 Hello, my name is Roger Watson and I'm the editor-in-chief of North Education and Practice, which is published by Elsevier. I want to talk to you today briefly about what editors are looking for when a manuscript is submitted. Make sure that the article adheres to ethical standards in two ways. First of all, that it adheres to ethical standards for research. It's absolutely essential if you're using human participants that you explain how ethical permission was obtained and how the human participants were consented. And that has to be explained in the article and that will be checked before your article goes into the submissions into the review system. And if your country has got slightly different ethical arrangements for different kinds of research from other countries, then you need to explain that as well. So not every country, for example, requires you to have ethical permission for survey research in the same way as you would for a clinical trial. But you need to explain that and explain it credibly and some journals will require you to provide proof of that. The other aspect of ethics is publication ethics and essentially your article should not be too similar to other sources. And all good leading publishers now use similarity detection software, for example, authenticate, but there are other platforms available to check your manuscript. This will be done by someone in the journal office at the journal desk. So these days you have to make quite clear that your article isn't similar to other sources that you won't be accused of duplication or plagiarism. However, these days publishers and most journals are strongly encouraging the pre-printing of articles on official pre-printing sites or public repositories. If you pre-print your article and then it goes to the journal, it will be picked up as being almost 100% similar to the pre-print. So the way to get round that, you can't get round it in terms of it being detected, is that you first of all should check that the journals accept pre-printed articles. Not absolutely all journals do, most are moving that way now under open science. But if they do, and this is picked up, then the way to do it of course is to cover yourself by giving a link to the pre-print. You can do that on the title page, make it clear to the editors and possibly even to the reviewers that it has been pre-printed. And there are various ways in which you are able to make that anonymous, of course, to the reviewers, but that will be specified in the guidance for the journal. So if you've pre-printed an article, do make sure you've declared that. You could possibly declare it in the covering letter or wherever, as long as you've declared it then you're covered. The Committee on Publication Ethics is also encouraging editors to be more lenient about the method section of papers, which are often similar to other similar method sections from other papers, perhaps ones you've published yourself or even to other papers by other people. There are only so many ways in which methods can be written up. Again, be prepared to defend that if you're challenged about the extent of similarity in your article. Always think about these things and think how you're going to explain it. And if you give a credible explanation then that is okay and you can't be accused subsequently once the article is published of having committed a breach of ethics, for example duplication or plagiarism. So those are all the points that I want to cover, but one final thing to do before you submit your article is to make sure that you've checked through it to make sure that all the components are there. And for example that the abstract is there, that the tables and the figures are there and that the references are included. And the submission systems for most leading publishers will guide you through the process of submission and you will not be able to finally submit the paper until you've completed everything that they request. For example, you will have to upload an abstract separately. You probably have to upload or write a covering letter to the editor separately. And if there are tables and figures, most leading journals but not all again check the guidance but most require the tables and the figures to be uploaded separately from the main manuscript and not included in the manuscript. And therefore you've got to make sure that in your manuscript you've referred to all of the tables and that you've referred to them in the correct order and that they are all uploaded at the journal site before you finally create the PDF of the paper for checking and then submitting. So in summary, the basic requirement for making sure that you get past the editor-in-chief and to address what the editor-in-chief is looking for at the submission stage is to read the guidance. Things like length, layout and organisation. If your second language is English, please have at some stage a native English speaker to check over the English to make sure it's being used correctly. Make sure that you've followed all the conventions for that journal. For example, Prisma charts and Consort charts, Equator guidance for specific kinds of papers. Make sure that you've addressed the issue of similarity if that's likely to exist. And finally, before you press the submit button, check that all the components of the article are there before it's submitted. So good luck with your next submission. I hope these points have been helpful and thank you very much for listening.