ABSTRACT FORMAT
These instructions give general guidance for format although the electronic submission tool will format much of your abstract automatically. However, you are strongly advised to pre-prepare your abstract, using the guidance notes below, before attempting to submit your work online. Although data tables are permitted other figures and graphs/diagrams are no longer allowed as part of an abstract submission.
The number of words is limited strictly to 400 excluding the title, authors and affiliations, but including the references or 300 words if a simple table with a short table title are included. Each word or number is counted as one word whether it is one character or 10 characters long. (The previous sentence has a word count of 18).
All authors should be listed using surname and given name plus any other initial(s). Please omit all titles, degrees, academic appointments and post-nominals and do not separate initials with punctuation e.g. Smith, Martin P or Jones, J Charles.
One of the authors must be nominated to make the presentation (this individual may be different to the submitting author, and in exceptional circumstances changes may be permitted upon request to the congress secretariat).
The affiliation must comprise ONLY department name, institution, city and country.
Author names and affiliations will be printed in Clinical Toxicology as well as all congress programmes as they are provided to the abstract submission tool. Please make sure these are correct and consistent, particularly if you submit more than one abstract. It is also important that names are consistent for the author index.
The body of the abstract should be organised as outlined below. You must include the words in bold in the body of your abstract. There is additional guidance for case reports, case series and non-clinical studies – see below.
Objective: A statement of the purpose or reason for the report.
Methods: A brief description of the study design.
Results: A summary of the results presented in sufficient detail to support the conclusion.
Data must be presented in the abstract. Statements such as “the results will be presented” or “other data will be presented to support....” will result in automatic rejection of the abstract.
Conclusion: A statement of the conclusion based on the data presented.
References: Remember that references will be included in the word count.
All references should appear at the end of the abstract in numerical order as they appear in the text. Ensure references are cited in the text by bracketed numbers [1].
Follow the referencing style below. In general, the number of references used should be limited to 5 or less. References will be printed as entered in the abstract submission tool, so please ensure these are correct and complete to enable your colleagues to find the articles or book chapters cited.
References for Journal articles should be formatted as in the following example: Giannini L, Vannacci A, Missanelli A, et al. Amatoxin poisoning: a 15-year retrospective analysis and follow-up evaluation of 105 patients. Clin Toxicol 2007;45:539-42.
References for Book chapters should be formatted as follows: Goadsby PJ. Pathophysiology of headache. In: Silberstein SD, Lipton RB, Dalessio DJ, eds. Wolff's headache and other head pain. 7th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001:57-72.
For case reports or case series, the words Case report: or Case series: replace the Methods: and Results: headings. Otherwise, the format should remain the same (Objective, Case report/Case series, Conclusion).
Reports of non-clinical studies, such as those describing poisons centre operations or educational tools should attempt to follow these guidelines as closely as possible.
Other formatting guidance
Please do NOT use automatic Word® functions, e.g. numbering, bullet points or footnotes.
Use only standard abbreviations. As there is no incentive to using smaller words, non-standard and extensive abbreviations will only detract from your abstract’s acceptability. Numbers may be used to replace words, e.g. 5 rather than five, though the word count remains the same.
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