these files closed until the article is approved and published. They can also request that they remain closed after publication, with justification that will be analyzed by the journal. Alternatively, authors can make them available as supplementary material to the manuscript. If data sharing is not applicable to the article, because no data sets were generated or analyzed in the study, this information must be made explicit. Research data includes, but is not limited to: raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, and materials. To identify registered and certified data repositories in the field of study, it is recommended to access re3data.org. Otherwise, the institutional repository can be used. The author responsible for the submission must state whether the manuscript cites data, software code, and other material underlying the article. If so, the respective URLs must be indicated; if not, the author must provide a justification. To this end, SciELO recommends using the Open Science Compliance Form, which must be submitted as a supplementary file to the manuscript and accessible to reviewers. Initial evaluations of the manuscript, as well as reviews by associate editors and reviewers, must check the availability of data, software codes, and other materials, following the journal’s evaluation guide and form |
Charging Fees
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To contribute to publication costs, international authors must pay a fee of US$ 1,500.00 per accepted manuscript, while Brazilian and other Latin American authors must pay R$ 1,500.00 per accepted manuscript. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira may consider reduced fees, assessed on a case-by-case basis. |
Ethics, Misconduct, Correction, and Retraction Policies
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira follows the standards of conduct and good practice established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). According to these guidelines, noncompliance with the established conditions may result in the publication of an appropriate correction, a statement of retraction, or rejection of the article by the editor. Special attention must be paid to cases of plagiarism, duplicate or redundant publication, fabrication and falsification of data, corrections, and retractions. Authors who submit articles to the journal declare that their content is original and guarantee that the work has not been published or is in the process of being reviewed/evaluated in any other journal. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira requires authors to register clinical trials with the International Clinical Trials Registry. For clinical trials conducted in Brazil, authors must consult http://www.ensaiosclinicos.gov.br/. Manuscripts describing primary results of unregistered trials will be rejected before peer review.
In addition, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is committed to ethics and quality in publishing. The journal supports standards of ethical behavior expected of all parties involved in publishing in our journal: authors, editors, and reviewers. Plagiarism or any other unethical behavior is not accepted. The Similarity Check program is used to identify plagiarism and is analyzed on a case-by-case basis. These actions are subject to the approval of the Editorial Board, and corrections and additions that do not compromise the content of the article will not be published. The corresponding author must obtain the approval of all coauthors before submitting one of these requests or provide evidence that such approval has been sought. Additions, corrections, and retractions will include information on the title of the original article, the list of authors and the reason for the retraction. The article originally published will remain accessible, except in extraordinary circumstances. The links to the requests are as follows:
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Conflict of Interest Policy
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Before submitting an article to Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira, the corresponding author must complete and include the ICMJE Conflicts of Interest Form at the time of submission. The journal reserves the right not to accept an article if the appropriate ethical or experimental standards have not been met. Conflicts of interest must be communicated not only by the authors but by everyone involved in the editorial process of a manuscript. Editors must avoid making decisions on manuscripts that conflict with their own interests, such as those submitted by authors from their department or research collaborators.
If the Associate Editor has a conflict of interest, they must delegate decision-making to other editors. |
Adoption of Similarity Checking Softwares
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira has norms, standards, and style that must be followed. To prevent plagiarism in submitted manuscripts, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira uses the CrossRef – Similarity Check tool to identify the similarity of texts. This check is conducted as soon as the manuscript is submitted. |
Use of Generative AI and AI-Assisted Technologies
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The guidelines below refer exclusively to the writing process and do not cover the use of AI to analyze and gain insights from the data during the research. For more information, see: Guide to the use of Artificial Intelligence tools and resources in research communication on the SciELO Network
Authors must declare at the time of submission whether they have used AI-assisted technologies (such as language models, chatbots, or image generators) in the production of the manuscript. Authors are fully responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work submitted. They must ensure that there is no plagiarism in the text or in AI-generated images, guaranteeing that all quoted material is properly referenced with complete and correct citations. Citing AI-generated material as a primary source is not acceptable. |
Declaration instructions
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Authors must report the use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing of the manuscript by means of a statement inserted at the end of the main text before the list of References. This statement must appear in a new section entitled: Example of statement: “During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used [NAME OF TOOL/SERVICE] for [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as necessary and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication.” This declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools for checking grammar, spelling, references, etc. If there is nothing to declare, it is not necessary to include the declaration |
Sex and Gender Issues
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The editorial team of Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira, as well as the authors who publish in the journal, must always observe the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines. The SAGER guidelines comprise a set of instructions that guide the reporting of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, results, and interpretation of findings. In addition, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira observes the policy of gender equity in the formation of its editorial board. |
Ethics Committee
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira requires authors to register clinical trials with the International Clinical Trials Registry. For clinical trials conducted in Brazil, authors must consult http://www.ensaiosclinicos.gov.br/. Research involving laboratory animals must be approved to the Institution’s Ethics Committee (with case number), in accordance with Brazilian legislation and the guidelines of the Council for International Organization of Medical Sciences (CIOMS). Research involving human beings must be approved by the Institution’s Ethics Committee (send the approval opinion and the process number must be included in the article), in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, revised in 2024 (World Medical Association) and Resolution 466/2012 of the National Health Council of Brazil. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a statement ensuring that the research was conducted with the informed and appropriate consent of each participant. For the publication of any detail or photograph that may identify an individual, written consent must be obtained from the patient (or legal guardian, where applicable). |
Copyright
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A Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira adopts the Creative Commons Attribution-BY license (CC BY 4.0). Thus, copyright remains with the authors, and third parties may read, download, copy, distribute, print, index, create links to the full texts of articles, use them for data mining, integrate them into software, or employ them for any other legal purpose, including commercial use, provided that proper credit is given. The authors grant the journal the right of first publication under the CC BY 4.0 license. |
Intellectual Property and Terms of Use
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Website responsibility:
Author’s responsibility:
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Sponsors and Funding Agencies
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The publication of the journal is financed by publication fees and by the:
The journal is associated with:
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Founding Editor
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Editors-in-Chief
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Scientific Editors
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Associate Editors
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Assistant Editor
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Technical Team | Editorial Production
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Editorial Board
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Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira has norms, standards, and style that must be followed. All articles are checked using the Crossref – Similarity Check tool to ensure their originality. Acceptance of manuscripts will be based on their originality, relevance, and scientific contribution. Articles with a purely advertising or commercial purpose will not be accepted. Manuscripts must be submitted exclusively in English, using clear and precise language, avoiding the use of informal or colloquial expressions. Only manuscripts whose data is not being evaluated by other journals and/or which have not been previously published will be considered for evaluation. The journal accepts manuscripts previously published in preprint, provided they are considered, but will follow the normal peer review process. |
Types of Documents Accepted
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The journal accepts research articles, preferably on experimental surgery, clinical research, and reviews requested by the Editorial Board. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses focusing on surgical topics of current interest will be considered for publication. All content published in Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Clinical Research: Depending on the type of study, authors must follow the relevant EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines. For example, randomized controlled trials must include Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) showing the number of participants in each intervention group, as well as a detailed description of how many patients were excluded at each stage of the data analysis. All clinical trials must be registered and made available on an open-access website. The trial protocol (including the full statistical analysis plan) must be submitted with the manuscript. The clinical trial must be registered on a WHO-approved public trial registration platform at or before the time of first patient recruitment. The name and URL of the trial registry, and the registration number must be included in the submission document. Review Article: Systematic methods and explicit criteria for identifying, selecting, and critically appraising relevant research. This category includes Systematic Reviews with and without meta-analysis. Systematic review protocols must be registered on PROSPERO, or made available on an open access website. Systematic reviews must be reported according to PRISMA guidelines, and must include the flowchart as a figure and the checklist as supplementary material. |
Authors' Contribution
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Since 2025, Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira has used the CRediT taxonomy structure. All authors must describe their participation in the preparation of the manuscript. In addition to being responsible for the parts of the work they have done, the author must be able to identify which coauthors are responsible for other specific parts of the work. In addition, authors must have confidence in the integrity of their coauthors’ contributions. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the contributions of all authors are correct, and it is expected that all authors have reviewed, discussed, and agreed on their individual contributions and institutional affiliations, as shared by the submitting author. Acta Cirúrgica Brasileira encourages the consideration of acknowledgments for contributors who do not fit all these criteria. Changes in authorship: Any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors’ names in the authorship list must only be made before the manuscript is accepted and only if approved by the Editor of the journal. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following email from the corresponding author with: (a) the reason for the change in the list of authors and (b) written confirmation (email, letter) from all authors that they agree on the addition, removal, or reorganization. In the case of adding or removing authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor consider adding, deleting, or reorganizing authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the Editor considers the request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. If the manuscript has already been published in an online edition, any requests will not be accepted. |
Manuscript Preparation
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Article submission format
The author must carefully review the manuscript before submitting it for publication, otherwise the manuscript will be rejected by the Editorial Office during the initial review. Title page The title of the article must be concise but informative. Insert the full name of all authors with the Arabic numeric sequence in superscript, indicating below the highest academic degree of each author, including the institutional affiliation (division/department and university) and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID – ORCID of all authors. ORCIDs must be open to verify the institutional origin and researcher profile of each author. Insert the e-mail address of the corresponding author. Main document It must contain the title of the article. Abstract: It must not exceed 250 words and must be presented in a structured format: Objective: Clear, precise, and concise, without comment. Methods: Sample and procedures. Results: Main findings with specified data and statistical significance. Conclusion: Clear, precise, and concise, responding to the objective, without comment. Keywords: 3 to 6 terms must be provided based on the Descriptors in Health Sciences – DeCS/Medical Subject Headings – MeSH. Terms that are not part of MeSH prevent the article from being found. Introduction: It must clearly state the purpose of the study and provide only pertinent citations, and not review the subject extensively. Authors must be presented in lowercase letters or simply cited by numbers in superscript, without the year of the article. Methods: Ethical information must be included here. The sample (quantity and quality) and procedures in sufficient detail must be included to allow other researchers to replicate the results. Accurately identify all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration. Do not use names, initials, or patient record numbers. Describe statistical methods in detail and provide references to established procedures. The main author is responsible for the accuracy of the data, including all statistical calculations. Results: In the text, emphasize the important findings. Include statistical significance. Discussion: Emphasize the new and important aspect of the study. Compare the method and results with those previously published. Do not repeat the results. Conclusion: It must be clear and concise and respond to the purpose of the study. Avoid repeating data and comments. Acknowledgments: Acknowledge those who have contributed to the work, but without holding the characteristics of authors. Corresponding author: Full name, telephone number, and e-mail address. Declaration: Conflict of interest: Visit http://www.icmje.org/ to obtain the form. Institution/Laboratory of origin: At the end of the manuscript, mention the location of the research: laboratory, research center, school, department, and institution. If it is a thesis or part of a thesis, the name of the Tutor and the Postgraduate Program must be informed. |
Digital assets
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Tables: They are open and numbered in sequence. Use Arabic numerals and provide a short title for each one at the top. Use only approved abbreviations. Explain in footnotes all nonstandard abbreviations that are used in each table. They must be made without vertical lines. Visual abstract The visual abstract must be simple, organized, and clearly allow the reader to understand what you have done and what you have found. The take-home message must be consistent with your media abstract. The summary will be created in Microsoft PowerPoint using one of the templates provided with color, font, and formatting recommendations. In general, there will be a title at the top, the middle band will summarize your methods, results, and conclusion, and a bottom band will contain details of the author and citation. Icons can help to illustrate a point and can be obtained from databases such as https://thenounproject.com and https://iconfinder.com. Authors will be responsible for attribution and appropriate costs. The social media team will review all abstracts before publication |
Citations and references
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References must be up to date, select, and use the most important relevant research published in peer-reviewed journals. References must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they were first mentioned in the text. The Vancouver style rules must be followed, including the DOI. Journal titles must be abbreviated according to the style used in MEDLINE/PubMed. The names of all authors must be included (et al. is not accepted). References to abstracts, personal communication, or any other nonindexed source (textbooks and theses) are not accepted |
Supplementary documents
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ICMJE Conflicts of Interest Form |
Financing Statement
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The financial support received for the preparation of the manuscript must be declared in this item. The funding agency must be written in full, followed by the DOI of the Funder and the grant number. Several grant numbers from the same agency or several agencies must also be reported. If the research is not funded by a specific project grant, include this information: This research has not received any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or nonprofit sectors. |
Additional Information
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Checklist
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Contact
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Brazilian Society for the Development of Research in Surgery |
Read our Open Access Statement