Submission Guidelines for Individual Scholarship

Who Can Submit

Contributors must be a member or staff of the ADA at the time of submission. Materials will not be removed due to change of membership status unless a formal request is submitted by the author. ADA members may include works from before membership as long as they are within the scope of materials which may be contributed and related to the profession of dentistry. Student members are also eligible to contribute.

How to Submit a Paper

1. Make sure your work is in an acceptable, digital format. Preferred formats include:

  • Audio: WAVE (.wav), MPEG (.mp3)
  • Image: TIFF (.tif), JPEG (.jpg), PNG (.png), Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
  • Tabular data: Comma Separated Values (.csv), Excel (.xlsx 2007 or later)
  • Formatted Text: PDF (.pdf), Word (.docx)
  • Plain Text: Plain text (.txt)
  • Video: MPEG-4 (.mp4), AVI (.avi), QuickTime (.mov)

Non-preferred formats may be deemed unacceptable if not an open, sustainable or commonly-used type. Text-based documents will be automatically converted to a PDF in order to retain formatting, unless the contributor requests otherwise.

2. Write an abstract for your work. Abstracts may be of any length.

3. Determine keywords which describe your work. These are words that will help a user locate your paper through a search.

4. During the submission process you will be asked to provide the following information:

  • Author(s)*
  • Article title*
  • Document type*
  • Original publisher or platform*
  • Original publisher date*
  • Abstract*
  • Keywords*
  • If item is a pre-print*
  • Volume and Issue where work appeared
  • Footnote
  • DOI
  • Disciplines
  • Comments
  • Additional Files
  • Author affiliation
  • Link to original publication

*required field

5. Before completing the process, you will be required to acknowledge a submissions agreement form. This states that requisite copyright, licensing, and/or intellectual property clearance has been obtained for the deposited content. ADA Commons provides open access to its content; this involves contributors being willing and able to grant non-exclusive rights to preserve and make their work publicly available.

More information about the right to deposit may be found in ADA Common’s FAQ.