Ethics & Medics Submissions Guidelines

PDF Version of these Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in submitting to Ethics & Medics. You can submit manuscripts to Ethics & Medics at Submissions@ncbcenter.org.

Ethics & Medics is a monthly commentary providing moral analysis, argument, and opinion concerning advances in the health and life sciences. The publication has been in print for over 40 years. We publish articles that relate the Western moral tradition to new developments in health care in the areas of medicine, law, philosophy, theology, and pastoral implications of medical-moral subjects. Ethics & Medics articles are faithful to the Catholic moral tradition and its official teaching, but it is not a publication of the Catholic Church. Authors are responsible for the opinions and arguments advanced in the articles they write. Our readers are clergy, medical professionals, administrative health care personnel, teachers, lawyers, students, and interested Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Process

Please submit manuscripts as MS Word attachments to submissions@ncbcenter.org. Specify that this is a submission to Ethics & Medics.

Manuscripts are reviewed by a submissions editor to ensure that they meet all criteria, see below. Manuscripts must meet submission criteria before being reviewed for acceptance. Manuscripts that do not meet these criteria will be returned to the author with a list of requested adjustments. Once the manuscript is revised, it may be resubmitted for consideration. 

Manuscripts that meet submission criteria will be reviewed by the editorial team, and the editor in chief will inform authors if their manuscript is accepted, accepted with revisions, or rejected. Accepted articles will proceed to copyediting, typesetting, and proofreading. All submitted articles are copyedited here at the NCBC.

All editorial changes are reviewed with the author; we do not print without final author approval. Whenever agreement between editor and author cannot be reached, the article either will be returned to the author or temporarily set aside.

Copyright & Credit

The National Catholic Bioethics Center holds copyright but freely grants authors permission to reprint their work so long as they mention first publication in Ethics & Medics. By submitting your material, you are agreeing to transfer copyright to the NCBC upon publication.

Authors receive a byline that includes medical credentials (MD, RN, DO, etc.) as well as a 1-sentence description of affiliation and academic credentials at the end of the piece.

Submission Criteria

1. Word counts

  • Regular length article: 1,600–1,750 words, including notes

  • Double-length article: 3,400–3,600 words, including notes

2. File formats

  • Submit manuscripts in DOC, DOCX, or RTF format. (No PDFs or other word processing formats.)

  • Submit figures and tables separately as image files (JPG, PNG, or TIF).

3. Use of Outside Sources

  • Be sure to cite all sources thoroughly. (See “Endnotes,” below, for directions about style.)

  • Be prepared to submit source copy upon request. (Source copy includes title and copyright pages of books, or TOC and masthead pages of journals, along with the pages where direct quotes originally appear.)

4. Endnotes

  • Follow Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed. (or Turabian). Submissions that follow another style will be returned with a request to conform to Chicago or Turabian style before we can review the piece for publication. The following are examples of commonly cited source formats:

i. Book: Author, Title (City: Publisher, Year), Page Number.

ii. Journal Article: Author, “Title,” Journal Volume#, Issue# (Date): Page Number, DOI: Number.

iii. Website or Web Resource: Author, “Page Title,” Organization, Date, URL.

  • Include DOIs whenever they exist.

  • Integrate explanatory and discursive notes into the text.

  • Place notes at the ends of clauses.

  • Do not place notes at the ends of headings.

5. Computer algorithms (so-called AI)

a.     Any article submitted to the National Catholic Bioethics Center must be solely the work of the human authors and collaborators and avoid any plagiarism; the outline, first draft, and substantial revisions of any work cannot be the work of a content-generating computer algorithm (so-called artificial intelligence or AI). Non-coauthor collaboration will be acknowledged by name or anonymously, per permission of the contributor.

b.     It is permissible to use basic auto-complete prompts (finishing a short phrase the author has begun), citation-assisting software, and, for non-native English speakers, translation software.

c.     Statistical analysis software may be used to analyze available data, but it must be cited.

d.     Computer-generated translations should be checked by a native speaker for accuracy and good usage before submitting the NCBC. It is strongly recommended to use a native speaker to translate the piece from the outset, if it is not composed in English.

e.     The author must declare mention to the editors the use of permitted basic assistance programs mentioned in (5b) and non-coauthor collaborators, if any.