The editor, Zoe Hudson, PhD, welcomes the submission of articles for publication in the journal.

Submission to this journal proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article via http://ees.elsevier.com/yptsp you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of the various files. The system automatically converts source files to a single Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the article, which is used in the peer-review process. Please note that even though manuscript source files are converted to PDF at submission for the review process, these source files are needed for further processing after acceptance. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail and via the Author's homepage, removing the need for a hard-copy paper trail.

The above represents a very brief outline of this form of submission. It can be advantageous to print this "Guide for Authors" section from the site for reference in the subsequent stages of article preparation.

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the Publisher.

Manuscripts reporting the results of studies involving human participants will only be accepted for publication if it is made clear within the text that 'appropriate ethical approval had been granted prior to the commencement of the study'. Photographs of human participants are acceptable if the authors have received appropriate permission for publication of the photographs, or taken appropriate measures to disguise the individual's identity.

TYPES OF PAPERS

Original Research: Provide a full length account of original research and will not normally exceed 4000 words.
Review Papers: Provide an in-depth and up to date critical review of a related topic and will not normally exceed 4000 words.
Case Studies: A case report providing clinical findings, management and outcome with reference to related literature.
Masterclasses: Usually a commissioned piece by an expert in their field. If you would like to submit a non-commissioned article, please check with the editorial office beforehand.
Clinical Approaches: These include clinical approaches or opinions which may be novel or practiced with minimal evidence available in the literature.
Professional Issues: An occasional series which aims to highlight changes in guidelines or other professional issues.
Research Without Tears: An occasional series dedicated to the process of research.

Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or anaylsis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted.

Changes to authorship


This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:


Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Journal Manager from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the author names rearranged and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Journal Manager to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that: (1) Journal Managers will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (2) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.

After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and result in a corrigendum.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Authors should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Conflict of interest

At the end of the text, under a subheading "Conflict of interest statement" all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding.

Role of the funding source

All sources of funding should be declared at the end of the text. Authors should declare the role of study sponsors, if any, in the study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. If the study sponsors had no such involvement, the authors should so state.

PRESENTATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Authors are required to submit manuscripts according to the requirements of the Instructions to Authors. Please note that papers not formatted in this manner will be returned to the author for amendment before entering into the editorial and peer review process. In particular please take care to follow the instructions for the formatting of references.

Reviewer suggestion
Please supply the names of two potential reviewers for your manuscript. Please provide their full name, position and e-mail address. Please do not suggest reviewers from your own institution, previous or current collaborators. Please note, the final choice of reviewers is that of the Editor and the journal reserves the right not to use reviewers which have been suggested by the authors.

Your article should be typed on A4 paper, double-spaced with margins of at least 3cm. Number all pages consecutively beginning with the title page. Papers should be set out as follows, with each section beginning on a separate sheet:

Title page
Provide the following data on the title page (in the order given).

Title. Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.

Author names and affiliations. Present the authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name, and, if available, the e-mail address of each author.

Corresponding author. Clearly indicate who is willing to handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that telephone and fax numbers (with country and area code) are provided in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address.

Present/permanent address. If an author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a 'Present address' (or 'Permanent address') may be indicated as a footnote to that author's name. The address at which the author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.

Abstract
An abstract of your manuscript, summarizing the content in no more than 200 words, should be provided. Abstracts should follow a structured format. For empirical studies, this will usually involve these headings: Objectives, Design, Setting, Participants, Main Outcome Measures, Results, Conclusions. For other types of study, contributors may adapt this format, but should retain the idea of structure and headings.

Keywords
Include three or four keywords. The purpose of these is to increase the likely accessibility of your paper to potential readers searching the literature. Therefore, ensure keywords are descriptive of the study. Refer to a recognised thesaurus of keywords (e.g. CINAHL, MEDLINE) wherever possible.

Text
Headings should be appropriate to the nature of the paper. The use of headings enhances readability. Three categories of headings should be used:
•major headings should be typed in capital letters in the centre of the page and underlined;
•secondary headings should be typed in lower case (with an initial capital letter) at the left-hand margin and underlined; and
•minor headings should be typed in lower case and italicized.
Do not use 'he', 'his' etc. where the sex of the person is unknown; say 'the participant', etc. Avoid inelegant alternatives such as 'he/she'. Avoid sexist language.
•Any acknowledgements should be included at the end of the text.

References
Authors are responsible for verifying the accuracy and completeness of references. Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association. You are referred to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Edition, ISBN 1-55798-790-4, copies of which may be ordered from http://www.apa.org/books/4200061.html or APA Order Dept., P.O.B. 2710, Hyattsville, MD 20784, USA or APA, 3 Henrietta Street, London, WC3E 8LU, UK. Details concerning this referencing style can also be found at http://linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/henrichsenl/apa/apa01.html.

Text
Single author (Graham, 2001)
Two authors (Geyer & Braff, 1999)
Three to six authors (Lehman, Stohr, & Feldon, 2000)
for the first citation and (Lehman et al., 2000) for subsequent citations.
More than six authors (Karper et al., 1996)
Separate references in the text in parentheses by using a semi-colon.

List
References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters "a", "b", "c" etc., placed after the year of publication.

Reference to a journal publication:

Shelbourne, K.D., & Trumper, R.V. (1997). Preventing anterior knee pain after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 25, 41-47.

Reference to a book:

Magee, D.J. (1997). Orthopaedic physical assessment. (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Saunders.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

Hudson, Z., & Brown, A. (2003). Athletes with disability. In: G. S. Kolt, & L. Snyder-Mackler (Eds.), Physical therapies in sport and exercise (pp. 521-304). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.

Citing and listing of Web references . As a minimum, the full URL should be given. Any further information, if known (Author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be given. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list; in square brackets in line with the text.

Tables, Illustrations and Figures
A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available on our website: http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Preparation of supplementary data. Elsevier now accepts electronic supplementary material (e-components) to support and enhance your scientific research. Supplementary files offer the Author additional possibilities to publish supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and more. Supplementary files supplied will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article in Elsevier Web products, including ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com. In order to ensure that your submitted material is directly usable, please ensure that data is provided in one of our recommended file formats. Authors should submit the material in electronic format together with the article and supply a concise and descriptive caption for each file. For more detailed instructions please visit our artwork instruction pages at: http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Illustrations and tables that have appeared elsewhere must be accompanied by written permission to reproduce them from the original publishers. This is necessary even if you are an author of the borrowed material. Borrowed material should be acknowledged in the captions in the exact wording required by the copyright holder. If not specified, use this style: `Reproduced by kind permission of . . . (publishers) from . . . (reference).' Identifiable clinical photographs must be accompanied by written permission from the patient.

Ethics
Work on human beings that is submitted to Physical Therapy in Sport should comply with the principles laid down in the declaration of Helsinki; Recommendations guiding physicians in biomedical research involving human subjects. Adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly, Helsinki, Finland, June 1964, amended by the 29th World Medical Assembly, Tokyo, Japan, October 1975, the 35th World Medical Assembly, Venice, Italy, October 1983, and the 41st World Medical Assembly, Hong Kong, September 1989. The manuscript should contain a statement that has been approved by the appropriate ethical committees related to the institution(s) in which it was performed and that subjects gave informed consent to the work. Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with institution guidelines. Patients' and volunteers' names, initials, and hospital numbers should not be used.
In a case report, the subject's written consent should be provided. It is the author's responsibility to ensure all appropriate consents have been obtained.

PATIENT ANONYMITY Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent which should be documented in your paper. Patients have a right to privacy. Therefore identifying information, including patients¿ images, names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be included in videos, recordings, written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and you have obtained written informed consent for publication in print and electronic form from the patient (or parent, guardian or next of kin where applicable). If such consent is made subject to any conditions, Elsevier must be made aware of all such conditions. Written consents must be provided to Elsevier on request. Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note. If such consent has not been obtained, personal details of patients included in any part of the paper and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

COPYRIGHT
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a "Journal Publishing Agreement'' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail (or letter) will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: contact Elsevier's Rights Department, Philadelphia, PA, USA: phone (+1) 215 239 3804, fax (+1) 215 239 3805, e-mail healthpermissions@elsevier.com. Requests may also be completed online via the Elsevier homepage ( http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Funding body agreements and policies
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors whose articles appear in journals published by Elsevier, to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards. To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies

Sponsored Articles
Physical Therapy in Sport now offers authors the option to sponsor non-subscriber access to individual articles. The access sponsorship contribution fee per article is $3,000. This contribution is necessary to offset publishing costs - from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The sponsorship fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as colour charges which are additional.

Authors can specify that they would like to select this option after receiving notification that their article has been accepted for publication, but not before. This eliminates a potential conflict of interest by ensuring that the journal does not have a financial incentive to accept an article for publication.

Authors' rights
As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:
•make copies (print or electronic) of the article for your own personal use, including for your own classroom teaching use
•make copies and distribute such copies (including through e-mail) of the article to research colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not commercially or systematically, e.g., via an e-mail list or list server)
•post a pre-print version of the article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites
•post a revised personal version of the final text of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or institutional website or server, with a link to the journal homepage (on http://www.elsevier.com )
•present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of the article to the delegates attending such a meeting
•for your employer, if the article is a 'work for hire', made within the scope of your employment, your employer may use all or part of the information in the article for other intra-company use (e.g., training)
•retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any processes or procedure described in the article
•include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially)
•use the article or any part thereof in a printed compilation of your works, such as collected writings or lecture notes (subsequent to publication of your article in the journal)
•prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in other works, with full acknowledgement of its original publication in the journal


PROOFS
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author (if we do not have an e-mail address then paper proofs will be sent by post). Elsevier now sends PDF proofs which can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 7 available free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrsystemreqs.html#70win. If you do not wish to use the PDF annotations function, you may list the corrections (including replies to the Query Form) and return to Elsevier in an e-mail. Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments (including replies to the Query Form) on a printout of your proof and return by fax, or scan the pages and e-mail, or by post. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that Elsevier may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

OFFPRINTS

The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author. For further information please consult http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

Submission Checklist
It is hoped that this list will be useful during the final checking of an article prior to sending it to the journal's Editor for review. Please consult this Guide for Authors for further details of any item.
Ensure that the following items are present:
• One Author designated as corresponding Author:
• E-mail address
• Full postal address
• Telephone and fax numbers
• All necessary fields have been uploaded
• Keywords
• All figure captions
• All tables (including title, description, footnotes)


At the end of the paper, but before the references, please provide three statements:

• Ethical Approval: The organisation providing ethical approval and ethics protocol reference number where appropriate.
• Funding: any sources of funding should be stated.
• Conflict of Interest: Disclosed conflicts will be published if they are believed to be important to readers in judging the manuscript. If there are no conflicts of interest, authors should state that there are none.

Further considerations
• Manuscript has been "spellchecked"
• References are in the correct format for this journal
• All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa
• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Web)