Table 1.
The responses from epidemiology and public health-related journals that participated in the survey and agree to have their responses quoted as personal communicationsa.
| Journals | Allow Citations of non-English material? | The format in which the citations must be written | Is a different format recommended for non-Latin characters e.g. Chinese? |
| American Journal of Preventive Medicine | Y | A | "Must be romanized." (personal communication, Charlotte Seidman, 6 February 2008) |
| American Journal of Public Health | Y | A or B. http://www.ajph.org/misc/ama_references.shtml |
"AJPH does not allow non-Latin characters in references. For citations that references foreign sources, a translation [in brackets] must be provided after the original language." (personal communication, Brian Selzer, 20 December 2007) |
| Annals of Epidemiology | Y | A | No. Same format. |
| BMC Medicine | Y | A | "Not really applicable – we can include most characters. The limitations here are related to our ability to mark-up special characters into XML." (personal communication, Melissa Norton, 20 December 2007)* |
| BMC Public Health | Y | A | Same as BMC Medicine. |
| Central European Journal of Public Health | Y | A http://www.szu.cz/svi/cejph/show_en.php?kat=author |
No. Same format. |
| Clinical practice and epidemiology in mental health | Y | C | No. Same format. |
| Emerging Themes in Epidemiology | Y | A | ETE follows the style of BMC Medicine. However, regarding Chinese journal titles, ETE recommends that after spelling out the journal titles on pinyin (romanised Chinese), authors can include the English or Latin translations of the journal title for intelligibility for non-Chinese-speaking readers. |
| Epidemiology | Y | A, B or C "which ever of these the authors provide" (personal communication, Margaret McCann, 18, December 2007)** | "We do not allow the use of non-Latin characters." (personal communication, Margaret McCann, 18 December 2007) |
| Epidemiology and Infection | Y | A | "The journal title will be in Roman letters." (personal communication, Norman Noah, 20 February 2008) |
| European Journal of Cancer Prevention | Y | A | No. Same format. |
| European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation | Y‡ | A | "Not applicable." (personal communication, Phil Daly, 11 January 2008) |
| Injury Prevention | Y | C | "This issue has not arisen to date." (personal communication, Brian Johnston, 18 January 2008) |
| Journal of Public Health Management and Practice | Y | B | No. Same format. |
| Journal of Public Health Policy | Y | A, B or C (often C) | "Our authors have usually translated the reference from non-Latin characters so we have not tried to typeset non-Latin characters" (personal communication, Anthony Robbins, 27 December 2007) |
| Nature (and all journals with "Nature" in title, 38 journals in total, including Nature Clinical Practice journals) † | Y | D. "We follow the authors' usage. Authors generally supply the translation of the title rather than the original language, possibly because of PubMed listings or because foreign-language journals often provide an English-language abstract. If the author supplies a citation in the original language, we do not ask him/her to re-supply in English, but use the language supplied by the author." (personal communication, Maxine Clarke, 7 January 2008) | "Chinese titles are always supplied in English and our sub/copy editors add ' [in Chinese]' after the title if this is obviously the case (it isn't always obvious). We don't receive titles in, e.g., kanji or Cyrillic for our journals, but the Asia-Pacific edition of Nature has several additional translated pages at the front of each weekly issue (title, author names, summary of paper) for the local readership, and websites in Japanese, Korean and Chinese that contain additional material. These additional pages and websites are produced locally in the Asia-Pacific region, where the fonts are standard." (personal communication, Maxine Clarke, 7 January 2008) |
| NPG Academic Journals† | Y | D. "Like the Nature journals, we also tend to follow what is supplied by the author. If the author provides an English translation only then we would indicate this and specify the original language." "If the reference is supplied in the original language then we would publish as supplied (formatted to journal style)." (personal communication, Claire Andrews, 22 January 2008) | "We can also accommodate non-Latin characters, e.g. Chinese." (personal communication, Claire Andrews, 22 January 2008) |
| New England Journal of Medicine | Y | D." Titles of non-English can be given in the original language or in English. If the latter, a parenthetical note indicating the original language appears at the end of the citation" (personal communication, Sarah Fishkin, 20 December 2007) | No. "Citations to material published in non-Latin characters should be translated into English, with a parenthetical note indicating the original language at the end of the citation." (personal communication, Sarah Fishkin, 20 December 2007) |
| Preventive Medicine | Y | C | No. "We have never had this problem. We would keep the original characters if there is no official translation of the title and if no parts of the papers are available in English." |
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Science | Y | A http://www.pnas.org/misc/iforc.shtml |
"We prefer that authors translate foreign titles into English, which helps to increase searchability of the references." (personal communication, Diane Sullenberger, 16 January 2008) |
| Tobacco Control § | Y | D "We would ask authors to translate the title of the paper/book/report into English but leave the name of the journal in the original language." (personal communication, Simon Chapman, 4 January 2008) | "We have never experienced this." (personal communication, Simon Chapman, 4 January 2008) |
| Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene | Y | A | No: "not for Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc. This does not imply any judgement as to the standard of publications in these or any other languages." (personal communication, Bohumil S. Drasar, 15 January 2008) |
a Two journals replied and agreed to participate in this survey, but refused to have their replies cited as personal communication. Therefore, they are not presented in this table.
* The answer for BMC Medicine applies to all BMC-series journals http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/bmcseries#journallist, but does not necessarily apply to all other non-BMC series journals that BioMed Central publishes.
** According to Margaret McCann of Epidemiology (personal communication, 18 December 2007), all journals published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins adhere to the 10th edition of AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors.
‡ European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation's answer was 'a qualified "yes". As an English language publication the editors need to consider the accessibility and value of these sources so that readers also can also make their own assessment of the study results presented' (personal communication, Phil J. Daly, 10 January 2008).
† For the response from Nature and NPG academic journals, we only counted as one journal (Nature) in the denominator of 67 journals. A few other journals published by the NPG were surveyed too were counted individually in the denominator. For a list of NPG journals, please visit http://www.nature.com/siteindex/index.html.
§BMJ Journals have similar policies across all their journals (personal communication, Claire Folkes, 16 January 2008).