Taylor & Francis
Prepare your manuscript for Journal of Loss and Trauma.
Review the checklist, choose your article type, and turn your draft into a cleaner submission package.
Checked 2026-08-01
Article types
Review
Clinical Trial
Perspective
Research Article
Letter to the Editor
Book Review
Review Article
Brief Communication
Editorial
Lectio
Protocol
Case Report
Systematic Review
Readiness requirements
Review the key details below, or download the complete checklist with every stored source-backed requirement.
Abstract length
- Provide an author-written abstract of no more than 250 words.
- Use a unstructured abstract.
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- Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
- Abstract (250 words) must be emailed to the Special Issue Editor to receive invitation to submit a manuscript.
- This limit includes the text but excludes the title page, abstract, acknowledgments, declaration of interest statement, references, appendices, tables, and figures, all of which must be formatted in accordance with APA 7th edition style.
- LTEs should not include abstract or keywords.
- Trial registration numbers should be included in the abstract, with full details in the methods section.
- Your abstract should focus on what your research is about, what methods have been used, and what you found out.
- It should not contain an abstract.
- The instructions for authors for each journal will give specific guidelines on what’s required here, including whether it should be a structured abstract or graphical abstract, and any word limits.
Keywords
- Provide up to 5 keywords chosen by the author.
- Should contain no more than 5 keywords.
Reference style
- Articlo formats your supplied references in APA style and checks that citations match the reference list; source validity is not verified.
- LTEs should be succinct and thus within 1,000 words or 4 pages (double-spaced with APA 7 th writing style), without references, a title page, and bio.
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- Review / Book Review: The book review should be within 1,200 words (or 1,000 words without references and book information).
- LTEs should deliver a clear message in response to a publication within the journal and provide a citation.
- A reference list should be included when other sources than the reviewed book are discussed.
- Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text.
- If you reply yes, you will be required to provide the DOI, pre-registered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s).
- The DAS should include the hyperlink, DOI or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s), or information on how the data can be requested from the authors.
- A declaration must be included within the submission stating: Confirmation the authors take full responsibility for the integrity of the whole content, including accuracy of references.
Figure and table rules
- Keep every figure and table numbered, captioned, and cited in the manuscript. Keep figures embedded; Articlo also extracts numbered source files for the package.
- Group figures at the end of the manuscript.
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- Group tables at the end of the manuscript.
- Figures should be high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour, at the correct size).
- Tables and figures Show clearly in your article text where the tables and figures should appear, for example, by writing [Table 1 near here].
- Figures should be saved separately from the text.
- Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text.
- It’s very important that you have been given permission to use any tables or figures you are reproducing from another source before you submit.
- Figures should be supplied in one of our preferred file formats: PS, JPEG, TIFF, or Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) files are acceptable for figures that have been drawn in Word.
- Check the instructions for authors to see how you should supply tables and figures, whether at the end of the text or in separate files, and follow any guidance given on the submission system.
Funding statement
- You should declare only the acquired funds and grants that are directly relevant to the work reported in your article; for example, This work was supported by the [Funding Agency #1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency #2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency #3] under Grant [number xxxx].
Competing interests
- Include or confirm the competing interests required by the journal. Articlo checks this item and flags anything that still needs author input.
Data availability statement
- Add or confirm the author-written Data availability statement; Articlo flags it if author input is still needed.
- Authors are required to provide a data availability statement, detailing where data associated with a paper can be found and how it can be accessed.
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- If data cannot be made open, authors should state why in the data availability statement.
- Authors are required to cite any data sets referenced in the article and provide a Data Availability Statement.
- Articles need to meet the Open Science Badges criteria in order to earn a badge.
Ethics statement
- Add or confirm the author-written Ethics statement; Articlo flags it if author input is still needed.
- In settings where ethics approval for non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys) is not required, authors must include a statement to explain this.
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- Authors should familiarise themselves with our policy on participant/patient privacy and informed consent.
- Review: All original research papers involving humans, animals, plants, biological material, protected or non-public datasets, collections or sites, must include a written statement in the Methods section, confirming ethical approval has been obtained from the appropriate local ethics committee or Institutional Review Board and that where relevant, informed consent has been obtained.
- Editorial: Consent All authors are required to follow the ICMJE requirements and Taylor & Francis Editorial Policies on privacy and informed consent from patients and study participants.
- Authors must include a statement to confirm that any patient, service user, or participant (or that person’s parent or legal guardian) in any type of qualitative or quantitative research, has given informed consent to participate in the research.
- Case Report: a clinical case report detailing their medical history, identifiable images or media content, etc), authors must include a statement to confirm that they have obtained written informed consent to publish the details from the affected individual (or their parents/guardians if the participant in not an adult or unable to give informed consent; or next of kin if the participant is deceased).
- Case Report: For submissions where patients or participants can be potentially identified (e.g.
Cover letter
- Using Third-Party Material You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article.
- Review: The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission.
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- If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.
Author contributions
- Submitting authors should be prepared to submit CRediT roles for themselves and their co-authors (where applicable) as part of the submission process.
Title page and author information
- All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript.
- One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article.
Article structure and word limits
- Text should appear in 12-point Times New Roman or other common 12-point font.
- All titles should be as brief as possible, 6 to 12 words.
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- This could be adapted from your departmental website or academic networking profile and should be relatively brief (e.g. no more than 200 words).
- Margins Margins should be at least 2.5cm (1 inch).
- Title should be no longer than 12 words.
- All manuscripts, regardless of whether they utilize quantitative or qualitative data, and whether they are theoretical or empirical, should be limited to a maximum of 6,000 words or 20 pages.
- Review: These instructions will ensure we have everything required so your paper can move through peer review, production and publication smoothly.
- Your research funder or your institution may require you to publish your article open access.
- Use our APC finder to view the APC for this journal.
- Research Article: Research Articles must address the topics in the field of loss and trauma, broadly defined.
- All research papers must use the established guidelines.
- Brief Communication / Editorial: LTE, a brief communication to a journal’s editorial team, must be written in response to a publication within the Journal of Loss and Trauma.
- Editorial: Should adhere to the guideline set by the Special Issue editorial team.
- SI proposal should address the aims, motivation, list of potential contributors, and timelines, with the brief bio of guest co-editor(s).
- Editorial: One of the Editorial Board members must agree to collaborate.
- The main document should be double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides, and all pages should be numbered consecutively.
- For all NIH/Welcome-funded papers, the grant number(s) must be included in the declaration of interest statement.
- Clinical Trial: Clinical trials should be registered prospectively – i.e. before participant recruitment.
- Editorial: Authors of retrospectively registered trials must be prepared to provide further information to the journal editorial office if requested.
- Clinical Trial: The clinical trial registry should be publicly accessible (at no charge), open to all prospective registrants, and managed by a not-for-profit organization.
- All research studies on humans (individuals, samples, or data) must have been performed in accordance with the principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki.
- Please include all relevant safety precautions; and cite any accepted standard or code of practice.
- You will also need to upload your LaTeX source files, which should be uploaded as a single zip file alongside your submission and marked as “LaTeX Source Files”.
- Before you submit your article, make sure you’ve checked the instructions for authors for your chosen journal, so you are aware of everything required.
- Most journals create image descriptions during the production process, but a minority may require authors to provide image descriptions.
- Review: Running heads and received dates These aren’t required when submitting a manuscript for review.
- A declaration must be included within the submission stating: Originality and accuracy of content has been confirmed by the authors.
- Authors must provide full methodological details and adhere to relevant reporting guidelines where applicable.
- Authors must retain the original and revised versions which must be shared upon request.
- The PLSP guidelines for authors must be followed at all times.
- If you submit a paper to a participating journal, you will then receive an email upon submission with: Details of the badges offered by the journal.
- If you submit a paper to a participating journal, you will then receive an email upon submission with: Links to additional information.
- If you submit a paper to a participating journal, you will then receive an email upon submission with: An open practices disclosure form.
- If you submit a paper to a participating journal, you will then receive an email upon submission with: The journal editor’s email address.
- Please use SI units (non-italicized).
- Clinical Trial: Clinical Trials Registry In order to be published in a Taylor & Francis journal, all clinical trials must have been registered in a public repository, ideally at the beginning of the research process (prior to participant recruitment).
- The process of obtaining consent to publish should include sharing the article with the individual (or whoever is consenting on their behalf), so that they are fully aware of the content of the article before it is published.
- Please note that data should only be shared if it is ethically correct to do so, where this does not violate the protection of human subjects, or other valid ethical, privacy, or security concerns.
- Special characters If you are preparing your manuscript in Microsoft Word and your article contains special characters, accents, or diacritics, we recommend you follow these steps: European accents (Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic letters, or phonetic symbols): choose Times New Roman font from the dropdown menu in the “Insert symbol” window and insert the character you require.
- Special characters If you are preparing your manuscript in Microsoft Word and your article contains special characters, accents, or diacritics, we recommend you follow these steps: Asian languages (such as Sanskrit, Korean, Chinese, or Japanese): choose Arial Unicode font from the dropdown menu in the “Insert symbol” window and insert the character you require.
- Such as: The standards on Data, Materials, and Analytical Code Transparency speak to the items generated over the course of the study and how you should preserve or share them.
- Should be written with the following elements in the following order: See below for detailed information.
- Review / Book Review: To receive an invitation to submit a book review manuscript, the following should be emailed to the Editor, Dr.
- If you are at the early stage of your research, you may also need to read how to start writing a journal manuscript.
- Image descriptions are typically used by systems such as pronouncing screen readers to make images accessible to people that cannot read or see the object due to a visual disability.
- COS currently offers three badges in its program: The Open Materials badge is earned by making publicly available the components of the research methodology needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis.
Reporting guidelines
- Include or confirm the reporting guidelines required by the journal. Articlo checks this item and flags anything that still needs author input.
Preprints and prior publication
- If you have shared an earlier version of your Author’s Original Manuscript on a preprint server, please be aware that anonymity cannot be guaranteed.
Artificial intelligence disclosure
- Add or confirm the author-written Artificial intelligence statement; Articlo flags it if author input is still needed.
- Please include a statement disclosing whether and how generative AI has been used in the research and manuscript preparation process.
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- Use of AI tools as part of ethical research studies is permitted.
- A declaration must be included within the submission stating: The name and version number of the AI tool used.
- Systematic Review: Use of AI tools as part of ethically conducted literature reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analysis and bibliometrics studies is permitted.
- Use of AI tool assisted plain language summaries (PLS) of authors own work is permitted.
- Please read our guidance on using AI tools in your research and manuscript preparation to understand scenarios where their use may be permissible, and the required information that must be disclosed.
- A declaration must be included within the submission stating: Confirmation the authors have checked terms of use for the specific AI tool used, and therefore confirm suitability for publication.
Article type and manuscript length
- Exceptions are permitted for papers addressing multiple studies, mixed methods, and meta-analytical reviews; these manuscripts may extend to a maximum length of 9,000 words or 35 pages, excluding the title page, abstract, acknowledgments, declaration of interest statement, references, appendices, tables, and figures.
- Should be written with the following elements in the following order: main text, references, and author biography.
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- Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (on individual pages).
- Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list).
Blinded manuscript
- Review: Manuscripts should be submitted in two files (with and without including authors’ information), as the journal uses a double-anonymous peer review policy.
- The PDF should be uploaded as the “Manuscript - with author details”/“Manuscript - anonymous” file.
Manuscript structure
- Editorial: Special issues (SI), a collection of 6-12 papers, with an introduction, centered around a topic in the field of loss and trauma, should be led by Guest Co-Editor(s) who collaborate with one of the Editorial Board members of the Journal of Loss and Trauma.
- Research Article: For example, research articles (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods studies) must adhere to the content delineated in the JARS standards for acceptance.
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- Research Article: Please refer to the above section of Research Articles for the required format/guidelines.
- Review / Book Review: The book review must include several paragraphs describing the central ideas or arguments of the book, originality as well as contribution to the field of loss and trauma, and the conclusion such as your critique and recommendation.
- Headings This will show you the different levels of the heading section in your article: First-level headings (e.g. Introduction, Conclusion) should be in bold, with an initial capital letter for any proper nouns.
- Authors must retain full records of the methods undertaken, including full descriptions and records of the prompts used, which must be shared with the journal upon request.
- Clinical Trial: However, for clinical trials that have not been registered prospectively, Taylor & Francis journals requires retrospective registration to ensure the transparent and complete dissemination of all clinical trial results which ultimately impact human health.
Study reporting guidelines
- For animal studies, approval must have been obtained from the local or institutional animal use and care committee.
- Authors must provide full methodological details and adhere to relevant reporting guidelines where applicable (e.g. CONSORT-AI, STARD-AI, GAMER, TRIPOD-AI, etc).
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- Review: Review articles must adhere to PRISMA.
Language and text style
- Please use American spelling style consistently throughout your manuscript.
- Please use double quotation marks, except where “a quotation is ‘within’ a quotation”.
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- Please note that long quotations should be indented without quotation marks.
- Headings This will show you the different levels of the heading section in your article: Fourth-level headings should be in bold italics, at the beginning of a paragraph.
- Headings This will show you the different levels of the heading section in your article: Fifth-level headings should be in italics, at the beginning of a paragraph.
- Headings This will show you the different levels of the heading section in your article: Second-level headings should be in bold italics, with an initial capital letter for any proper nouns.
- Headings This will show you the different levels of the heading section in your article: Third-level headings should be in italics, with an initial capital letter for any proper nouns.
What your package checks
Abstract: 250 words
Paper: 9,000 words
Keywords: Up to 5 keywords
References: APA
Declarations: Data availability, Ethics, Artificial intelligence
Format: Times New Roman, double spacing, 1" margins
Source transparency
This preparation guide uses published journal-specific author requirements. Journal instructions can change, so authors should complete a final review before submission.
Open official guideline source