Author Instructions
Each submission to the Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal is evaluated on its timeliness, relevance, accuracy, clarity and applicability to the journal. Submissions will be accepted from any country but must be written in English. Submissions to the journal must be original and unpublished work. Submissions must not be under consideration elsewhere.
The Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal provides assistance to first time authors. Authors are invited to contact the ANZCJ Editorial Office to discuss potential manuscripts. Publication of all articles is free of charge.
- Publishing Policies
- Peer review
- Authorship
- Licence to publish
- Open access
- Ethics Approval
- Submission and preparation of manuscripts
- Use of inclusive language
- Article Types
- Acknowledgements
- Data Availability Statement
- Conflicts of interest
- Declaration of Funding
- References and Citations
- Abbreviations
- Page Proofs
The Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal insists on high standards of ethical behaviour throughout the publication process. Our journal editors work within the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Further information on our policies can be found at publish.csiro.au/journals/publishingpolicies.
The Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that uses a double-anonymised peer-review. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible to maintain high-quality peer-review of papers submitted to the journal and works together with the Associate Editors and an Editorial Advisory Board to ensure a thorough and fair peer-review and the highest scientific publishing standards. All submissions undergo preliminary assessment by the Editor-in-Chief, who may reject a paper before peer review when it is outside the journal’s scope or is of insufficient quality. Associate Editors select reviewers and after at least two review reports are received, they make the decision whether to accept/reject or send a manuscript for revision. The final decision is made by the Associate Editor.
The conditions around authorship for the Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal should follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). For more information, see publish.csiro.au/journals/publishingpolicies.
For details regarding copyright, please see Copyright/Licence to Publish.
The Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal publishes exclusively open access content through an arrangement between the Continence Foundation Australia and CSIRO Publishing. Authors who are affiliated with an institution that has a Read and Publish Agreement with CSIRO Publishing, are encouraged to publish under this agreement to take full advantage of the benefits provided by your institution. See Open Access for more details.
Investigations in human and animal subjects must conform to accepted ethical standards. Authors must provide a statement within the text that the research protocol was approved by a suitably constituted Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) of the institution within which the work was carried out and that it conforms to the Statement on Human Experimentation or the Statement on Animal Experimentation by the NHMRC. The HREC number must be included in the text. Clinical trials must be registered, details including trial registration number provided, along with a statement that participants gave consent before taking part.
Investigators who do not have access to an institutional review board are required to provide a statement to the editor outlining why it was not possible to gain formal ethics approval. If the study is judged exempt from review, a statement from the committee is required. Authors should make an ethics statement within the manuscript to this effect. Authors should also state that the research was undertaken with appropriate informed consent of participants or guardians.
In reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and welfare of animals were followed and provide a statement within the manuscript regarding the use of appropriate measures to minimize pain or discomfort. Editors should ensure that peer reviewers consider ethical and welfare issues raised by the research they are reviewing, and to request additional information from authors where needed. In situations where there is doubt as to the adherence to appropriate procedures or approval by the relevant ethics committee, editors are required to reject these papers.
CSIRO Publishing follows the CSIRO guidelines on ethical human research and guidelines provided by the CSIRO Animal Ethics committee.
Submission and preparation of manuscripts
Manuscripts word length is dependent on the type of paper submitted. Research papers should be no more than 4000 words. Manuscripts should be created in a Word document using minimal formatting and typed double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. Define abbreviations and acronyms on first mention in the text.
Abstracts
All papers (apart from segments) should include an abstract of no more than 250 words. No references in the abstract. No abbreviations unless it saves more than ten words.
Title page
Include title of the work, total word count, and up to five keywords. Title page should not include any information that identifies the authors or their respective institutions as all submissions are double-blind-peer-reviewed.
Tables
To be presented on separate pages, one per page. Tables should be clearly typed, showing columns and lines. Number tables consecutively using Arabic numerals in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each. Place explanatory matter in a legend under the table, not in the heading. Explain in the legend all non-standard abbreviations used in each table. Please provide an editable version of the table (e.g. PowerPoint, Word Doc or Excel rather than a PDF).
Photographs and figures
Should be supplied in a graphic format such as jpeg at a resolution of 300 dpi. Illustrations and figures must be supplied in a format that can be edited (eg PowerPoint, Word Doc, Illustrator file rather than a PDF). The title and legend for figures should be on a separate page after the references. Each figure must include its place, its number and the orientation of figure. Patients or other individual subjects should not be identifiable from photos unless they have given written consent for their identity to be disclosed; this must be supplied.
These guidelines should be used to assist in identifying appropriate language, but are by no means exhaustive or definitive. Inclusive language comprises carefully chosen words and phrases that are respectful and promote the acceptance and value of all people. It is language which is free from words, phrases or tones that demean, insult, exclude, stereotype, or trivialise people on the basis of their membership of a certain group or because of a particular attribute. As such, inclusive language should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader, and contain nothing which might imply that one individual is superior to another on any grounds including but not limited to: age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition.
We encourage the use of plural nouns (e.g., ‘they’ as default wherever possible instead of ‘he/she’), and recommend avoiding the use of descriptors that refer to personal attributes, unless there is scientific or clinical relevance. For further guidance on inclusive language see Inclusive language | Style Manual. If there are questions about language use and/or publishing with regards to First Nations Peoples, please contact the Journal.
The Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal welcomes original research articles for peer review and general articles regarding the achievements of people working in the disciplines pertaining to the management of incontinence, clinical issue updates, book reviews and general project information. Types of manuscripts accepted include but are not limited to the following:
Discussion
Presentation of information from more than one viewpoint (for example, for and against) and usually ending with a recommendation or opinion based on the evidence presented.
Literature review
Narrative Review: describes and evaluates the current knowledge of a subject, identifies gaps or inconsistencies and includes critical evaluation with recommendations for future research.
Systematic Review: describes planned analysis and evaluation of all available research studies on a particular clinical issue, conducted in accordance with scientific principles and may include recommendations for future research.
Qualitative and quantitative research report
Presentation of study results in an ordered fashion, based on common practice. Research reports are expected to follow the Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, as published by the International Council of Science Journal Editors.
Case study
Combination of recount (retelling of events as they occurred) and information report (classification and description of something). Can be presented in different ways to give a cohesive account. To publish a case study containing any personal information about a patient you must provide a statement where the patient has given consent for the information to be used (understandably with case studies it is not possible to get consent from the patient beforehand – as you would with a clinical trial).
Segments
We have launched three regular segments to encourage people who do not have the resources or time to publish a full paper to let the community know what they have been up to. The three segments will be double-blind peer reviewed, 800-1200 words long (not including references) and have 6-12 references.
Did you know…
This segment covers interesting things related to continence that our readership of nurses, doctors, physios, OTs and other health professionals might not know. It could be something you have just discovered, or something you have known about for a long time that you are always surprised people don’t know about.
What I learned about…
This segment can cover anything you have recently discovered, it could be from a book, a conference, a training course, or even a discussion you have had.
Have you heard…
This segment is any news related to continence, including upcoming events, new research released, new services available, new products related to continence.
The contribution of colleagues who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be acknowledged. Anyone included in the Acknowledgements section should have granted permission to be listed. Sources of financial support should be acknowledged in a separate ‘Declaration of Funding’ rather than here.
A ‘Data availability statement’ must be included indicating whether the data used to generate the results in the paper are available and, if so, where to access them. CSIRO Publishing’s data sharing policy provides more information and examples of what to include.
Cite any preprint to your paper here, e.g. ‘A preprint version of this article is available at [URL link]’.
Authors can get credit for their work by citing their research data in the reference list of their article. References should include at a minimum: authors, year of publication, title of dataset, record ID, publisher, DOI or URL if available.
A ‘Conflicts of interest’ section must be included and should identify any financial or non-financial (political, personal, professional) interests/relationships that may be interpreted to have influenced the manuscript. If there are no conflicts, please include the statement ‘The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest’.
Declare all sources of funding for the research and/or preparation of the article. Include grant numbers where possible. Declare sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources, if any, in the preparation of the data or manuscript or the decision to submit for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement. If no funding has been provided for the research, please include the statement: ‘This research did not receive any specific funding’.
Important: Funding information should also be entered into the ScholarOne Manuscripts system, and information supplied there must match information declared on the manuscript.
ANZCJ uses the Vancouver style of referencing.
In text citations
Cite references in the main text using superscript numbers, after any punctuation.1 Multiple references may be cited at a single point with the identifying numbers separated by commas, without spaces.2,3–5 Cite the same reference at multiple locations using the same number.1,6
Reference list
List all cited references at the end of the paper, in numerical order of first mention in the text.6-14 Ensure each reference is only listed once and use that number for each relevant in-text citation. Use abbreviated journal names according to MEDLINE.1,2 The correct abbreviation for Australian and New Zealand Continence Journal is ANZ Cont J.
For references with more than four authors, you may use ‘et al.’ after the third author’s name.3 Do not use ellipses (…) to indicate missing authors. Reference subparts are not permitted.
See below for how to format common reference types used in ANZCJ.
Journal article (with page range)
1 Dwyer S, Lin I. Evaluation of a pelvic health physiotherapy service in remote Australia. ANZ Cont J 2024; 30(3): 60–72. doi:10.33235/anzcj.30.3.60-72
Journal article (with article ID)
2 Lokmic-Tomkins Z, Bone A. Global health and climate action: achievements and imperatives from COP28. Public Health Res Pract 2024; 34(2): e3422412. doi:10.17061/phrp3422412
Preprint
3 Krick T, Shub DA, Verstraete N, et al. Amino acid metabolism conflicts with protein diversity [Preprint]. arXiv: 1403.3301v1; 2014. Available at https://128.84.21.199/abs/1403.3301v1
Dataset
4 Fiddes S, Pepler A, Saunders K, Hope P. Southern Australia’s climate regions. Version 1.0.0. [Dataset]. Zenodo; 2020. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4265471
Book chapter
5 May KA. Interview techniques in qualitative research: Concerns and challenges. In: Morse JM, editor. Qualitative nursing research: A contemporary dialogue. Sage Publications, Inc; 1991. pp. 188–201.
Book
6 Carpenter C, Suto M. Why choose qualitative research in rehabilitation. Milton, Australia: Wiley-Blackwell; 2008.
Thesis
7 Taafaki J. The lived experience of rural Tuvaluans navigating the Aotearoa New Zealand healthcare system. Doctoral Thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand; 2023.
Report, part of report, or Bulletin
8 Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. Te Rangahau Ohu Mahi The Workforce Survey 2022 Time Series Report. Wellington, NZ: Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners; 2023.
9 IPCC. Summary for Policymakers. In: Shukla PR, Skea J, Slade R, Al Khourdajie A, van Diemen R, McCollum D, Pathak M, Some S, Vyas P, Fradera R, Belkacemi M, Hasija A, Lisboa G, Luz S, Malley J, editors. Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA; 2022. pp. 3–48. doi:10.1017/9781009157926.001
Conference Proceedings
10 Francis C. How mobile technologies and gaming are improving HIV programming for key populations in Vietnam. In: Smith A, Jones B, editors. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific; 18–22 November 2013; Bangkok, Thailand. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 2013. p. 5–11.
Web-based material (URL or DOI)
11 The Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd. New Zealand Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) Surveillance Dashboard 2021; 2021. Available at https://www.esr.cri.nz/our-services/consultancy/public-health/sti/ [Accessed 21 April 2021]
Standard
12 Environmental management — Guidelines for environmental due diligence assessment. ISO14015:2022. International Organization for Standardization: Geneva; 2022. Available at https://www.iso.org/standard/78014.html
Patent
13 Lois-Caballe C, Baltimore D, Qin X-F. Method for Expression of Small RNA Molecules within a Cell. US Patent Office: US7732193B2; 2010.
Define abbreviations and acronyms when they are first mentioned in the abstract and the body of the text. Do not include full points in acronyms: thus CSIRO (not C.S.I.R.O.).
The accepted paper will be passed to the production team, where it will be pre-edited for style, copyedited and typeset. The corresponding author will then receive an email with a link to complete an online proof check of the paper.
The online proof will contain queries from the production team and copyeditor. All queries require a response. This is the final check prior to publication.
Complete the proof check within 2 business days to ensure there are no delays in publication.