Guidelines for preparing Original Articles

Preparing your manuscript

Title page
The title page should:

 present a title that is concise and informative (composed of no more than 100 characters)
 list the full names, institutional addresses and email addresses for all authors
o if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author.
If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through
their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements”
section in accordance with the instructions below
 indicate the corresponding author
Abstract
Each manuscript must be preceded by an abstract presenting the most important results and
conclusions in no more than 250 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not
cite references in the abstract.

Keywords
Four to six keywords representing the main content of the article.

Introduction
The Introduction section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of
the existing literature and why this study was necessary.

Materials and Methods

The Materials and methods section should provide enough information to permit repetition of
the experimental work.

The methods section should include:

 the aim, design and setting of the study
 the characteristics of participants or description of materials
 a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic names should
generally be used. When proprietary brands are used, the brand names, company, town and
country should in indicated in parentheses.
 the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate
The microorganisms used in the study and in particular new isolates must be deposited in a
publicly accessible culture collection belonging to the WDCM (e.g. DSM, ATCC, NCIMB).
The authors must refer to the collection and the strain number in the text to ensure that the
strains are available to other scientists.
If nucleic acid or amino acid sequences are presented (this includes also optimized sequences
of known genes), a GenBank/EMBL accession number for primary nucleotide and/or amino
acid sequence data must be included in a separate paragraph at the end of the Materials and
methods section.
 Huge sequencing datasets or raw data must also be deposited, e.g. as a NCBI BioProject.
For studies in proteomics, the minimum information about a proteomics experiment (MIAPE)
of the HUPO proteomics standard initiative and publication guidelines for the analysis and
documentation of peptide and protein identifications from the journal Molecular and Cellular
Proteomics must be followed up. One biological replicate will not be acceptable.
For X-ray crystallographic analyses of proteins (enzymes), the authors should obtain each PDB
ID to one structure of protein from PDB (The Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB)) and
add it to the manuscript just like as nucleotide accession numbers.

Results
The Results section should describe the outcome of the study. Data should be presented as
concisely as possible, if appropriate in the form of tables or figures, although very large tables
should be included as an additional file

Discussion
This section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and
highlight limitations of the study. Authors should also state clearly the main conclusions and
provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study to the field.

Declarations
List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of
abbreviations should be provided.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:
 include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was
waived)
 include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference
number if appropriate
Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval. See our editorial
policies for more information.
If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue,
this section is not applicable to your submission. Please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form, consent to publish must
be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All
presentations of case reports must have consent to publish.
If your manuscript does not contain any individual persons data, please state “Not applicable”
in this section.

Availability of data and materials

For all journals, SpringerOpen strongly encourages all datasets on which the conclusions of the
manuscript rely to be either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and
appropriate) or presented in the main paper or additional supporting files, in machine-readable
format (such as spreadsheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. Please see the list of
recommended repositories in our editorial policies.
For some journals, deposition of the data on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely is an
absolute requirement. Please check the Criteria section for this article type (located at the top
of this page) for journal specific policies.

For all journals, authors must include an “Availability of data and materials” section in their
article detailing where the data supporting their findings can be found. If you do not wish to
share your data, please state that data will not be shared, and state the reason.

For instructions on how to cite your data and format this section see preparation/style and
formatting.

Competing interests

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section. See
our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether
you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.
Funding
All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding
body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing
the manuscript should be declared.

Authors' contributions

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section.

Acknowledgements
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria
for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.
Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the
Acknowledgements section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.
Group authorship: if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration
Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of
the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also
include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section.
Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can
add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent
across all authors.
Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a
published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code
this information.
Authors' information

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) (in
this case, add your name and your guide name, registration number, department name, school
name and university name) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand
the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications,
current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background
information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to
describe any competing interests.

Endnotes
Endnotes should be designated within the text using a superscript lowercase letter and all notes
(along with their corresponding letter) should be included in the Endnotes section. Please
format this section in a paragraph rather than a list.

References
Examples of the Basic Springer reference style are shown below.

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.
Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites,
should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text
of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the
URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor
Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If
an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs,
then they should be included in the reference.

Example reference style:

Article within a journal
Smith J, Jones M Jr, Houghton L (1999) Future of health insurance. N Engl J Med 965:325-
329.

Article by DOI (with page numbers)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J
Mol Med 78:74-80. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article by DOI (before issue publication and with page numbers)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J
Mol Med. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article in electronic journal by DOI (no paginated version)

Slifka MK, Whitton JL (2000) Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig
J Mol Med. doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Journal issue with issue editor

Smith J (ed) (1998) Rodent genes. Mod Genomics J 14(6):126-233.
Journal issue with no issue editor
Mod Genomics J (1998) Rodent genes. Mod Genomics J 14(6):126-233.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Brown B, Aaron M (2001) The politics of nature. In: Smith J (ed) The rise of modern genomics,
3rd edn. Wiley, New York.

Complete book, authored

South J, Blass B (2001) The future of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Complete book, edited

Smith J, Brown B (eds) (2001) The demise of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Complete book, also showing a translated edition [Either edition may be listed first.]
Adorno TW (1966) Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. English edition: Adorno TW
(1973) Negative Dialectics (trans: Ashton EB). Routledge, London.

Chapter in a book in a series without volume titles

Schmidt H (1989) Testing results. In: Hutzinger O (ed) Handbook of environmental chemistry,
vol 2E. Springer, Heidelberg, p 111.

Chapter in a book in a series with volume titles

Smith SE (1976) Neuromuscular blocking drugs in man. In: Zaimis E (ed) Neuromuscular
junction. Handbook of experimental pharmacology, vol 42. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 593-660.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito, Yukio, and Hyuga, Hiroyuki. (2007) Rate equation approaches to amplification of
enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Topics in Current Chemistry.
doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Proceedings as a book (in a series and subseries)

Zowghi D (1996) A framework for reasoning about requirements in evolution. In: Foo N,
Goebel R (eds) PRICAI'96: topics in artificial intelligence. 4th Pacific Rim conference on
artificial intelligence, Cairns, August 1996. Lecture notes in computer science (Lecture notes
in artificial intelligence), vol 1114. Springer, Heidelberg, p 157.

Article within conference proceedings with an editor (without a publisher)

Aaron M (1999) The future of genomics. In: Williams H (ed) Proceedings of the genomic
researchers, Boston, 1999.

Article within conference proceedings without an editor (without a publisher)

Chung S-T, Morris RL (1978) Isolation and characterization of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid
from Streptomyces fradiae. In: Abstracts of the 3rd international symposium on the genetics of
industrial microorganisms, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4-9 June 1978.

Article presented at a conference

Chung S-T, Morris RL (1978) Isolation and characterization of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid
from Streptomyces fradiae. Paper presented at the 3rd international symposium on the genetics
of industrial microorganisms, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4-9 June 1978.

Patent
Norman LO (1998) Lightning rods. US Patent 4,379,752, 9 Sept 1998.

Dissertation
Trent JW (1975) Experimental acute renal failure. Dissertation, University of California.

Book with institutional author

International Anatomical Nomenclature Committee (1966) Nomina anatomica. Excerpta
Medica, Amsterdam.

In press article
Major M (2007) Recent developments. In: Jones W (ed) Surgery today. Springer, Dordrecht
(in press).
Online document
Doe J (1999) Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects.
Royal Society of Chemistry. Available via DIALOG. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of
subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database
Healthwise Knowledgebase (1998) US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. http://www.healthwise.org.
Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J (2000) Title of supplementary material. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22
Feb 2000.

University site
Doe J (1999) Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html. Accessed 25 Dec
1999.

FTP site
Doe J (1999) Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt. Accessed 12 Nov
1999.

Organization site
ISSN International Centre (2006) The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org. Accessed 20 Feb
2007.

General formatting information

Manuscripts must be written in concise English. For help on scientific writing, or preparing
your manuscript in English, please see Springer's Author Academy.
Quick points:
 Use double line spacing
 Include line and page numbering
 Use SI units: Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text, otherwise
they will be lost during conversion to PDF
 Do not use page breaks in your manuscript

File formats
The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

 TeX/LaTeX
Please note: editable files are required for processing in production. If your manuscript
contains any non-editable files (such as PDFs) you will be required to re-submit an editable
file if your manuscript is accepted.
For more information, see 'Preparing figures' below.

Style and language

For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript you need
to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. If you need help with
writing in English you should consider:

Data and materials

A submission to the journal implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all
relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-
commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.

Data citation
The journal also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions
of the paper rely. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI), should
be included in the reference list using the minimum information recommended by DataCite,
and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs.

Research data and peer review

Peer reviewers are encouraged to check the manuscript’s Data availability statement, where
applicable. They should consider if the authors have complied with the journal’s policy on the
availability of research data, and whether reasonable effort has been made to make the data that
support the findings of the study available for replication or reuse by other researchers. Peer
reviewers are entitled to request access to underlying data (and code) when needed for them to
perform their evaluation of a manuscript.

Figures
When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.
 Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main
manuscript, not in the graphic file.
 Tables should NOT be submitted as figures but should be included in the main manuscript file.
 Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc.) should be submitted as a single composite
file that contains all parts of the figure.
 Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in
this order.
 Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation.
 Figure keys should be incorporated into the graphic, not into the legend of the figure.
 Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the
illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with
other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site. For more
information on individual figure file formats, see our detailed instructions.
 Individual figure files should not exceed 10 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is
adequate for extremely high quality figures.
 Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the
copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published
elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the
rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non open
access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source
included in the reference list.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

 EPS (suitable for diagrams and/or images)

 PDF (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
 Microsoft Word (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
 PowerPoint (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
 TIFF (suitable for images)
 JPEG (suitable for photographic images, less suitable for graphical images)
 PNG (suitable for images)
 BMP (suitable for images)
 CDX (ChemDraw - suitable for molecular structures)
Figure size and resolution
Figures are resized during publication of the final full text and PDF versions to conform to the
SpringerOpen standard dimensions, which are detailed below.

Preparing tables
When preparing tables, please follow the formatting instructions below.

 Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table
1, Table 2 etc.).
 Tables less than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed in the appropriate location within
the manuscript.
 Tables larger than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed at the end of the document
text file. Please cite and indicate where the table should appear at the relevant location in the
text file so that the table can be added in the correct place during production.
 Larger datasets, or tables too wide for A4 or Letter landscape page can be uploaded as
additional files. Please see [below] for more information.
 Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls ) or
comma separated values (.csv). Please use the standard file extensions.
 Table titles (max 15 words) should be included above the table, and legends (max 300 words)
should be included underneath the table.
 Tables should not be embedded as figures or spreadsheet files, but should be formatted using
‘Table object’ function in your word processing program.
 Color and shading may not be used. Parts of the table can be highlighted using superscript,
numbering, lettering, symbols or bold text, the meaning of which should be explained in a table
legend.
 Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values.
 General Instructions
 Page Number is Mandatory
 Footer is Mandatory (Ex: Title of the Document (Reg.No))
 You can use Online or Offline Compiler
(Online-Overleaf)
(Offline-Textmaker, Texstudio, Authorea, LyX, TeXworks)