Clinical Infectious Diseases Formatting Requirements: Complete Author Guide

CID requires a structured abstract for Major Articles; Brief Reports and Review Articles use unstructured abstracts.

• Word limit: 250 words maximum for a Major Article (50 words for a Brief Report, 150 words for a Review Article)

• Required sections: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions

• No citations allowed

• No abbreviations unless universally understood

The 250-word abstract is restrictive. At 250 words, you can't afford generic background statements. Start the Background section with the specific gap or question. The Methods section should name the study design and setting in one sentence. Results should include your primary endpoint with the effect size and confidence interval. Conclusions should be one sentence.

One thing that trips authors up: CID doesn't allow "Objective" or "Purpose" as a heading. It must be "Background." This is different from journals like Clinical Cancer Research which uses "Purpose" and "Experimental Design." Use exactly the headings CID specifies.

Review Articles use unstructured abstracts of up to 150 words. These should outline the scope of the review and its main conclusions.

CID sets no limit on figures and tables for Major Articles, but the guidelines ask authors to avoid overcrowding in tables and unnecessary clutter in figures, and data in the text should not be repeated extensively in tables or figures. Brief Reports are limited to 2 figures and tables combined.

Figure requirements:

Table requirements:

• Tables can be part of the manuscript file, placed after the references, each on a separate page with a title and footnotes where necessary

• Every column needs a header row

• Horizontal rules only

• No vertical lines or shading

• Abbreviations defined in footnotes

• Units of measure given in parentheses at the top of each column rather than repeated on each line

Figure conventions worth following (the CID author guidelines do not list these):

• Kaplan-Meier curves must include numbers at risk below the x-axis

• Forest plots should follow standard formatting with diamond summary estimates

• Antibiogram tables should use standard susceptibility breakpoints (CLSI or EUCAST)

• Flowcharts for patient selection should follow CONSORT or STROBE conventions

• Epidemic curves should use standard epidemiologic formatting

CID's readership includes practicing clinicians, epidemiologists, and microbiologists. Figures need to be immediately interpretable without extensive reference to the text. Don't rely on color alone to convey information; use patterns or labels for accessibility.

CID's reference style is based on the ICMJE Recommendations, with references numbered consecutively in the order they appear in the text. At first submission, references can be formatted in any readable style.

In-text citations: Numbers in brackets on the text line, for example [3, 7-9, 57]. References first cited in a table or figure are numbered in sequence with those in the text.

Worked example (ICMJE/NLM-based style, with the common mismatched form shown for contrast):

Sample in the ICMJE/NLM-based style: Smith AB, Jones CD, Brown EF. Risk factors for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae in hospitalized patients. *Clin Infect Dis* 2025;**80**(3):412-420.
Not the journal's style (APA preset most reference managers default to): Smith, A. B., Jones, C. D., & Brown, E. F. (2025). Risk factors for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.

Clinical Infectious Diseases, 80(3), 412-420.

Any readable style is accepted at first submission, but authors may later be asked to comply with the journal's citation convention, which writes "Smith AB" with no comma or period inside the name and abbreviates the journal "Clin Infect Dis" with no periods (the journal's own sample references give page ranges in full, for example 505-511); the APA form your reference manager exports by default uses "Smith, A. B." and does not match the convention.

Key formatting rules:

• List all authors up to 6; for 7+, list first 3 followed by "et al."

• Journal names abbreviated according to the List of Journals Indexed for Medline; titles of journals not listed in Medline spelled out in full

• Follow the journal's sample references, which give year, volume, and page range

• No period after journal abbreviation (e.g., "Clin Infect Dis" not "Clin. Infect. Dis.")

• Reference to a website must include access date

The 50-reference limit for Major Articles is set in the journal's article types table. This is tighter than many comparable journals and forces you to cite only the most relevant literature. Unpublished data should be cited in the text as unpublished data and not included in the reference list.

One common mistake: CID uses the NLM abbreviation "Clin Infect Dis" without periods, which is standard NLM style. Some reference managers add periods to abbreviations. Check your output format.

CID hosts supplementary data through Oxford Academic's online platform.

Common supplementary content:

• Extended methods (laboratory protocols, statistical analysis details)

• Additional tables (complete antibiotic susceptibility data, subgroup analyses)

• Additional figures (supplementary Kaplan-Meier curves, sensitivity analyses)

• Case report forms and questionnaires

• Raw data tables for genomic or epidemiologic studies

Formatting:

• Mark supplementary files clearly and include a summary of the file names and types

• Refer to the supplementary material in the main manuscript, for example as (see Supplementary Figure 1)

• Keep the total supplementary material to no more than 25 MB

• Supplementary data is peer reviewed

Supplementary material must be submitted with the main manuscript, cannot be altered or replaced after the paper is accepted, and is not copyedited, so check it carefully before submission.

The CID author guidelines name Word (.doc or .docx) as the submission format and do not mention LaTeX.

Word submissions:

• Line numbers

• Page numbers

• Figures and tables can stay in the manuscript file at first submission; separate high-resolution files are requested later

• Tables placed at the end of the manuscript, one per page

LaTeX submissions:

• The author guidelines do not mention LaTeX; ask the editorial office before submitting LaTeX source files

Infectious disease research is a clinical field where Word dominates, and Word is the format the guidelines name.

CID has several requirements and practices that set it apart from other infectious disease journals.

1. Conflict of interest disclosure. CID requires all authors to disclose any potential conflict of interest at the point of submission, and the corresponding author must certify in the submission system that all conflicts have been disclosed. ICMJE forms are not required at initial submission; they are requested at revision or, if no revisions are needed, on acceptance. Disclosure of generative AI use is a separate item; our CID AI disclosure rules page covers where CID asks for it and what to name.

2. Antimicrobial susceptibility reporting standards. The CID author guidelines do not set breakpoint rules, but reviewers in this field commonly expect susceptibility data to follow CLSI (Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute) or EUCAST breakpoints. Specify which standard you used and which version, and do not report susceptibility results without identifying the breakpoint criteria.

3. Patient consent and IRB documentation. CID requires a statement about institutional review board approval and patient consent in the Methods section. For studies involving identifiable patients, the specific consent process must be described.

4. ClinicalTrials.gov registration. All clinical trials must be registered before enrollment of the first patient. The registration number must appear in the abstract. CID follows ICMJE policy strictly on this.

5. Transfer between CID and Open Forum Infectious Diseases. If the paper is not appropriate for CID, the editors may offer a transfer to another IDSA journal, such as Open Forum Infectious Diseases (OFID), the IDSA's open-access companion journal, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, or Research Connections. The core author guidelines are shared across CID, JID, and OFID, so minimal reformatting is needed.

6. Nomenclature standards. CID attempts to use the latest widely accepted nomenclature for microorganisms, so use current taxonomic names (e.g., Clostridioides difficile, not Clostridium difficile). Generic names of drugs and other chemical compounds should be used, and the full names of manufacturers should be listed for commercially obtained products.

The CID author guidelines do not require a specific reporting checklist for each study type, but clinical-ID reviewers commonly expect these standard guidelines:

For randomized controlled trials, CID does require the complete protocol with all amendments, uploaded as supplementary data (the guidelines refer to SPIRIT). The ORION statement for outbreak investigations is particularly relevant for CID and often overlooked.

For manuscripts targeting Clinical Infectious Diseases, four patterns generate the most consistent desk-rejection outcomes.

Abstract word count exceeds the 250-word limit. CID sets a 250-word limit for the structured Major Article abstract, with the section headings Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. The editors reserve the right to return manuscripts that do not follow the instructions, so abstracts that exceed the limit or use other headings (such as "Patients and Methods" or "Objective") risk being returned for reformatting before peer review.

The structured format applies to Major Articles (Brief Reports use an unstructured abstract of up to 50 words), and in our review work the most common cause of an over-length abstract is a generic Background sentence that the 250-word cap simply cannot afford; we rewrite it to open on the specific clinical gap so the Methods, Results, and Conclusions each keep their share of the word budget.

Reporting checklist not submitted for study design. The CID author guidelines do not list a required reporting checklist per study type, but reviewers in clinical infectious diseases commonly expect CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, and PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, with page numbers showing where each item appears in the manuscript. For randomized controlled trials the guidelines do require the complete protocol and all amendments, uploaded as supplementary data.

Scope is laboratory or basic immunology without clinical patient data. CID is a clinical journal whose scope is infectious diseases as they present in clinical practice. Papers reporting in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility, animal model infection data, or basic immunological mechanisms without a clinical cohort, case series, or direct clinical application are desk-rejected for scope. The IDSA journal family has separate outlets for basic science (JID) and clinical care (CID).

Single-center, retrospective study without adequately powered sample size. CID receives a high volume of single-center retrospective cohort submissions. Papers with very small sample sizes (under 50 cases for rare infections, under 200 for common presentations) that do not include power calculations or acknowledge sample size as a limitation in the Discussion are often rejected as underpowered to support the conclusions.

A Clinical Infectious Diseases submission readiness check evaluates manuscript scope, OUP abstract format, and reporting checklist compliance against these desk-rejection patterns.