Writing for ICNApedia

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The International Child Neurology Association's (ICNA) aim with ICNApedia is to develop a comprehensive continually updated trustworthy resource in child neurology. This can only be made possible through collaborative content authoring. As an ICNA member there are several ways you can get involved in creating and maintaining this child neurology knowledge environment. A great way to start is by contributing articles to the ICNApedia WIKI. Before you start check whether the topic you intended to write on is already present. If so, you might want to edit the existing article than starting a new one. 

  1. Editing an existing article
  2. Starting a new article on ICNApedia WIKI
    1. General guidance on article style:
  3. Citing References
  4. Citing ICNApedia WIKI articles
  5. Bibliography
  6. Using Tables

Editing an existing article

ICNApedia WIKI employs a very strict granular access control to restrict article editing rights. If you are an ICNA member you would have already been granted EDIT rights. However your contribution would still be reviewed by a section editor before publishing. See figure below to see how you can access the edit page. Use the wysiwyg editor provided to format your article. Please do not copy & paste from desktop editors for e.g MS Word since this will introduce lot of junk HTML which may interfere with the website code.

If you do not currently have author/editor rights please email editor-at-icnapedia.org with your request. All author/editor contributions to the content will be acknowledged online. However please note that the content is meant to be continually updated and any contributed content is subject to further modification by bonafide editors. Although ICNApedia retains the previous 100 major revisions of the articles, contributing authors are encouraged to retain a copy of the content they contributed.

Starting a new article on ICNApedia WIKI

If you want to start a new topic/article we recommend you first search for the article. If your article is found you can go ahead and edit it. If not you will be given an opportunity to create it.

Please following the instructions below for using inline citations and bibliography lists. Keep your articles at a reasonable length. Between 1500 and 5000 words is a good choice or less than 50KB worth of prose. Keeping articles to a reasonable size is important for ICNApedia's accessibility, especially for readers on slower net connections and mobiles.

When articles grow beyond this amount of readable text, they will be divided into smaller articles to improve readability and ease of editing, or may be edited to make it more concise. The headed sub-section should be retained, with a summary of what has been removed under a separate header inorder to retain context. Each article on a subtopic should be written as a stand-alone article should have its own introduction, subheadings and references.

When an article is on a broad topic and is long with many sub articles, the main article should be fairly balanced on its treatment of the subtopics without putting undue importance on any one subtopic. If a particular subtopic ends up quite long, then it is an indication for having a separate article of its own.

General guidance on article style:

ICNApedia follows the AMA(American Medical Association) Manual of Style2 as its editorial guide. Articles should have an introduction, a clear structure divided into paragraphs , supplemented with lists, tables, graphics and should end with a list of references. For paragraph headings the top two levels should be "Heading 3" and "Heading 4". Subsequent heading levels should use just "bold" formatting. Use bold and italics sparingly. Bold should be used for headings and then sparingly for any other emphasis. Too much bold makes text harder, not easier, to read and differentiate. A "summary style" an organizational style that is similar to news style except that it applies to topics instead of articles and mostly lead sections instead of lead sentences is the preferred style of writing for ICNApedia WIKI. A news style could be used while contributing blog articles to ICNApedia News/Announcements.

Try to avoid long sentences that have several embedded clauses. Authors should take care to avoid text duplication or redundancy which unnecessarily complicates a manuscript. A short focussed article would be more appreciated and useful to readers.

Public domain resources such as textbooks may be used to add content to an article provided such material is properly attributed. A public domain source may be summarized and cited in the same manner as for copyrighted material, but the source's text can also be copied verbatim into a ICNApedia article. If copying material verbatim from public-domain or compatibly-licensed sources ICNApedia editors are encouraged to indicate so in the revision history box for the article citing the source.

Paragraphs: Paragraphs should be short enough to be easily readable but long enough to convey and idea. Short paragraphs allow readers to quickly scan through the content one paragraph at a time. It is also important to keep the sentences short. An optimal line length is consdered to be between 60 and 70 characters. long lines make it more difficult to focus and to correctly jump from one line to the next. If lines are too short, the eye is tempted to back and forth too quickly, breaking the reader’s rhythm and possibly skipping essential words. Paragraphs should contain key words to highlight the content. Use lists to structure the content and provide images to focus the reader on important aspects and avoid the use of jargon.

Spell checking: Please pay careful attention to spellings. The WYSIWYG editors provided in ICNApedia has spell check functionalities. Alternatively you can use online dictionaries like Dictionary.com, Ask Oxford e.t.c and online spell checkers such as SpellCheck.net,GingerSoftware, or your browser's built-in spell checker. A simple online WYSIWYG editor is available at http://icnapedia.org/wysiwyg/ if you want to format your article before copy & pasting onto ICNApedia.

Copyright & Attributions: ICNApedia content is licenced under the  CC-BY  licence model. Authors continue to own copyright to their contributions, but they liberally license their contributions for reuse and modification. However the licence model does require proper attribution. If an ICNApedia WIKI article is constructed through summarizing reliable sources, but there is a paragraph or a few sentences copied from compatibly-licensed or public-domain text which is not placed within quotations, then putting an attribution footnote at the end of the sentences or paragraph is sufficient.

Citing References

For inline citations Parenthetical referencing, also known as Harvard referencing is preferred using "Author-date" style as recommended by the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association (APA)1. See the examples below for various situations (Hover over the examples for more information). For a detailed overview please see https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/03/

However the rule regarding inline citations are flexible and for any particular article the reference system chosen by the first major contributor is often followed. For bibliography or reference list the recommended format is 

Online citation generators :There are several online citation generators available. We would recommend the resource  from University of Kansas hosted at http://sumsearch.org/cite/ ( Please use the blog format output if you are copy & pasting ). https://www.citethisforme.com/ is another resource.

Other suitable formats are (see https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/07/ )

  • Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article.Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy 
  • Harlow, H. F. (1983). Fundamentals for preparing psychology journal articles. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 55, 893-896.
  • Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5-13.

Citing ICNApedia WIKI articles

ICNApedia is an e-resource. Hence an electronic-citation format should be used. The actual format will depend on the citation style that you are using. Please see below for some general guidance regarding citing ICNApedia articles

  • ICNApedia is collaboratively written. Hence any particular author or authors should not be cited. Often the stem of an article might be based on a published source which is then updated collaboratively. You can view the article review history for full details of sources and authors.
  • The citation should list the article title and ICNApedia, The Child Neurology Knowledge Environment and date accessed. Every article should be a separate citation. At the bottom of each article there would be a permalink which should be used as the URL for the article. Alternatively you may use the URL as shown in the browser window
  • If the citation style you are following request the full date and time of the article revision you are using although this may not be necessary if you are using the permanent link. However, the date and time of the last revision can be found at the bottom of every article under revision history.

Following are examples of how an ICNApedia article may be cited

APA Style
Benzodiazepines. (n.d.). In ICNApedia. Retrieved October 25,2015 11:10:03 from http://icnapedia.org/wiki/drugs-in-neurology/benzodiazepines
MLA Style
"Benzodiazepines." ICNApedia: The Child Neurology Knowledge Environment, Inc. October 24, 2015. Web. October 25,2015 11:10:03
AMA Style
ICNApedia contributors. Benzodiazepines. ICNApedia, The Child Neurology Knowledge Environment. October 24, 2015. Available at: http://icnapedia.org/wiki/drugs-in-neurology/benzodiazepines.Accessed October 25,2015 11:10:0

Bibliography

  1. American Psychological Association (2001) APA Style 
  2. Iverson, Cheryl. AMA Manual Of Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Using Tables

There are several handy online tools you may use to format table data, if you are not comfortable using the inbuilt wysiwyg editor. Examples of few such tools are HTML Table Generator, Truben table editor, Quackit, LaTeX Table Generator e.t.c

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