Author Guidelines

RESOURCES

Download the PDF of our full Author Guidelines

Download the PDF of our Ethical Policies

Download the PDF of our Submission Checklist

Author Guidelines

AIMS AND SCOPE

Obesity is the premier source of information for increasing knowledge, fostering translational research from basic to population science, and promoting better treatment for people with obesity. Obesity is published 12 times per year and is a forum where knowledge on the cutting edge of discovery can be disseminated to medical and health professionals and researchers. Manuscripts should have a central theme of improving the understanding of obesity, including nutrition, exercise/physical activity, diabetes, obesity pharmacotherapy, bariatric surgery, public health, pediatrics, basic science, eating disorders, psychology, and genetics. Confirmatory findings and incremental advances will take second place to new observations, scientific excellence being equal. Epidemiological studies will be expected to provide insights into causes or potential treatments of obesity and related diseases. Studies identifying new pathways or first-in-human observations are encouraged. Most published papers are quantitative; however, very high-quality qualitative studies will be considered if they provide novel information that improves obesity treatment.

Article categories

Articles will be published under one of four categories. Your study may overlap categories, but select the type that best describes your manuscript.

• Obesity Biology and Integrated Physiology
• Clinical Trials and Investigations
• Pediatric Obesity
• Epidemiology/Genetics

Article types

Manuscripts published by Obesity include:

• Original Articles
• Brief Cutting Edge Reports
• Reviews and Invited Reviews
• Perspectives
• Commentaries
• Letters to the Editor
• Editorials

Articles (in English) should be submitted via our electronic system at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/obesity.

Editorial Policies

Manuscript submissions are considered on the following conditions:

• Your manuscript must be original and not be published or submitted for publication elsewhere in any language. Submission as an abstract or on a community preprint server is not considered to constitute previous publication.
• All coauthors have fulfilled each of the following criteria—(1) have made a substantial contribution to research design or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; (2) have drafted the paper or revised it critically; and (3) have approved the submitted and final versions.
• All coauthors have declared all competing interests.
• All work complies with the Ethical Policies of Obesity and has been conducted under internationally accepted ethical standards after relevant ethical review. It is imperative that authors read this policy and complete any necessary documentation prior to submission.

The journal operates a stringent peer-review process. All manuscripts will be reviewed by the Editors, members of the Editorial Team, or other expert reviewers. At the discretion of the Editors, the manuscript may be returned immediately without full review if deemed not competitive (not within the top 50% for originality and quality) or outside the realm of interests of the majority of the readership of the journal. Acceptance of papers is based on the originality of the observation or investigation; the quality of the work described; the clarity of presentation; and the relevance to our readership. All manuscripts are judged in relation to other submissions currently under consideration. The decision (reject, invite revision, accept) letter will be conveyed through the Obesity Manuscript Central (ScholarOne Manuscripts) system, coming directly from the Editors responsible for the manuscript's review. On average, manuscripts submitted in 2023 that were sent for external peer review took an average of 34.8 days to reach a decision.

This journal employs a plagiarism detection system. By submitting your manuscript, you accept that your manuscript may be screened for plagiarism against previously published works.

Most obesity-related topics are suitable for submission if they fall within the scope outlined above. Occasionally, authors inquire whether they should submit their manuscript. It is not possible for the Editorial Office to speculate on whether an article is likely to be accepted or not. The only way to know is to submit your manuscript, which can be done at no charge to you. The editors at Obesity are committed to providing a fast, but thorough, review of your submission.

Cost of Publication

There are no submission fees to have your manuscript considered for publication in Obesity. However, if accepted, you will incur page charges. The authors will be assessed $65 per published page if a first or corresponding author is a member of The Obesity Society or $95 per published page if a first or corresponding author is not a member of The Obesity Society. Please see “Publication Charges” below for complete details.

To join The Obesity Society and receive reduced rates, please visit the TOS website. Please be aware, however, that all manuscripts accepted for publication are chosen based on an objective peer-review process and merit alone and are not influenced by TOS membership status.

Publication Ethics

Obesity is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and subscribes to its recommendations in the COPE guidelines on good publication practice. Best practice guidelines and more information about publication ethics are also available from Wiley, our publisher. The editors reserve the right to reject a paper on ethical grounds. All authors are responsible for adhering to guidelines on good publication practice.

Content Generated by Artificial Intelligence

Nonhuman artificial intelligence (AI), language models, machine learning, or similar technologies cannot be considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction by human authors. They also cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship, nor do they have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. Therefore—in accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools—these tools do not qualify for authorship and cannot be listed as an author of an article.

If an author has used this kind of AI tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Acknowledgements section or Methods section (if part of formal research design or methods). Authors are fully responsible for the accuracy of any information provided by the tool and for correctly referencing any supporting work on which that information depends. Tools that are used to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing are not included in the scope of these guidelines.

The final decision about whether use of an AI tool is appropriate or permissible in the circumstances of a submitted manuscript or a published article lies with the journal’s editor or other party responsible for the publication’s editorial policy.

Conflicts of Interest

All authors are required to sign the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest and provide a copy to the corresponding author before submission. The corresponding author must then compile a full Disclosure statement that accurately reflects what each author has disclosed and include this Disclosure statement on the Title Page of the Main Document. It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to store the ICMJE forms and to provide them to the Editorial Office if requested at any time. Do not send these forms to the Editorial Office and do not upload them to the ScholarOne submission site.

Avoiding Pejorative Language and Images

The Obesity Society’s policy is that journal content must not use potentially pejorative adjectives or adverbs when describing individuals with overweight or obesity, as well as language that directly or indirectly attributes moral judgments or character flaws to this population. Importantly, authors should not use “obese” as an adjective or noun to describe an individual person or group of people, but instead use terms such as “people with obesity” (not “obese people” or “people who are obese”). This also includes language and images that could be interpreted as stereotyping, biased, or prejudiced.

Preprints

Obesity will consider for review articles previously available as preprints on noncommercial servers. Authors may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to noncommercial servers at any time. The details of the preprint server and any accession numbers should be included in your cover letter. Authors are also requested to update any prepublication versions with a link to the final published article.

Language Editing

Obesity peer reviewers are asked to indicate whether submitted manuscripts would require English language editing before publication. To reduce the possibility of negative reviewer comments in this area, we strongly encourage non-native English speakers to have their manuscript reviewed by an English-speaking colleague or to use an English language editing service such as Wiley Editing Services. An editor will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and will identify any problems that require your review.

Please note that the use of a language editing service is at the author's own expense and does not guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted.

At the discretion of the Editorial Team, manuscripts may receive provisional acceptance upon the condition of English language editing.

Ethical Approval and Informed Consent

For all manuscripts reporting data from studies involving human participants or animals, formal review and approval, or formal review and waiver, by an appropriate institutional review board or ethics committee is required and should be described in the Methods section.

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. For investigations of humans, state in the Methods section the complete name of the ethics committee (and reference number if available).

For primary research manuscripts reporting experiments on live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates, the manuscript must include a statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details regarding animal welfare.

Visual Abstracts

Obesity encourages the submission of visual (graphical) abstracts in order to draw more attention to research published in our journal. You may also be invited by our editorial team to submit a visual abstract. The visual abstract should summarize the contents of the article in a concise, pictorial form designed to capture the attention of a wide readership. Visual abstracts can be shared and reproduced by authors including in social media and at conferences provided that the abstract is attributed with a proper citation.

These images should be submitted as a separate file in the online submission system with “visual abstract” in the file name. Guidelines: JPEG, TIFF, EPS, or PDF file format, within dimensions of 5x5 inches, at 300dpi, or 1500x1500 pixels. Avoid graphs and other figures with fine detail due to the relatively small size of this image.

Image Screening

All figures of your manuscript will undergo an integrity check. In case of any doubt, raw data will be requested. Publication will proceed on the condition that all final files comply with the journal integrity checks. In the event that any file does not comply with our integrity checks, the journal reserves the right to rescind an acceptance, or, alternatively, you may be contacted to resolve any concerns raised by these checks.

STANDARDS OF REPORTING FOR RIGOR AND REPRODUCIBILITY

 Clinical Trials

Clinical trial registration – All clinical trials, regardless of when they were completed, must be pre-registered. A clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human participants to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes. Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome, including but not limited to drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, and dietary changes. Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events.

PLEASE NOTE: For clinical trials starting participant enrollment after July 2005, trials must have been registered before onset of patient enrollment. For trials that began before July 2005 but that were not registered before September 13, 2005, trials must have been registered before journal submission.

Acceptable registries must be accessible to the public at no charge, open to all prospective registrants, managed by a not-for-profit organization, and electronically searchable, and they must have a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data. The trial registry name, registration identification number, and URL for the registry should be included on the article Title Page. Examples of acceptable trial registries include the following:

http://www.clinicaltrials.gov

http://www.anzctr.org.au

http://isrctn.org

http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr

https://eudract.ema.europa.eu/

For more information on these policies, please see the ICMJE recommendations.

Data sharing statement – All manuscripts reporting the results of clinical trials must include a data sharing plan in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript. The following must be specified:

• Will individual deidentified participant data be available (including data dictionaries)? If so, what data in particular will be shared and when (start and end dates)?
• What other documents will be available (e.g., study protocol, statistical analysis plan)?
• With whom will data be shared, for what types of analyses, and by what mechanism?

Please see the ICMJE recommendations (table) for examples of data sharing statements meeting these requirements.

Required Checklists

Depending on the design of the study, one of the health research reporting checklists referenced at the EQUATOR Network (http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/) must accompany the first version of each manuscript as a “supplementary file” in the online manuscript submission system. Page or line numbers must be included to indicate where the checklist items are located in your paper. Participant flowcharts also should be included whenever possible, especially with manuscripts that require the CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, or ARRIVE checklists. Include the participant flowchart either as part of the full paper or as part of the Online Supporting Material. For randomized trials, publication of the CONSORT diagram as one of the article figures may be required at the discretion of the Editorial Team (for trials with >50 participants).If your study did not include participants, please use the flowchart to demonstrate your selection process for the data included in your analysis.

If none of the checklists apply to your study, please explain in your cover letter why none is needed.

Transparency of Data, Code, and Research Materials

To encourage transparency and reproducible research, Obesity requires authors to include in their manuscript relevant experimental and analytical details so that all procedures can be reproduced. For basic science and preclinical research, the authors should provide a description of all reagents (antibodies, primers, cell lines, etc.), as well as animal models (strain, sex, age of animals). Authors should provide the name of the manufacturer/supplier for all specifically named equipment and instruments. Details of animal housing and husbandry must be included where they are likely to influence experimental results.

Furthermore, authors should confirm in the cover letter their willingness to share the following items with the journal editors: study protocol, including potential amendments; statistical code to generate the published results; data set from which the results were derived.

We encourage authors to share the data and other artefacts supporting the results in the paper by archiving them in an appropriate public repository. Authors may provide a data availability statement, including a description of how the data can be accessed and including a persistent identifier (e.g., DOI, accession number) from the repository where you shared the data, in order that this statement can be published in their paper.

Secondary Analyses

Authors of secondary analyses using shared data must attest that their use was in accordance with the terms (if any) agreed to upon their receipt. The article reference list must include the source of the data using its unique, persistent identifier. Authors of secondary analyses must explain completely how theirs differ from previous analyses. In addition, those who generate and then share clinical trial data sets deserve substantial credit for their efforts. Those using data collected by others should seek collaboration with those who collected the data. As collaboration will not always be possible, practical, or desired, the efforts of those who generated the data must be recognized.

Use of Previously Published Data

Our publisher Wiley is implementing the FORCE 11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles requiring that authors include data citations as part of their reference list, and Wiley journals require data to be cited in the same way as article, book, and Web citations. Formal citation in reference lists supports reproducibility, facilitates the tracking of data reuse, and may help recognize or credit individual’s contributions to research and the work put into collecting, managing, and archiving data.

We recommend the reference format proposed by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles: Authors; Year; Data set title; Data repository or archive; Version (if any); Persistent identifier (e.g., DOI)

Statistics

Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (e.g., confidence intervals, SDs, or SEs), even for differences that were not significant. Report the numbers of observations. Specify any general-use computer programs used, including the version number and the manufacturer’s name and location. Include general descriptions of statistical methods in the Methods section and specific descriptions in each table and figure legend. Indicate whether variables were transformed for analysis. Provide details about what hypotheses were tested, what statistical tests were used, and what the outcome and explanatory variables were, Indicate the level of significance used in tests if different from the conventional two-sided 5% alpha error and whether or what type of adjustment is made for multiple comparisons.

Physiological Modeling

Papers involving mathematical modeling must (a) include all model assumptions in list form, (b) define all variables used, with units, and (c) provide the actual model and model code.

Energy Expenditure Data

Comparisons of animal or human metabolic rates in groups of differing body size must avoid using ratios of metabolic rate per unit of body mass. Instead, authors are encouraged to plot individual data and analyze group and body size effects using ANCOVA (Tschöp et al. Nat Methods 2011;9:57-63).

Refer and Transfer Program

Wiley believes that no valuable research should go unshared. This journal participates in Wiley’s Refer & Transfer program. If your manuscript is not accepted, you may receive a recommendation to transfer your manuscript to another suitable Wiley journal, either through a referral from the journal’s editor or through our Transfer Desk Assistant.

Post acceptance

Publication charges (These do not apply to invited authors)

Page charges

Manuscripts accepted for publication in Obesity will incur page charges to cover, in part, the cost of publication. If your paper is accepted, the authors will be assessed $65 per page if a first or corresponding author is a member of The Obesity Society or $95 per page if a first or corresponding member is not a member of The Obesity Society. Please visit The Obesity Society website to join and receive reduced rates.

Color charges

Authors will be expected to contribute towards the cost of publication of color figures. Charges are $595 per figure. Upon acceptance authors must fill in the form that will be sent to them.

Open access charges

The cost for authors to publish their accepted original research article as open access is $4,740. Authors who elect open access publication will be exempt from paying page charges. Please see the “open access” section below for details.

Exclusive License Agreement and Open Access

If your paper is accepted, the author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Author Services; where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be able to complete the license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.

For authors signing the copyright transfer agreement

If the open access option is not selected the corresponding author will be presented with the copyright transfer agreement (CTA) to sign. The terms and conditions of the CTA can be previewed in the samples associated with the Copyright FAQs below:

CTA Terms and Conditions: http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp

For authors choosing open access

If the open access option is selected the corresponding author will have a choice of the following Creative Commons License Open Access Agreements (OAA):

Creative Commons Attribution License OAA

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License OAA

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial -NoDerivs License OAA

To preview the terms and conditions of these open access agreements please visit the Copyright FAQs hosted on Wiley Author Services http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp  and visit http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright--License.html.

If you select the open access option and your research is funded by The Wellcome Trust and members of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) you will be given the opportunity to publish your article under a CC-BY license supporting you in complying with Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK requirements. For more information on this policy and the Journal’s compliant self-archiving policy please visit:http://www.wiley.com/go/funderstatement.

NIH Public Access Mandate
For those interested in the Wiley-Blackwell policy on the NIH Public Access Mandate, please visit our policy statement

Author Name Changes After Publication
In cases where authors wish to change their name following publication, Wiley will update and republish the paper and redeliver the updated metadata to indexing services. Our editorial and production teams will use discretion in recognizing that name changes may be of a sensitive and private nature for various reasons including (but not limited to) alignment with gender identity, or as a result of marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. Accordingly, to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. Authors should contact the  Editorial Office with their name change request.

Online production tracking via Author Services

Author Services enables authors to track their accepted article through the production process to publication online and in print. Authors can check the status of their articles online and choose to receive automated e-mails at key stages of production. The author will receive an e-mail with a unique link that enables them to register and have their article automatically added to the system. Please ensure that a complete e-mail address is provided when submitting the manuscript. Visit http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor for more details on online production tracking and for a wealth of resources including FAQs and tips on article preparation, submission and more.

Proofs

The corresponding author will receive an email alert containing a link to the online proofs. A working e-mail address must therefore be provided for the corresponding author. The proof can be downloaded as a PDF (portable document format) file from the site. Acrobat Reader is needed to read the file, this software can be downloaded (free of charge) from:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Offprints

PDF offprints will be available for download through Author Services once an article has been published in print. Paper offprints may be ordered online, but please note that the cost is higher if the order arrives too late for the main print run, so these orders are best placed around the time of checking proofs. Offprints are normally despatched within three weeks of publication of the issue in which the paper appears. Please contact the Publishers if offprints do not arrive: however, please note that offprints are sent surface mail, so overseas orders may take up to six weeks to arrive.

CONTACT INFORMATION

For all matters regarding the submission of your manuscript and related documents:

1. Review the Author Guidelines at:
   http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1930-739X/homepage/ForAuthors.html
2. If you still have questions, visit: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/obesity
   Click on 'Get Help Now' in the top right hand corner for online support. Or Contact ScholarOne at +1-434-964-4100 or +1-888-503-1050.

Obesity Editorial Department
Editor-in-Chief: Michael Jensen, MD
Associate Editor-in-Chief: Leanne Redman, PhD
Managing Editor: Allison Templet
[email protected]

* TIP: Always remember to include the full title, first and corresponding author, and manuscript ID numbers on any correspondence. If you have submitted a manuscript, your manuscript ID number can be found in your account on Scholar One, or in the subject line of the automated emails that have been sent to you during the submission process.