In order to make manuscript submission as easy as possible for authors, we have introduced format-free initial submission.
At first submission, authors can submit their manuscript in any format; however, we do still encourage authors to read the manuscript preparation guidelines below.
Once an article has been accepted for publication the main manuscript must be submitted as an editable file, not a PDF.
Submissions should include the following sections.
Title page
Your article title should be a short description of the research you are reporting. The best titles are written with both human readers and search engines in mind; including keywords in your title will help readers discover your article online. The title page should also contain full names and affiliations for each author.
Abstract
The abstract should be no more than 300 words and should not contain references or unexplained abbreviations or acronyms. The general scope of the article as well as the main results and conclusions should be summarized.
Keywords
Please include at least 3 and up to 6 keywords. Try to avoid overly broad or specialized terms that might be meaningless to a reader.
Think about the words you would use to search online for articles on the same topic; these often make the best keywords. They do not necessarily need to be single words; keywords can include short phrases or terms that are easily recognized by researchers in your field.
Main text
The main text of your article should be split into clearly-labelled sections. Usually these will be background, methods, results, discussion and conclusions, however please feel free to use whatever headings and subheadings best suit your article. Abbreviations should be written out in full on first use.
Acknowledgements
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed to the study but did not meet the authorship criteria.
Funding
Please state the sources of funding for each author. Including this information is a requirement of many funders. You will also be asked to enter this information during the submission process, but please ensure that you also include it in the manuscript.
References
Each reference should contain as many of the following elements as possible:
Author surnames with initials
Year of publication
Title of paper or book
Journal name using standard abbreviation
Volume number
Book publisher and location
First and last page numbers, or article number
Digital Object Identifier (DOI).