Preparation of abstracts of communications to the Australian Physiological Society

D.G. Allen and D.F. Davey, Discipline of Physiology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.

Abstracts must be submitted through the Society's web site (see Davey, 2007 for details). The style should conform to the examples provided, including this abstract. The precise formatting of the title, authors and author addresses will be managed by the server software. Authors should concern themselves primarily with the body of the abstract.

Length. The entire abstract must fit on a single A4 page with 11pt type. For guidance, this is a maximum of about 800 words.

Title. The title should be in grammatical English. It should be comprehensible and meaningful in the table of contents and programme. Avoid abbreviations that are specific to a narrow field.

Name(s) and Institute address of author(s). The name of the author who will present the communication should be listed first. The address(es) should identify where the work was done, but may indicate other institutional affiliations and/or present addresses. For free communication abstracts, where no author is a Society member there must be an introducing member who will be identified in parentheses immediately following the address i.e. (Introduced by ...........). The precise formatting of the by-line will be managed by the web server.

Text. The text should contain enough detail to be self-explanatory. Abstracts must contain reasons for the work, methods employed, results obtained and conclusions drawn. The text should not make reference to the talk that will be given. These do not assist a reader, especially after the meeting. Statements such as "the results will be discussed" are unacceptable. If abbreviations are used they must be defined at first appearance (but not in the title). S.I. units should be used as recommended by Baron (1988). For statistical notation see McCance (2001). Latin and other non-English words should appear in Italics.

Citations. Use the Harvard system as employed by the Journal of Physiology. Work by three or more authors may be cited using the form Aitkin et al. (1993) (e.g.) unless it will lead to confusion.

References. The cited works must be listed after the text, alphabetically by the authors' surnames, then chronologically if necessary. The reference must include all authors' names, year of publication, optionally title of article, abbreviated title of the journal using the standard PubMed form in Italics, volume number in bold, and first and last pages of the article. For a book, include the title, editor, edition if applicable, specific page references if applicable, city of publication and publisher (see, e.g., Baron, 1988).

Footnotes. Footnotes should be avoided if possible as they are not well suited to web presentation.

Figure. Figures (line drawing or half tone) can be included, but generally should be restricted to one. It should bear no title or legend and be unnumbered. Its location should be within the text (not before or after), be appropriately described in the text and referred to as "the Figure". Lettering should be approximately 11 pt.

Table. Only one table is permitted. It should be included in the appropriate position in the text. It should have no number, title or legend and be referred to as "the Table".

Animal Experiments. Note that Domestic rule 11(5) states that "All abstracts that deal with animal experimentation in vivo should include the names, doses (where applicable) and modes of administration of all anaesthetic, tranquilizing and muscle relaxant drugs employed". Users of in vitro materials should make it clear that tissue was removed from anaesthetised or dead animals. The inclusion of such information is for the protection of authors and the Society.

Baron DN. (1988) In: Units, Symbols and Abbreviations, ed. Baron DN. pp. 1-64. London: The Royal Society of Medicine.

Davey DF. (2007) On-line submission of abstracts to the Australian Physiological Society. http://aups.org.au/Proceedings/submission.html

McCance I. (2001) Proc Aust Physiol Pharmacol Soc, 32(1): 2P.