Data Supplements in Blood - Instructions for Authors

Data supplements can be special figures, materials & methods, special tables, or other items that add to the topic of the article but not substantially enough for inclusion within the body of the article. They can be items that are not printable, such as videos or long gene sequences.

Though the journal permits references inside the article to certain, non-commercial Web sites, the preference is for documents of a manageable quantity and filesize that are currently stored on another Web site to be stored on Blood Online as supplements, especially if the Web site on which they are currently posted is not sponsored by a university or government institution.

Data supplements can be published online only after approval by the editors following peer review. Authors must include the supplement in all submissions of the manuscript in Blood Bench>Press, even with revisions. Along with the supplement, please upload a separate document in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format consisting of a legend for each supplemental document. Do not refer to a supplement in the text of your manuscript unless you have uploaded it as well.

Non-Video Formats

Authors may upload supplemental documents in the following formats:

HTML (.htm or .html);
Simple rich text format (.rtf) or plain text (.txt), both of which will be converted into HTML for posting on to Blood’s Web site;
Graphic formats: JPEG (.jpeg or .jpg), GIF (.gif), TIFF (.tif), Windows bitmap (.bmp), or Portable Network Graphic (.png) &mdash any format other than JPEG or GIF will be converted into an appropriately sized JPEG for posting;
Adobe (.pdf);
PostScript (.ps) or Encapsulated PostScript (.eps), both of which will be converted into PDF;
PowerPoint (.ppt), which will be converted into PDF;
Complex Microsoft Word (.doc) or rich text format (.rtf), both of which will be converted into PDF;
Excel workbooks or spreadsheets (.xls); and
Comma-separated variables (.csv) or tab-delimited text (.txt containing quotation marks surrounding your fields and commas or tabs as the separator between each field), both of which will be converted into XLS.

Video Formats

Videos may be uploaded in one of the following formats:

QuickTime (.mov);
Audio Video Interleave (.avi);
Windows Media (.wmv);
Moving Pictures Expert Group (.mpeg or .mpg); and
Shockwave/Flash Format (.swf).

Submit all videos at the desired size and length. To avoid excessive delays for users accessing them on their Web browsers or downloading them, keep videos to fewer than 5 MB in size, normally running between 30 and 45 seconds in length. To control the filesize of MOV videos, use QuickTime’s “compress” option. Cropping frames and image sizes can also significantly reduce filesizes, and videos can be looped to play more than once, provided filesize does not become excessive.

Authors will be notified if problems exist with submitted data supplements or if an item, such as a legend, is missing and needed prior to posting. The journal’s staff will not edit the content of a supplemental document, but staff may change its dimensions and/or its format, may combine individual pieces &mdash such as subsets A and B &mdash into a single view or a single document, and may remove surrounding white space.

The data supplement and corresponding legend (unedited) will be posted alongside the article in Blood First Edition, though the supplement’s posting will not be instantaneous to the article’s posting. For subsequent production toward print in a regular issue of the journal, staff will copyedit the legend and show results of the copyediting to the author for approval. Corrected legends will appear after the article’s posting in a regular issue of the journal.

More information about QuickTime is available at Quicktime Tutorials.

For questions and/or to send a supplement on a disc or CD in case upload was not successful, contact

Andrew Harmon
Technical Content Editor, Blood
1900 M St. NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
202-552-4900 (tel)
202-776-0549 (fax)
aharmon{at}hematology.org