Archives of Disease in Childhood Submission Guide

Age bands should reflect biology, care, or measurement rather than convenient bins. Explain gestational age where relevant, developmental stage, school or family context, transition to adult care, and how consent, assent, or proxy reporting affects what is known. Avoid presenting children as small adults when dosing, outcomes, disease expression, and service pathways differ.

For family-reported outcomes, distinguish the child's experience from caregiver observation. For administrative or linked data, explain coding validity, missingness, migration between services, and whether the record captures the intended event.

The journal's author guidelines, read October 10, 2026, set a limit for each article type. The word count excludes the title page, abstract, tables, acknowledgements, contributions and references. ADC no longer publishes case reports.

Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, scoping reviews and mixed methods reviews are submitted as Original research, not as Reviews. A Viewpoint has at most three authors.

Quality improvement articles are limited to 3,000 words excluding references, boxes, tables and diagrams, and the guidelines say 30 to 40 references should suffice. Images in Paediatrics takes a striking or clinically important image with up to 250 words of text and up to 5 references, plus a scanned patient consent form as a supplementary file; two images can be sent together if the word count is reduced. Patient-voice articles are limited to 1,200 words including a summary box, with up to five references. Guidelines have no fixed length, which the editor determines, and carry an abstract of 250 to 350 words.

• Key messages. A box after the abstract, kept to 3-5 sentences and distinct from the abstract, under three headings: what is already known on this topic, what this study adds, and how it might affect research, practice or policy.
• Ethics statement. Any report involving human subjects states ethics committee approval, or the equivalent, at the end of the Methods.
• Registration and checklist. Randomised controlled trials must be appropriately registered, and the cover page should say so. The EQUATOR checklist for the study type is a journal requirement; if none applies, give the reason in the cover letter. Qualitative research uses COREQ, with the manuscript page given for each item.
• Data. ADC follows BMJ's Tier 3 data policy, and every research article needs a Data Availability Statement.
• Surveys. Online questionnaire surveys of opinion or practice are accepted only as 500-word letters, with a denominator and a response rate of at least 60%, and they need a very clear clinical message. The guidelines say these requirements currently apply to ADC only.
• Observational studies. The guidelines strongly recommend a directed acyclic graph of the postulated relations between exposures and outcomes.

The author page (read October 10, 2026) points to ScholarOne as the manuscript system and requires an ORCID iD for the submitting author at submission. Peer review is single anonymised, and in most instances the journal aims for two external opinions, often with additional statistical assessment. Authors must not suggest reviewers who are current or recent colleagues of themselves or their co-authors. The author page header shows a median of 56 days to first decision with review, and prints no reporting period beside the figure.

Open access costs 4,500 GBP (exclusive of VAT for UK and EU authors), per the same page. There are no submission, page or colour figure charges, and authors can instead publish at no cost, with the article made available to subscribers. Three licence types are offered, an exclusive licence to BMJ, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY, and the two Creative Commons licences require the charge. Authors based entirely in low-income countries can apply for a full or partial waiver, and applications are made at submission. Authors rejected by ADC are offered a transfer to BMJ Paediatrics Open, its open access companion journal.

The map is not a timing promise. It simply shows which author-controlled dependencies should be resolved first.

Adult assumptions cross the age boundary. Validate the measure, threshold, dose, or mechanism in the represented population or narrow the conclusion.

Age groups conceal developmental differences. Justify bands and report where effects change across them.

A parent-reported measure becomes the child's voice. State the respondent and the construct actually measured.

Safeguarding implications outrun evidence. Separate observed risk, professional duty, policy recommendation, and untested inference.

The service recommendation ignores capacity. Name staffing, access, referral, school, family, and equity conditions that control implementation.

A model predicting paediatric deterioration should define the intended decision, age range, setting, outcome window, predictor availability, missing data, calibration, discrimination, thresholds, external validation, and consequences of false reassurance or escalation. A high area under the curve alone does not show whether the model helps a clinical team.

In Manusights editorial review, the most useful repair is often to connect an apparently technical result to the child-health decision while making the developmental boundary more visible. That creates clarity without claiming more certainty.

We use a child-specific applicability test: who is the child population, what developmental or family context changes the result, which outcome matters to children or caregivers, and what safeguard limits the proposed action? A manuscript should not become paediatric merely because the participants are under 18. The age range, developmental stage, dependency on caregivers, consent or assent pathway, and service context may change both interpretation and implementation.

This test is especially useful for studies spanning wide age bands. Neonates, school-age children, and adolescents may differ in physiology, exposure, measurement validity, treatment pathway, and ability to report outcomes. If those groups are pooled, explain why the effect can be interpreted across them or show age-specific results. If only one group is represented, keep the title and conclusion within that boundary.

Worked example: a digital intervention

For a digital intervention, describe who uses the tool, whether caregiver participation is required, accessibility and language constraints, safeguarding, adherence, missing data, and the care pathway triggered by a result. A short-term engagement increase does not establish a clinical benefit. If the study measures usability, keep the claim at usability unless health outcomes or validated intermediate consequences were actually evaluated.

Child-specific decision record

Put the most consequential boundary beside the main result. A generic limitations paragraph at the end cannot repair a title or abstract that already overgeneralizes the population.