Submissions to CMI: a new CMI guide for authors
Authors: L. Leibovici, J. Friedman
Journal: Clinical Microbiology and Infection (2019)

We have made several changes to the Clinical Microbiology and Infection (CMI) Guide for Authors, and we would like to highlight two of them. First, we accept the submission of original articles in any format. For the revised version we will then ask for the CMI format according to the Guide for Authors. The logic of this is to save authors unnecessary work. We publish <13% of the articles that are submitted to us, and it would be unkind to ask for extensive formatting from the remaining 87%. Having said that, we would like to offer a few pieces of advice to authors who are considering submitting to CMI. Although we do not demand it for the first submission, a formatted and informative abstract is very helpful to editors, and we encourage authors to provide a structured abstract according to the CMI guide. We will make a first decision on articles even if they are longer than the CMI word limits (maximum 2500 words for original articles and narrative reviews, 3500 words for systematic reviews, 1200 words for research notes, and 1400 words for commentaries). However, if an original article is submitted containing 5000 words and we ask for a revision after peer-review, the revised version will have to be cut in half. This will create a manuscript that is completely different from the first one, and demand much closer scrutiny. Keeping the number of words closer to the CMI word limit will make revisions easier. We are asking for certain research designs to be reported according to reporting guidelines: CONSORT for randomized controlled trials; STROBE for observational studies (including its extensions, STROBE-ID for reporting of molecular epidemiology for infectious diseases and STROBE-AMS for reporting epidemiological studies on antimicrobial resistance); PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses; STARD for diagnostic studies; CHEERS for economic evaluations; and ORION for outbreak reports and interventional, non-randomized studies of nosocomial infections. The checklists for each relevant guideline should be uploaded upon the first submission. Organizing articles according to the relevant guidelines is the best advice we could offer to authors. The second major addition to the Guide for Authors is the request to detail at the end of the text each author's contribution. This is a much better way than relying on the order of author names to recognize a person's contribution to a study. The reasons for doing this are clearly explained in a recent article in PNAS [[1]McNutt M.K. Bradford M. Drazen J.M. Hanson B. Howard B. Jamieson K.H. et al.Transparency in authors' contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication.Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018; 115: 2557-2560Crossref PubMed Scopus (129) Google Scholar]. We are now asking the authors of original articles to include a paragraph at the end of the text detailing the authors' contributions. To describe the contributions, please use the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT: https://www.casrai.org/credit.html). This is the minimum request: if needed, the roles of contributors can be further expounded. As McNutt et al. remind us, ‘ … authorship implies both credit and accountability’ [[1]McNutt M.K. Bradford M. Drazen J.M. Hanson B. Howard B. Jamieson K.H. et al.Transparency in authors' contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication.Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018; 115: 2557-2560Crossref PubMed Scopus (129) Google Scholar]. We hope that a detailed description of contributions will help academic institutions to assign credit where credit is due, and allow readers and editors to assign accountability.