format. All authors have approved the final version of the article. There are no conflicts of interest to declare. We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and hope that you find our revised manuscript suitable for publication in BMC Nephrology. Yours sincerely, on behalf of the co-authors,

objective: several studies have compared ferric sulfate and formocresol pulpotomy in primary molars. the results of these studies, however, could not be compared due to differences in evaluated outcomes (clinical, radiographic, or histologic) and follow up duration. the aim of the present study was a systematic review of similar studies and a metaanalysis of their results to provide the latest ...

ith this issue the journal introduces the first major change in its format in more than nine decades of publication. To be sure, there have been many modifications in typography and details of style during and after the development ofthe familiar format that has characterized theJournal since the early part of this century, but at no time have substantial changes been instituted. It may seem li...

I am pleased to introduce the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), the American Heart Association’s new Open Access journal. The Scientific Publishing Committee created JAHA to align the American Heart Association with recent trends in the publishing industry as readers have moved away from the print version of journals and increasingly seek rapid electronic access to scientific ar...

to present the basic principles and standards of ethics in medical research and publishing, as well as the need for continuing education in the principles and ethics in science and publication in biomedicine. an analysis of relevant materials and documents, sources from the published literature. investing in education of researches and potential researches, already in the level of medical schoo...

In response to a growing need for students to appreciate ethical issues in medical research and publication, a brief team-based learning (TBL) course was presented to graduate students in the medical school of Hallym University in October and November 2007. To gather information as a basis for improving the course, questionnaires were distributed to 19 students and the feedback was evaluated. T...

Two complementary de facto standards for the publication of electronic documents are HTML on the World Wide Web and Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) language for use with Acrobat viewers. Both these formats provide support for hypertext features to be embedded within documents. We present a method, which allows links and other hypertext material to be kept in an abstract form in separate ...

More knowledge about Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing on the web would be helpful for citation data mining and the development of Web-based citation indexes. In the current study, five characteristics of 545 OA citing sources targeting OA research articles in four science and four social science disciplines were manually identified, including file format, hyperlinking, Internet domain, lan...

FASTQ has emerged as a common file format for sharing sequencing read data combining both the sequence and an associated per base quality score, despite lacking any formal definition to date, and existing in at least three incompatible variants. This article defines the FASTQ format, covering the original Sanger standard, the Solexa/Illumina variants and conversion between them, based on public...