All submitted manuscripts will be subject to the possibility of online only publication on our online journal site: https://meridian.allenpress.com/operative-dentistry. These e-pub articles will be paginated with an “e” prefix and will carry a fully citable DOI number. If you are not interested in the possibility of having your paper published online only, please do not submit your manuscript to us. Your authorization to allow us to e-publish will help us to publish manuscripts even faster than we have in the past.
We will need your text file (original word processing file in Word) in order to size your manuscript accurately. Our system will automatically merge the text file that you upload with the figure and table files, to make one article file PDF. This allows editors and reviewers to view and/or download your manuscript in one easy step. If any of your figures are illegible, or the figure sizes are too large or small (see below), your submission will be returned to you so that you can fix these problems. Your manuscript will only be considered officially submitted after it has been approved through our initial quality control check, and these problems (if any) have been fixed.
Before submitting a manuscript, please gather the following information as indicated by the article type:
- CORRESPONDING AUTHOR must provide a WORKING / VALID e-mail address which will be used for all communication with the journal.
- All Authors:
- First Names, Middle Names/Initials, Last Names
- Author Degrees, and Current Institution information,Postal Addresses,Work Telephone Numbers
- E-mail Addresses
- ORCID IDs (16 digits)
- MENTION OF COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS/EQUIPMENT must include:
- • full name of product
- • full name of manufacturer
- • city, state and country of manufacturer
- Title and Running Title (you can cut and paste this from your manuscript). Running title: This is simply a shorter version of the title used on following pages and in our database for reports, etc.
- Clinical Relevance Statement. This is required to submit and should appear in both the manuscript data field when entering initial info, as well as being part of the manuscript text document.
- Abstract or Summary (you can cut and paste this from your manuscript).
- Manuscript files and Tables in Word. (Please include your abstract and figure captions in the text file.)
- TABLES may be submitted as either Word (.doc and .docx) or Excel (.xls and .xlsx) files. All tables must be legible, with fonts being no smaller than 7 points. Tables have the following size limitations: In profile view a table must be no larger than 7 x 9 inches; landscape tables should be no wider than 7 inches. It is the Editor’s preference that tables not need to be rotated in order to be printed, as it interrupts the reader’s flow.
- References must be numbered (superscripted Arabic numerals…1, 2, 3 etc.) consecutively as they appear in the text and, where applicable, they should appear after punctuation. For examples, see below.
- For printing purposes, we require that your figure files be in TIFF, or JPG formats and be uploaded separately as source files, not PDF files. You may not embed the figures, graphs or tables in the manuscript
- Photographs submitted to Operative dentistry must be unretouched; they may be cropped, annotated and/or aggregated with other photos, but each photo must remain unretouched.
Figures must be of publication quality with the following parameters:
- line art (and tables that are submitted as a graphic) must be sized with the short edge being no shorter than 5 inches. It should have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi and a maximum resolution of 1200 dpi. This means the shortest side should be no smaller than 3000 pixels.
- gray scale/black & white figures must be sized with the short edge being no shorter than 5 inches. It should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi and a maximum of 400 dpi. This means the shortest side should be no smaller than 1500 pixels.
- color figures and photographs must be sized with the short edge being no shorter than 3.5 inches. It should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi and a maximum of 400 dpi. This means that the shortest side should be no smaller than 1050 pixels.
The manuscript text must not contain any author identifying information, no names nor addresses, no acknowledgements, no ethics board information, etc. These items are entered separately during the process, and will be merged into the final document by the computer. Any manuscripts with identifying information in the main manuscript file will be sent back to the author for correction. Remember, our peer review is double blind in order to provide our readers with the highest quality data possible.