Principles behind Standardisation Documents
- Documents will be of the highest quality, contemporary, interesting and a valuable contribution to the academic wealth of the ICS and, if relevant, collaborating societies.
- Definitions must be accurate, concise and, unless there is good reason, consistent.
1. Proposal Stage
- The Working Group (WG) chair must first complete and submit an ICS Content Proposal Form to the ICS Office.
- The content of the report must be new and relevant for the society or an update of a previously but outdated report.
- The proposal form should include the proposed working group members. Guidelines for creating working groups are available here - How to create a working group as well as the general responsibilities of a working group chair. Please note that all WG members must be ICS Members and a WG should not include more than 12 people.
- The proposal is then sent to the ICS Standardisation Steering Committee (SSC) for approval via the committee forum and SSC (including ICS Board Rep for SSC) approves or rejects the proposal.
- SSC can suggest conditions (i.e., a certain person must be included in the working group or the final draft must be approved by a certain committee). Please note that it is the responsibility of the SSC to ensure that these conditions are followed before the paper is submitted to the ICS Journal Continence or Continence Reports.
2. Preparatory Stage
Once the proposal has been approved by the SSC the project can move into the Preparatory Stage:
At this point, the project will receive a WG-reference number which is needed for communication with the SSC as well as the ICS Office and when submitting the paper to one of the ICS Journals. Please ensure that you always use this WG-reference number, together with the title of the manuscript, for your communication with the SSC and ICS Office.
The finalised list of WG-members should be sent to the ICS Office so the WG-number can be added to the SSC micro-site (e.g. Conservative Management of Male LUT & PF). This will allow the group to access to forums, the document file system and voting functions.
The ICS Office should not be copied into email discussions about the development of the paper. It is the responsibility of the SSC to provide support to the WG-Chair in leading the development of the paper.
All authors must contribute significantly to the standardization document with regards to:
- content
- structure
- drafting and
- voting (whenever applicable)
The sequence of authors should be as follows: the first author should be the person who drafted the manuscript and did the predominant work of writing, usually the WG-Chair, second author: deputy; WG members in alphabetical order or according to input; last author: SSC-Chair or predetermined SSC-Representative.
All Standardisation reports must include a Summary Table with the following columns:
- Number of existing ICS Glossary terms (where available)
- Number of 'OLD' terms
- Number of proposed 'NEW' terms
- Number of 'CHANGED' terms
- Brief logic behind the suggested change
- Associated citation (where available)
The standardisation report can be written in British or American English but must be consistent throughout the manuscript.
Before submitting the standardisation report to one of the ICS Journals, English language must be checked and corrected by a native English speaker of the WG.
3. Content Review Stage
- Once the WG is happy with the final draft, this document must be sent to the SSC for them to review (ICS Office will post the document on the committee forum for review – 2 weeks).
- All feedback will need to be seriously considered by the WG and incorporated into the content where appropriate.
4. Approval Stage
- The WG has 1 month to make final revisions and submit the final document to the SSC.
- The Board Rep on the SSC must also approve the document before it is signed off, ready for submission.
- SSC-Chair gives the WG-Chair the go ahead when the paper is approved to be submitted.
5. Submission to Journals
- SSC will notify the ICS Office when a report is ready for submission.
- The ICS Office will then notify the Journal Editors of Continence or Continence Reports.
- The WG-chair will need the WG-reference number when they submit.
- Standard text for the report title for submission to the ICS journal:
- A Standard for Terminology in : A Report From the XXX Working Group of the International Continence Society
- An International Continence Society (ICS)/ XXX Society joint report on the standard for terminology for……
6. Publication (ICS Office tasks)
- Once published in the ICS Journal, the ICS Office will create a news article to promote the report.
- The paper will be added to the SCC micro-site and the complete list of terminology documents. The report will also be included in the next edition of the ICS Standards Book and 'NEW' or 'CHANGED' terms will be added to the Glossary.