Manuscript submission process
Pre-submission process
Submit your manuscript to Lifelines
As stated in the Data and/or Material Agreement (DMTA) you signed at the start of your project, Lifelines would like to receive your manuscript at least two weeks before submission to a journal. You can email your manuscript, including possible supplementary material, to research@lifelines.nl mentioning your Lifelines project code for correct registration.
Response Lifelines
After you submit your manuscript to Lifelines, an employee from the Research Office will review your manuscript regarding adherence to our guidelines, and will email you one of three possible conclusions listed below. Important note: Lifelines will not evaluate the scientific content of your paper.
- Approval: All guidelines from Lifelines have been met and we approve your manuscript. You can go ahead and submit it to the journal.
- Small revision: The Lifelines reviewer noticed that you missed one or a few small details, e.g. one required reference. We ask you to process the necessary changes before submitting your manuscript to the journal, and this concludes our review.
- Larger revision: The Lifelines reviewer noticed several points that we would like to see adjusted, e.g. several missing references and/or the presence of potentially identifiable results. We ask you to process the necessary changes and email us a revised version of your manuscript for a re-evaluation.
(Possible) Media attention
We would love to think along if you are expecting to receive media coverage of your publication or when you are approaching the media yourself. We could utilize our own media platforms as well, to increase the spread of your publication; since sharing is caring! Additionally, if we are aware of (possible) media attention beforehand, we can prepare ourselves for possible questions from participants or researchers that might follow.
Post-publication process
When your manuscript has been published, Lifelines would love to receive this information at research@lifelines.nl including your Lifelines project code and the DOI from your publication (or URL). After we have been notified about a publication we will add the publication to the Lifelines page listing all publications using Lifelines data, increasing the findability of your paper.
Additionally, your publication might be selected for one (or more) of the actions listed below. Please note, that for some of these communications your own input might be requested as well.
- Sharing of your publication on our social media
- Sharing of your publication in our researcher newsletter
- Sharing of your publication in our participant newsletter
- Interview with the principal investigator of the project and/or the first author of the publication (see for example this interview)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
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Updating Lifelines on the progress of your manuscript is always appreciated. We do, however, add publications to our website only after a link/DOI is available.
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For Lifelines all the usual guidelines will apply. However, when you use additional data from another source/party (e.g. from Statistics Netherlands, IADB, IKNL, or your own data) please check their guidelines as well.
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Yes the described process and required references do still apply.
Please note: We (Lifelines) only check for compliance to our own guidelines and not to guidelines from or agreements made with other data sources/parties.
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The short answer is: partially. We do understand that with the specific requirements in these cases it is often not possible to include all references Lifelines requires. However, some aspects should be included:
- Compliance with the "data publication criteria"
- Mentioning "Lifelines" or "Lifelines Cohort Study" in the title or text
- Submitting the poster/report/abstract/conference talk to Lifelines before submission for documentation purposes (also allowing us to possibly share the information on our social media or with our participants)
If possible, it would be highly appreciated when the following reference is included:
"Lifelines is a multi-disciplinary prospective population-based cohort study examining in a unique three-generation design the health and health-related behaviours of 167,729 persons living in the North of the Netherlands. It employs a broad range of investigative procedures in assessing the biomedical, socio-demographic, behavioural, physical and psychological factors which contribute to the health and disease of the general population, with a special focus on multi-morbidity and complex genetics."
