Categories of Articles

Molecular Cancer Therapeutics welcomes submission of the following article types to be considered for publication in the journal, subject to peer review as noted below for each type. Please see About Molecular Cancer Therapeutics for information about the journal, and Instructions for Authors for important policies and instructions relevant to all authors submitting to an AACR journal. Where applicable, the journal’s editorial team reserves the right to edit the title, abstract, and any article summary statement to improve the article's clarity, brevity, and quality prior to publication.

Please note: The article size recommendations below, and most formatting requirements for final publication, are not enforced for initial submissions and do not impact the manuscript’s assessment for potential publication. Word counts are exclusive of cover page, abstract, methods section, tables, and references.

Research Articles

General guidelines:

• 250 word abstract
• 5,000 total words of text (exclusive of references)
• 50 references
• 6 total figures and/or tables

Specific Categories:

• Small Molecule Therapeutics: Discovery and preclinical development of small molecule entities
• Large Molecule Therapeutics: Novel large molecule therapeutics, primarily (but not exclusively) antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates
• Targeting Drug Resistance: Studies outlining actionable strategies to mitigate drug resistance in oncology
• Companion Diagnostic, Pharmacogenomic, and Cancer Biomarkers: Identification and validation of cancer therapeutic targets; prognostic, diagnostic or pharmacogenomic biomarkers that may inform personalized medicine
• Models & Technologies: Novel in vitro and in vivo models, screening platforms, and, in general, any technology that has the potential to advance discovery, delivery and evaluation of anticancer drugs

First Disclosures

General guidelines:

• 250 word abstract
• 5,000 total words of text (exclusive of references)
• 50 references
• 6 total figures and/or tables
• Graphical Abstract (required for First Disclosure articles)

This category is reserved for the first-time disclosure of drug candidate structures bound for or currently under clinical investigations. Manuscripts in this category will be expediently considered. Manuscripts should provide characterization of in vitro and in vivo efficacy and toxicity, sufficient methods for synthesis, and transparent drug structures.

Drug candidates will be considered from all experimental therapeutic categories. Structural requirements vary depending on the therapeutic but include protein sequences for engineered antibodies and DNA sequences for vaccine-based and cellular-based therapeutics. For specific details on structural requirements, contact the journal editors at mct@aacr.org.

Reviews

General guidelines:

• 200 word abstract
• 5,000 total words of text, exclusive of references
• 75 references
• 3 figures and/or tables

Authors of unsolicited review articles should first submit an abstract, outline, and a list of their related publications to mct@aacr.org for consideration by the Journal. The review article proposal materials will be evaluated by the editorial team to determine if the topic is of interest to the journal. All review articles, whether invited or not, will be subject to peer review.

Letters to the Editor

General guidelines:

• 400 words of text
• 5 references, the first of which should be to the original article
• No tables or figures unless approved by the Editor

In the spirit of open scientific dialogue, the Editor-in-Chief invites the submission of correspondence that presents considered opinions in response to articles published in the journal. Letters to the Editor will be reviewed and, if found to meet the requisite publication criteria (scholarly commentary on a subject of import and interest to the broad readership; length appropriate to the content), the Letter may be sent to the author(s) of the originally published article and possibly to other interested parties for a response to be published in the same issue of the journal as the Letter. Correspondence concerning articles that have not been published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics will not be considered. Letters must be in response to an article published in the journal within the past 6 months.