Radioprotection

Author information

Instructions for authors

Download the Radioprotection instructions for authors in PDF format.
Download the Radioprotection instructions for authors (in French) in PDF format.
Master list of keywords (PDF file)

1 The submission stage
2 Aims and scope
3 Manuscripts under review - Sending to the editor
4 Style guide
5 Radioprotection follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
- 5.1 Artificial intelligence
- 5.2 Corrections and withdrawal after publication
6 Manuscript presentation

7 Proofs
8 ORCID

1 The submission stage

Authors should submit their manuscripts and all associated files to the editorial office, and can track progress throughout the peer review process via the NESTOR (New Editorial System Tool fOr Research), available at https://radiopro.nestor-edp.org. Manuscripts should be sent in Word and pdf format. Please follow the instructions on Nestor platform. Submitting an article implies that the work has not been previously published except for conference abstracts and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere.

2 Aims and scope

All papers should be in relation to radiation protection.

Review articles – On a scientific, technical or legal subject in the field of radiation protection, they include up-to-date and consistent references (37 500 characters maximum, spaces included).
Articles – Original works, including introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion and conclusion (30 000 characters maximum, spaces included).
Brief Notes – Scientific or technical developments (10 000 characters maximum, spaces included).
Letters to the Editor – Personal opinions or discussions on a published paper (2500 characters maximum, spaces included). The Editors may submit the text to the person involved and publish the answer in the same issue of the journal (must be given within one month).

Figures and tables should be included in this account (a quarter page figure is about 1200 characters maximum, spaces included.

3 Manuscripts under review - Sending to the editor

Manuscripts under review should be sent to EDP Sciences via the Nestor platform in Word, Wordperfect, McWrite, LaTeX or RTF format.

The “native” electronic files (one file per figure), using one of the following formats: eps (preferably), tiff, bmp or jpeg. Files should have a 300 dpi resolution.

4 Style guide

Important : In accordance with ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) guidelines, the instructions for authors have been updated. Please read carefully the following guidelines to prepare your paper accordingly.

Your manuscript must include the following sections between the Conclusion and References: Acknowledgments, Funding, Conflicts of Interest, Data availability statement, Author contribution statement, Ethics approval, Informed consent.

4.1 Acknowledgements

Contributors who do not meet all the criteria mentioned above for authorship should be listed at the end of the main text in the Acknowledgements section. Any funding received should be declared. The names of the individuals who provided assistance during the research should be listed with a clear contribution statement (e.g., S. André : language editing, B. Champion : proof reading the article, etc.)

Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervi- sion of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. ‘Clinical Investigators’ or ‘Participating Investigators’), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., ‘served as scientific advisors,’ ‘critically reviewed the study proposal,’ ‘collected data,’ ‘provided and cared for study patients’, ‘participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript’).

Please ensure that all individuals have given written permission to be acknowledged.

4.2 Funding

This field should not be left empty.

All sources of funding should be indicated in this section.

Authors must describe the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in the study design ; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

For compliance purpose, funding sources should be listed as following:

Funding: This work was supported by the A Foundation [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the B Agency [grant number zzzz];

If no funding has been provided for the research, please include the following sentence:

This research did not receive any specific funding.

4.3 Conflits of interest

This field should not be left empty.

The potential for conflict of interest and bias exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) is likely to be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.

Any conflict of interest must be reported to the editorial office.

Authors should indicate whether they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research, even if it is their employment and / or home institution (university laboratory, hospital, other social or health structure. They must also confirm that they have complete control over the primary data and that they agree to a possible review of this data by the journal.

At the time of submission, the manuscript must be accompanied by a duly completed “declaration of conflict of interest” form available at: http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest.

Any other conflict of interest, personal or not, must also be declared, particularly when the author is a member of the Editorial Board.

Members of the editorial board are not involved in the review process of the articles they have written. The evaluation of these articles is entrusted to independent experts.

When there is no conflict of interest in connection with the drafted article, the following statement must appear at the end of the manuscript : The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

4.4 Data availability statement

This field should not be left empty.

Authors are encouraged to provide a data availability statement (DAS). This is a statement that tells the reader where the data associated with a paper is available, and under what conditions the data can be accessed and linked to the data set. If the authors deposit Appendices or Supplementary Material in a public data repository, include the name of the repository and the link (DOI) here.

When there is no data in connection with the drafted article, the following statement must appear at the end of the manuscript : The research data associated with this article are included within the article.

4.5 Author contribution statement

Authors should use this section to outline their individual contributions to the article with the corresponding roles: The ICMJE recommends authorship to be based on the following 4 criteria:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation ofdata for the work; AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content ; AND
Final approval of the version to be published; AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy orintegrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

The following format should be used:

J.Arnaud : Conceptualization, Methodology, T. Gaston : Writing original draft. R. Raymond : Visualization,Investigation. M. Leroy : Supervision. : B. Arnaud Writing-Reviewing and Editing.

4.6 Ethics approval

This field should not be left empty.

If your study requires ethical approval, include the ethical protocols followed and the name of the committee which approved the study for example: This study received ethical approval from the Ethics committee of X hospital under the protocol number XXXX.

If your study does not require ethical approval, please state that: Ethical approval was not required.

This field should not be left empty.

In accordance with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013, a statement that informed consent was obtained must be included for experimentation involving humans.

The privacy of patients must be preserved and any breach of privacy requires their consent. Whatever the method of questioning patients (interview or anonymous questionnaire), their prior informed consent must be indicated in the article. Information identifying patients (name, initials, medical file number) should not appear in the description of the case, in photographs or in the family history, unless it is scientifically essential. In this case, the patient (or one of his parents or guardian) must have given his informed consent before publication ; when identifiable, the patient must have seen the manuscript before it is published to give informed consent. Details allowing identification should be removed if they are not essential.

When informed consent has been obtained, it must be stated in the published article :

Written informed consent was obtained from all patients and/or families.

Sample sentence if not applicable:

This article does not contain any studies involving human subjects.

5 Radioprotection follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

Special attention is drawn to the various kinds of academic misconduct : plagiarism, data falsification. Radioprotection subscribes to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/).

Authors are invited to comply with the ‘Recommendations for the conduct, presentation, writing and publication of research work submitted to medical journals’, published by the International Commission of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and available at: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations.

Allegations of academic misconduct (for example, data fabrication, forgery, or plagiarism) are taken seriously and will be investigated.

5.1 Artificial intelligence

Regarding the use of Artificial intelligence software, we distinguish between Assistive AI tools (making suggestions, corrections, and improvements to content you’ve authored yourself) and Generative AI tools (ChatGPT, or Dall-e… which produce content).

You are required to inform the reader of any use of an AI (generative or not) within the frame of your research and regardless of its purpose (generation of all or parts of the manuscript, including text, images, generation of translation or language improvements, etc.)

This statement should appear in the Material and Methods section. You must provide the name of the AI tool used, its version, a brief description of how the tool was used in your writing process and where in your submission the AI generated content appears.

This mandatory information will allow the editorial team to make an informed publishing decision regarding your submission. Should we identify an article with undisclosed use of generative AI tools for content generation, we will take appropriate corrective action, including article rejection.

Please note that the use of AI is fully under the responsibility of the authors, as it is the case for the use of any tool. If the use of an AI tool results in academic misconduct, therefore the authors will have to support the consequences.

5.2 Corrections and withdrawal after publication

If an author discovers a material error or inaccuracy after the article has been published, he / she agrees to promptly inform the editor-in-chief of the journal or the publisher and to cooperate with the publisher to either retract or correct the paper (by an erratum).

If the editor or publisher learns from a third party that a published article contains a material error, he or she must inform the author who must either retract promptly, correct the paper or provide evidence to the editor for the correctness of the original article.

In order to make correspondence between authors and the production department easier, the author should provide with his/her manuscript: name and address, e-mail address, phone number…

6 Manuscript presentation

6.1 Presentation

Title	It should be brief and informative. It must be followed by the authors’ names and full postal addresses. The address should appear as: CEA, Laboratoire d’analyses de biologie médicale, ... IRSN, Laboratoire d’épidémiologie, ...
Abstracts	About 200 words, in a single paragraph, it presents the content and the original data supplied, the main conclusions and any interesting numerical results.
Keywords	The author should provide a maximum of five keywords. Keywords should be written in bold lowercase letters, separated by slashes: the plural form and uppercase letters should be avoided. An indicative list is available on EDP Sciences (at the top of this page) and SFRP websites (SFRP).
Texte	Footnotes should be kept to a minimum and numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals. Developments not essential to the understanding of the paper (details of calculations, etc.) should be given in appendices.
Units and symbols	The international system of units (SI) should be used. Radionuclides should be written as caesium-137 or 137Cs. Abbreviations should be defined when they first appear in the text. SI norms are available on www.radioprotection.org.
Illustrations	They should be kept to a minimum and supplied on separate sheets. Tables and figures should be numbered in growing Arabic numerals. Authors should write entire Table 1, Figure 1… in the text but abbreviated (Tab. 1), (Fig. 1) between brackets. Authors should cite in the text each table and figure. The typesetter carries out the layout by placing illustrations as close as possible to their citation. Authors should keep in mind that the final reproduction of their figures essentially depends on the originals. In order to guarantee good readability of the article, it is important to respect the following rules: The maximum printable size in Radioprotection is 18 × 23.5 cm: i.e., for one figure, the maximal width is 18 cmand the maximal length is 23.5 cm, excluding caption. For best results, figures should be provided respecting the guidelines detailed below: Final height of capital letters should be between 1.6 and 2.3 mm (10 to 12 points). Avoid use of bold lettering. Letter size should be homogeneous in all figures of the article. Where possible, avoid using grey levels. Hatching is preferable. For curves, standard symbols must be used □( , Δ, •, etc.). Tables should be kept in their simplest form, lines and columns being unambiguously identifiable.

6.2 References

In the text, the reference should be indicated by the author’s name and year of publication. If there is more than one author, indicate the first name fol- lowed by et al. If there is more than one reference cited together in the text, they should be listed in chronological order; Ex.: (Anderson et al., 2001a, 2001b; Smith, 2004). All entries in the reference list must correspond to references in the text and vice versa. The reference list should be listed in alphabetical order at the end of the text and include:

For journals : Last name + initial of first name of authors (publication year), original title of paper, Journal abbreviated title volume, first-last page numbers:

Anderson P. (2004) Determination of the gamma-ray effective dose, Radioprotection 39, 262-265.
Smith J. (2003) Radiation protection principles, Health Phys. 86, 24-42.

For books: Author(s) (publication year) chapter’s title. In: Book’s title, subdivisions if necessary (editors’ names, Eds) pp. first page-last page. Publisher, place of publication:

Madic C., Genet M. (2001) Propriétés physiques et chimiques de l’uranium. Dans L’Uranium, de l’environnement à l’Homme (H. Métivier, Ed.) pp. 43-81, EDP Sciences, Les Ulis.
Le Bellac (1991) Quantum and Statistical Field Theory. Oxford Sciences publications.

For conference proceedings: Author(s) (publication year) Original title of the paper. In: title of the conference, date, location, volume number if necessary (editors’ names, Eds.) pp. first page-last page. Publisher, place of publication:

Germain P., Guéguéniat P. (1993) Impact of industrial nuclear releases into the English Channel. In:Environmental impact of nuclear installations, September 15-18, 1992, Fribourg, numéro spécial deRadioprotection (Völkle H., Prêtre S., Eds) pp. 271-275. EDP Sciences, Les Ulis.

For the ICRP, IAEA, etc. publications: abrév:iation de l’organisme dans sa langue d’origine (ICRP et non CIPR,…), suivi du numéro de la publication (année de parution) titre de la communication. Maison d’édition, lieu d’édition.

IAEA (2000) Bulletin de l’International Atomic Energy Agency 42, mars 2000, pp. 38-40.
ICRP Publication 73 (1996) Radiological protection and safety in medicine, Ann. ICRP 26.

6.3 Online material

Images and videos including large tables may be accepted for the online version of the journal.

7 Proofs

Will be sent to the first or nominated author by e-mail in PDF format and must be returned within 7 days of receipt. Authors will be charged for major revisions.

8 ORCID

From October 2024, only authenticated ORCIDs will be published in this journal. Any ORCIDs included in the manuscript files or provided outside of the authentication process outlined below will not be included in the published article.

At the time of acceptance, corresponding authors should enter their co-authors details (names and email addresses) in EDP Sciences’ production system, SAGA. Co-authors listed this way will be automatically invited to validate their ORCID. This should be done as soon as possible, before the author’s first proof corrections. ORCIDs provided after author proof correction will not be taken into account. See also EDP Sciences ORCID policy.