The Editor of Nurse Education in Practice, Karen Holland, welcomes the submission of papers for publication. Submission to this journal proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article via http://ees.elsevier.com/nep you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of the various files. The system automatically converts source files to a single Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the article, which is used in the peer-review process. Please note that even though manuscript source files are converted to PDF at submission for the review process, these source files are needed for further processing after acceptance. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail and via the Author's homepage, removing the need for a hard-copy paper trail. The above represents a very brief outline of this form of submission. It can be advantageous to print this "Guide for Authors" section from the site for reference in the subsequent stages of article preparation. If you do not have internet access, please contact the editorial office for alternative submission instructions (see Editorial Board page for contact details).

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all Authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the Publisher.

Copyright
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a "Journal Publishing Agreement" (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail (or letter) will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement.

Subscribers may reproduce tables of content or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions).

If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult www.elsevier.com/permissions.

Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted.

Changes to authorship
This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:


Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Journal Manager from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the author names rearranged and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Journal Manager to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that: (1) Journal Managers will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (2) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.

After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and result in a corrigendum.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Authors should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Presentation of Papers
Articles should be up to 4000 words including references, not including abstract (authors should include a full word count, preferably with and without references, with their article submissions).

Issues for Debate: The Editor welcomes papers which will stimulate debate and have a direct impact on nursing education and scholarship. Issues for Debate papers should not exceed 2,500 words, including references.

Guest Editorials: The Editor encourages Guest Editorials to be submitted on a variety of current issues impacting and influencing nursing and healthcare education. Guest Editorials can have a national or international focus.

Please check your text carefully before you send it off, both for correct content and typographic errors. It is not possible to change the content of accepted papers during production. Do not use 'he', 'his' etc where the sex of the person is unknown; say 'the nurse' etc. Avoid inelegant alternatives such as 'he/she'. Nurses should not be automatically designated as 'she', and doctors as 'he'.

Title Page:
•The title page should be provided as a separate file.
•Your title page should give the title in capital letters, below which should be the authors' names (as they are to appear) in lower-case letters.
•For each author you should give one first name as well as the surname and any initials.
•Authors should provide email address, a daytime contact telephone number and fax number, if available.

Keywords
Include three or four keywords. The purpose of these is to increase the likely accessibility of your paper to potential readers searching the literature. Therefore, ensure keywords are descriptive of the study. Refer to a recognised thesaurus of keywords (e.g. MEDLINE, CINAHL) wherever possible.

Abstracts
An abstract of your paper, a maximum of 200 words summarising the content, should follow the title page.

Headings
The content of your paper should determine the headings you use. If yours is a research paper the headings should follow the usual layout; such as: Introduction, Background/Literature, Methods, Data/Results, Discussion, Conclusions. If your paper takes another form you should use the appropriate headings, but do bear in mind that headings should facilitate reading and understanding. You should use only two kinds of headings; major headings should be indicated by underlined capital letters in the centre of the page whereas minor headings should be underlined, have lower-case letters (beginning with a capital) and begin at the left hand margin.

Tables, Illustrations and Figures A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available on our website: http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Preparation of supplementary data. Elsevier now accepts electronic supplementary material (e-components) to support and enhance your scientific research. Supplementary files offer the Author additional possibilities to publish supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and more. Supplementary files supplied will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article in Elsevier Web products, including ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com. In order to ensure that your submitted material is directly usable, please ensure that data is provided in one of our recommended file formats. Authors should submit the material in electronic format together with the article and supply a concise and descriptive caption for each file. For more detailed instructions please visit our artwork instruction pages at: http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Permission to reproduce borrowed material
Written permission to reproduce borrowed material (illustrations and tables) must be obtained from the original publishers and authors, and submitted with the typescript. Borrowed material should be acknowledged in the captions in this style: Reproduced by kind permission of ... (publishers) ... from ... (reference).

Reference Style
The accuracy of the references you provide is your responsibility.

•In the text references should state the author's surname and the year of publication (Smith 1989). If there are two authors you should give both surnames (Smith & Black 1989). When a source has more than two authors, give the name of the first author followed by 'et al'.
•Where a quotation is used within your paper the author, date and page number should be given, e.g. 'Pain probably disables more people than any single disease entity.' (McCaffery 1979, p.1)
•A list of all references in your manuscript should be typed in alphabetical order. Each reference to a paper needs to include the authors' surnames and initials, year of publication, full title of the paper, full name of the journal, volume number, issue number and first and last page numbers. Do not add unnecessary punctuation.

For example: Aggleton, P., Allen, M., Montgomery, S., 1987. Developing a system for the continuous assessment of practical nursing skills. Nurse Education Today 7 (4), 158-164

References to Books should be given in a slightly different form, as in these examples: Houle, Co., 1972. The Design of Education. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Quinn, S., 1982. Nursing education in the countries of the Common Market. In: Henderson, M.S. (Ed.), Nursing Education. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, pp. 125-140

The digital object identifier (DOI) may be used to cite and link to electronic documents. The DOI consists of a unique alpha-numeric character string which is assigned to a document by the publisher upon the initial electronic publication. The correct format for citing as DOI is shown as follows (example taken from a document in the journal Physics Letters B): doi: 10.1016/j.physletb.2003.10.071

When you use the DOI to create URL hyperlinks to documents on the web, they are guaranteed never to change.

Citing and listing of Web references: As a minimum, the full URL should be given. Any further information, if known (Author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be given. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list.

Conflict of interest
At the end of the text, under a subheading "Conflict of interest statement" all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding.

Funding body agreements and policies
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals, to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards. To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies

Sponsored Articles
Nurse Education in Practice now offers authors the option to sponsor non-subscriber access to individual articles. The access sponsorship contribution fee per article is $3,000. This contribution is necessary to offset publishing costs - from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The sponsorship fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as colour charges which are additional.

Authors can specify that they would like to select this option after receiving notification that their article has been accepted for publication, but not before. This eliminates a potential conflict of interest by ensuring that the journal does not have a financial incentive to accept an article for publication.

PROOFS

One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author (if we do not have an e-mail address then paper proofs will be sent by post). Elsevier now sends PDF proofs which can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 7 available free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrsystemreqs.html#70win. If you do not wish to use the PDF annotations function, you may list the corrections (including replies to the Query Form) and return to Elsevier in an e-mail. Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments (including replies to the Query Form) on a printout of your proof and return by fax, or scan the pages and e-mail, or by post. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that Elsevier may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

OFFPRINTS
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author.

CHECKLIST: Before submitting your paper, please ensure that:
•All files are uploaded
•The reference list is complete and in correct style
•Written permission from original publishers and authors to reproduce any borrowed material has been obtained.
For further information please consult http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Nurse Education in Practice does not have page charges.