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Submitting your materials

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information. 

Licence to publish

Before Cambridge can publish your manuscript, we need a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged. For full details see the publishing agreement page.

Manuscript Review Process

Manuscripts submitted are first reviewed by Editorial Staff for proper format and possible plagiarism.  Section Editors and the Editor-in-Chief may return manuscripts that are written on topics that are not within the scope of PDM.  Manuscripts with political bias or that are critical in an unfounded manner are returned to the Author.

Expert review of manuscripts is one of the means of selecting manuscripts for publication in PDM.  Manuscripts are also selected for timeliness of the research topic, quality of study design, validity of scientific methods, and uniqueness of the research.  Manuscripts that are submitted without adherence to the proper format and style described in the PDM "Instructions for Contributors" cannot be selected for publication (available on the PDM website and at the time of manuscript submission).

PDM adheres to the international publishing standards of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).  Peer review is the objective assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts without connection to the research under review or preparation of the manuscript.  Peer review of manuscripts submitted to PDM is done in a blinded manner in which the reviewers and authors are unknown to each other.  Reviewers who may have a conflict of interest with review of a manuscript must withdraw from the review.  Including other factors, blinded reviews are used by PDM Editors to determine the priority for publishing each manuscript in the Journal.  Because PDM receives more submissions than there are pages available for publication of manuscripts received, only a fraction of manuscripts submitted to the Journal can be selected for publication.

The PDM peer review process occurs in two stages.  The first stage includes review by a Format Reviewer that is based on the publishing requirements provided in the Author Checklist that Authors must attest to having reviewed at the time of submission of a manuscript.  The first stage also includes a Methods Review that is specific to study design and methods.  If a manuscript is acceptable following Format and Methods Reviews, it is submitted for final review to at least one (usually two or more) content reviewers who are experts in the field of the research topic.