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PLoS Biology Guidelines for Authors

Contents:

  1. About PLoS Biology
  2. Criteria for Publication
  3. Presubmission Enquiries
  4. Overview of the Editorial Process
  5. Preparation of Research Manuscripts
  6. Submission of Research Manuscripts
  7. Other Article Types
  8. Outline of the Production Process
  9. Reader Responses and Notes, Comments and Ratings

1. About PLoS Biology

PLoS Biology is an open-access* journal published by the Public Library of Science. The journal features works of exceptional significance, originality, and relevance in all areas of biological science, from molecules to ecosystems, including works at the interface of other disciplines, such as chemistry, medicine, and mathematics. Our audience is the international scientific community as well as educators, policy makers, patient advocacy groups, and interested members of the public around the world.

* Open access means that every paper is freely available for everyone to read, download, copy, distribute and use.

2. Criteria for Publication

PLoS Biology is highly selective in the manuscripts that it publishes; rejection rates are high. To be considered for publication in PLoS Biology, any given manuscript must be exceptional in the following ways:

3. Presubmission Enquiries

We strongly encourage authors to submit a presubmission enquiry before making a full submission. The purpose of a presubmission enquiry is to solicit rapid feedback from the staff editors about the potential suitability of a manuscript for the journal. Presubmission enquiries will be assessed for suitability in the context of the publishing mission of PLoS Biology: to publish exceptional research across all areas of the life sciences, with a particular emphasis on those areas for which unrestricted access is especially important to the research community or to the general public. Suitable papers will include substantial new conceptual or mechanistic insight, which significantly advance one or more particular fields, or will represent an application that is of fundamental importance to a field. If you wish to submit a presubmission enquiry, please log into the PLoS Biology online submission system and select "Submit Presubmission Enquiry" from your homepage.

Please note that a positive response from a staff editor is not a commitment to peer-review the article formally, but it is an expression of interest on the basis of the information you provide in the presubmission enquiry. The specific information we require is listed below. It is therefore in your interest to outline the importance of your claims, with reference to related work, and to describe the evidence you present in support of your conclusions as objectively as possible. Providing relevant information will save you time and help to ensure that the editors give you a response that is appropriate to the content of your article. Please also ensure that you check the remit of other PLoS journals before submitting to PLoS Biology.

To be of most use to authors and editors, presubmission enquiries should consist of the following:

A) A COVER LETTER of approximately 600 words that provides brief answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the scientific question you are addressing?
  2. What is the key finding that answers this question?
  3. What is the nature of the evidence you provide in support of your conclusion?
  4. What are the three most recently published papers that are relevant to this question?
  5. What significance do your results have for the field?
  6. What significance do your results have for the broader community (of biologists and/or the public)?
  7. What other novel findings do you present?
  8. Is there additional information that we should take into account?

You may also include in the cover letter requests to exclude specific scientists from the evaluation process. Please provide a reason for doing so. Please also read our policy about competing interests before submitting your enquiry.

B) A REFERENCED ABSTRACT of approximately 300 words. For the purpose of the presubmission enquiry submission form, the referenced abstract will be your "article file" and should include up to 10 key references that put your work into context. Please do not submit your entire manuscript. The abstract should be structured as follows:

Background
This section should describe clearly the rationale for the study being done and the previous work relevant to the study. It should end with a statement of the specific question or hypothesis being addressed.

Methodology/Principal Findings
Mention the techniques used without going into extensive methodological detail, and outline the most important results. Include sample sizes for key experiments as appropriate. Please also outline any limitations of the study that may have a bearing on the results.

Conclusions/Significance
Provide the take-home message of your article as clearly as possible. You may also include a brief, more general interpretation of the results and / or specific recommendations for future research. Please note, however, that the editors will pay most attention to the direct conclusions of the work being presented, rather than some possible future avenues being opened.

C) YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION. Even though the form allows you to enter information for all authors who contributed to the manuscript, you need only enter information for the corresponding author.

Please note: At this time we cannot accept any documents created in Microsoft Office 2007. PLoS is actively seeking solutions to this problem.

If you have any questions or require assistance with the presubmission enquiry process, please e-mail plosbiology[at]plos.org.

Authors who receive an invitation to submit their full manuscripts will then enter the regular editorial process.

4. Overview of the Editorial Process

Our aim is to provide all authors with an efficient, courteous, and constructive editorial process. To ensure the fairest and most objective decision-making, the editorial process is run as a partnership between the PLoS Biology professional editors and the Editorial Board, which is comprised of leaders in all fields of biology.

The ultimate responsibility for the PLoS Biology content and editorial decision-making lies with the team of professional editors. Submitted manuscripts will be assigned to one of the professional editors, who will promptly evaluate the paper. The editor will often seek advice from an Academic Editor, who is usually a member of the Editorial Board, and decide if the work is likely to meet the requirement of providing a major advance in its field and describing a sufficient body of work to support the main claims, and, if so, it will be sent out for peer review. Academic Editors retain anonymity unless a paper is accepted for publication. The name of the Academic Editor is noted on the published paper.

Expert reviewers will be asked to assess the technical and scientific merits of the work. Once all reviews have been received and considered by the professional and Academic Editors, a decision letter to the author will be drafted.

There are several types of decisions possible: accept the paper as submitted; accept it with revision; invite the authors to revise the manuscript prior to the final decision; reject the paper, but with encouragement to resubmit it after extensive revision; or reject the manuscript outright, typically because it does not meet the criteria outlined above of originality, importance to the field, cross-disciplinary interest, or sound methodology. If the decision is to allow resubmission, the author will be advised in the decision letter whether the paper will require further peer review at that time. The revised manuscript will be assessed by a professional editor and Academic Editor. Sometimes, re-review will be required, but in general we aim to make decisions without involving multiple rounds of review.

Upon acceptance, the manuscript enters our production system. Articles are typically published online within 6 weeks of formal acceptance, and usually before they are assembled into a complete issue.

Appeals of Decisions

If you wish to appeal a decision, you should contact the professional editor who handled the presubmission inquiry or full manuscript, explaining in detail your reasons for the appeal.

All appeals will be discussed with at least one other professional editor; if those editors do not agree the appeal will be discussed at a full editorial meeting. Priority is given to new submissions to the journal, and the processing of appeals will usually take longer than the original submission. We may or may not seek external advice on appeals, and we do not consider second appeals.

5. Preparation of Research Manuscripts

PLoS Biology publishes original research articles of outstanding scientific significance. We will consider manuscripts of any length; we encourage the submission of both substantial full-length bodies of work and shorter manuscripts that report novel findings that might be based on a more limited range of experiments. The key criteria are that the work clearly demonstrates its novelty, its importance to a particular field as well as its interest to those outside that discipline, and conclusions that are justified by the study.

The writing style should be concise and accessible. Editors will make suggestions for how to achieve this, as well as suggestions for cuts or additions that could be made to the article to strengthen the argument. Our aim is to make the editorial process rigorous and consistent, but not intrusive or overbearing. Authors are encouraged to use their own voice and to decide how best to present their ideas, results, and conclusions.

Although we encourage submissions from around the globe, we require that manuscripts be submitted in English. As a step towards overcoming language barriers, we encourage authors fluent in other languages to provide copies of their full articles or abstracts in other languages. Translations should be submitted as supporting information and listed, together with other supporting information files, at the end of the article text.

Please note: At this time we cannot accept for review or revision any documents created in Microsoft Office 2007, even if "saved down" to the 2003 version. Major changes made in Word 2007, relative to earlier versions of Word, are incompatible with the established workflow processes of many publishers (e.g. the handling of mathematical equations). PLoS is actively seeking solutions to this problem.

Organization of the Manuscript

Most articles published in PLoS Biology will be organized into the following sections: Title, authors, affiliations, abstract, introduction, results, discussion, materials and methods, references, acknowledgments, and figure legends. Uniformity in format will facilitate the experience of readers and users of the journal. Page numbers are required for all sections (figures exempted). There are no specific length restrictions for the overall manuscript or individual sections. However, we urge authors to present and discuss their findings concisely. We recognize that some works will not be best presented in our research article format. If you have a manuscript that would benefit from a different format, please contact the editors to discuss this further.

Our submission system can support a large range of formats for text and graphics, but if you experience difficulties with the site or are concerned about the suitability of your files, please contact the editorial department PLoSBiology [at] plos.org.

Please submit your manuscript with double spacing (a blank line under each line of text) for the convenience of the editors and any reviewers.

Title (150 characters, including spaces)

The title should be specific to the project yet concise. It should be comprehensible to readers outside your field. Avoid specialist abbreviations, if possible. Titles should be presented in title case, meaning that all words except for prepositions, articles, and conjunctions should be capitalized.

Example:
Detection of Specific Sequences among DNA Fragments Separated by Gel Electrophoresis.

Please also provide a brief "running head" of approximately 50 characters. If your article is published, this will appear as a heading on each page of the paper.

Authors and Affiliations

Provide the first names or initials (if used), middle names or initials (if used), surnames, and affiliations—department, university or organization, city, state/province (if applicable), and country—for all authors. The information entered into our online system must be correct, as it will be published for accepted papers. If you require assistance in correcting author affiliations, etc. please contact our editorial team at plosbiology [at] plos.org.

One author should be designated as the corresponding author. It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that the author list, and the summary of the author contributions to the study are accurate and complete. If the article has been submitted on behalf of a consortium, all consortium members and affiliations should be listed after the Acknowledgments.

Abstract

The abstract succinctly introduces the paper. It should mention the techniques used without going into methodological detail and mention the most important results. The abstract is conceptually divided into the following three sections: Background, Methodology/Principal Findings, and Conclusions/Significance, however these headers do not appear in the published article. Please do not include any citations in the abstract. Avoid specialist abbreviations.

Author Summary

We ask that authors submitting revised manuscripts include a 150-200 word non-technical summary of the work as a separate file, uploaded as a Related Manuscript File, with the title "Author Summary". Subject to editorial review, this short text is published with all research articles as a highlighted text box.

Distinct from the scientific abstract, the author summary is included in the article to make findings accessible to an audience of both scientists and non-scientists. Ideally aimed to a level of understanding of an undergraduate student, the significance of the work should be presented simply, objectively, and without exaggeration.

Authors should avoid the use of acronyms and complex scientific terms and write the text using a first person voice. Authors may benefit from consulting with a science writer or press officer to ensure they effectively communicate their findings to a general audience. We encourage you to look at two examples of summaries currently online in PLoS Biology. These examples should help you determine the level we are aiming for:

Blurb

In addition to the Author Summary, we require a brief statement ("blurb") about the work. The blurb should be about 20 to 30 words long and is subject to editorial changes. It should, without exaggeration, entice people to read your manuscript. As it will be displayed on the website below the title of the article, it should not be redundant with the title. It should not contain acronyms or abbreviations. For examples, please view the blurbs accompanying the articles in the current issue of PLoS Biology.

Please submit your Blurb as a sentence or two, at the bottom of the document containing your Author Summary, under the heading "Blurb."

Introduction

The introduction should put the focus of the manuscript into a broader context. As you compose the introduction, think of readers who are not experts in this field. Include a brief review of the key literature. If there are relevant controversies or disagreements in the field, they should be mentioned so that a non-expert reader can delve into these issues further. The introduction should conclude with a brief statement of the overall aim of the experiments and a comment about whether that aim was achieved.

Results

The results section should provide details of all of the experiments that are required to support the conclusions of the paper. There is no specific word limit for this section, but details of experiments that are peripheral to the main thrust of the article and that detract from the focus of the article should not be included. The section may be divided into subsections, each with a concise subheading. Large datasets, including raw data, should be submitted as supplemental files; these are published online alongside the accepted article. The results section should be written in past tense.

Discussion

The discussion should spell out the major conclusions and interpretations of the work including some explanation on the significance of these conclusions. How do the conclusions affect the existing assumptions and models in the field? How can future research build on these observations? What are the key experiments that must be done? The discussion should be concise and tightly argued. If warranted, the results and discussion may be combined into one section.

Materials and Methods

This section should provide enough detail for reproduction of the findings. Protocols for new methods should be included, but well-established protocols may simply be referenced. We encourage authors to submit, as separate files, detailed protocols for newer or less well-established methods. These will be published online linked to the article and will be fully searchable.

Acknowledgments

People who contributed to the work, but do not fit the criteria for authors should be listed in the Acknowledgments, along with their contributions. You must also ensure that anyone named in the acknowledgments agrees to being so named. The Acknowledgments section is reserved for statements of gratitude or thanks. Details of the funding sources that have supported the work should be confined to the funding statement. Do not include them in the Acknowledgments.

References

Only published or accepted manuscripts should be included in the reference list. Meetings, abstracts, conference talks, or papers that have been submitted but not yet accepted should not be cited. Limited citation of unpublished work should be included in the body of the text only. All personal communications should be supported by a letter from the relevant authors.

PLoS uses the numbered citation (citation-sequence) method. References are listed and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, citations should be indicated by the reference number in brackets. Multiple citations within a single set of brackets should be separated by commas. Where there are three or more sequential citations, they should be given as a range. Example: "...has been shown previously [1,4–6,22]." Make sure the parts of the manuscript are in the correct order for the relevant journal before ordering the citations. Figure captions and tables should be at the end of the manuscript.

Because references will be linked electronically as much as possible to the papers they cite, proper formatting of the references is crucial. Please use the following style for the reference list:

Published Papers
1. Sanger F, Nicklen S, Coulson AR (1977) DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 74: 5463–5467.

Please list the first five authors and then add "et al." if there are additional authors. Use of a DOI number to the full-text article is acceptable as an alternative to or in addition to traditional volume and page numbers.

Accepted Papers
Same as above, but "In press" appears instead of the page numbers. Example: Adv Clin Path. In press.

Electronic Journal Articles
1. Loker WM (1996) "Campesinos" and the crisis of modernization in Latin America. Jour Pol Ecol 3. Available: http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/volume_3/ascii-lokeriso.txt. Accessed 11 August 2006.

Books
1. Bates B (1992) Bargaining for life: A social history of tuberculosis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 435 p.

Book Chapters
1. Hansen B (1991) New York City epidemics and history for the public. In: Harden VA, Risse GB, editors. AIDS and the historian. Bethesda: National Institutes of Health. pp. 21–28.

Competing Interest

Authors are asked at submission to declare whether they have any financial, personal, or professional interests that could be construed to have influenced their paper. Reviewers are also asked to declare any interests that might interfere with their objective assessment of a manuscript. Any relevant competing interests of authors must be available to editors and reviewers during the review process and will be stated in published articles. Click here for more general information on the Public Library of Science’s policy regarding competing interests.

Abbreviations

Please keep abbreviations to a minimum. List all non-standard abbreviations in alphabetical order, along with their expanded form. Define them as well upon first use in the text. Non-standard abbreviations should not be used unless they appear at least three times in the text.

Priority Claims

Manuscripts should not include priority claims. For example, "the first demonstration of this" should be changed to "the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of this."

Nomenclature

The use of standardized nomenclature in all fields of science and medicine is an essential step toward the integration and linking of scientific information reported in published literature. We will enforce the use of correct and established nomenclature wherever possible:

Accession Numbers

All appropriate datasets, images, and information should be deposited in public resources. Please provide the relevant accession numbers (and version numbers, if appropriate). Accession numbers should be provided in parentheses after the entity on first use. Suggested databases include, but are not limited to:

In addition, as much as possible, please provide accession numbers or identifiers for all entities such as genes, proteins, mutants, diseases, etc., for which there is an entry in a public database, for example:

Providing accession numbers allows linking to and from established databases and integrates your article with a broader collection of scientific information.

Figures

Figures should be submitted either as .EPS or .TIFF files. If the article is accepted for publication, authors will be asked to supply high-resolution, print-ready versions of the figures. Please ensure that the files conform to our Guidelines for Figure and Table Preparation when preparing your figures for production. All figures will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows them to be freely used, distributed, and built upon as long as proper attribution is given. Please do not submit any figures that have been previously copyrighted unless you have express written permission from the copyright holder to publish under the CCAL license.

Figure Legends

The aim of the figure legend should be to describe the key messages of the figure, but the figure should also be discussed in the text. An enlarged version of the figure and its full legend will often be viewed in a separate window online, and it should be possible for a reader to understand the figure without switching back and forth between this window and the relevant parts of the text. Each legend should have a concise title of no more than 15 words. The legend itself should be succinct, while still explaining all symbols and abbreviations. Avoid lengthy descriptions of methods.

Tables

All tables should have a concise title. Footnotes can be used to explain abbreviations. Citations should be indicated using the same style as outlined above. Tables occupying more than one printed page should be avoided, if possible. Larger tables can be published as online supporting information. Tables must be cell-based; do not use picture elements, text boxes, tabs, or returns in tables. Please ensure that the files conform to our Guidelines for Figure and Table Preparation when preparing your tables for production.

Multimedia Files and Supporting Information

We encourage authors to submit essential supporting files and multimedia files along with their manuscripts. All supporting material will be subject to peer review, and should be smaller than 10 MB in size because of the difficulties that some users will experience in loading or downloading files of a greater size.

Supporting files should fall into one of the following categories: Dataset, Figure, Table, Text, Protocol, Audio, or Video. All supporting information should be referred to in the manuscript with a leading capital S (e.g., Figure S4 for the fourth supporting information figure). Titles (and, if desired, legends) for all supporting information files should be listed in the manuscript under the heading "Supporting Information."

Supporting files may be submitted in a variety of formats, but should be publication-ready, as these files are not copyedited. All video files should be submitted as AVI or Quicktime files.

6. Submission of Research Manuscripts

Are You Ready to Submit Your Manuscript?

We have provided an author checklist to help you prepare your materials for submission and to make the online submission process as straightforward as possible. Please take the time to look through the list before submitting your article.

We strongly encourage authors to submit a presubmission enquiry before making a full submission. The purpose of a presubmission enquiry is to solicit rapid feedback from the staff editors about the potential suitability of a manuscript for the journal.

Cover Letter

Please include a cover letter of no more than 600 words that provides brief answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the scientific question you are addressing?
  2. What is the key finding that answers this question?
  3. What is the nature of the evidence you provide in support of your conclusion?
  4. What are the three most recently published papers that are relevant to this question?
  5. What significance do your results have for the field?
  6. What significance do your results have for the broader community (of biologists and/or the public)?
  7. What other novel findings do you present?
  8. Is there additional information that we should take into account?

You may also include in the cover letter requests to exclude specific scientists from the evaluation process. Please provide a reason for doing so. Please also read our policy about competing interests before submitting your enquiry.

Electronic Submission

Detailed instructions for submission can be found on the PLoS Biology Manuscript Submission and Peer Review Web site. Files are uploaded individually and are combined into a single PDF file, which must be approved by the author at the end of the submission process.

Hardcopies of your manuscript are not required

Text files can be submitted for review in the following formats: .DOC, .RTF or .PDF. Any articles that have been prepared in LaTeX will be accepted for review, but only in .PDF format. After acceptance, only text files (.RTF or .DOC) of the revised manuscript can be accepted for use in the pre-production and copyediting processes.

Tables for publication can be submitted in .DOC or.XLS formats.

Manuscript figure files can be submitted in the following formats: EPS or TIFF. Figures that are part of the Supporting Information can be submitted in any format.

7. Other Article Types

While remaining scientifically rigorous, the magazine section of PLoS Biology is inclusive and accessible to a broad audience. All articles submitted to the magazine section are directed at a readership that extends beyond the traditional research community and that includes scientific educators, students, physicians, patients, and the interested public. The magazine section provides opportunities for contributions not only from scientists, but also from authors who might not otherwise publish primary articles in PLoS Biology.

All articles in the magazine section of PLoS Biology are published by invitation only, but if you have a suggestion for a topic in any of the following categories, we will be happy to consider the idea. Please submit your suggestions for front matter via our online submission system as a pre-submission enquiry. You may find that some of the fields on the submission form are not appropriate to your front matter article-please enter a full stop/period into these boxes. If you have any questions about this process, please contact our publication assistants at plosbiology [at] plos.org.

Essays

PLoS Biology publishes visionary and provocative essays that cover broad topics of general interest to life scientists. Essays might explore the implications of recent advances in a given field or global methods that promise to have broad-ranging consequences across fields, investigate an emerging trend with cross-disciplinary implications, or explain the challenges of a nascent field.

Features

News features, written by science writers, explore either recent advances or ongoing controversies in the life sciences, typically presenting the perspectives of many different scientists told in a lively narrative to reach a broad audience.

Unsolved Mysteries

Unsolved Mysteries discuss a topic of biological importance that is poorly understood and in need of research attention, covering issues that have been ignored, pose technically and conceptually challenging questions, or recent puzzling phenomena with potentially devastating consequences. The articles are intended to stimulate students and other scientists to think about future research possibilities outside their areas of expertise.

Perspectives

Perspectives provide experts with a forum to comment on topical or controversial issues of broad interest.

Primers

Primers provide concise and accessible background information for a particular area in biology that might be featured in a PLoS Biology research article or for an emerging technique or discipline that holds great promise for the life science research community.

Community Pages

The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhance the dissemination and value of scientific knowledge.

Book Review/Science in the Media

Written by scientists, advocates, or science writers, these short reviews critique books, films, plays, and other media that deal with some aspect of the biological sciences.

Challenges

The challenges series features short peer-reviewed articles highlighting fundamental challenges that cut across and help unify different subdisciplines in biology.

Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

The Historical and Philosophical Perspectives section provides professional historians and philosophers of science with a forum to reflect on topical issues in contemporary biology.

Obituaries

8. Outline of the Production Process

Once an article has been accepted for publication, the manuscript files are transferred into our production system. Manuscripts are then copyedited by professional copyeditors who correspond directly with the authors concerning queries and corrections. Once the article has been typeset, PDF proofs are generated so that authors can approve the final article. The prompt return of proofs by authors will expedite the production process. PLoS permits only the following types of corrections to the PDF proofs: errors in author names or affiliations, errors to scientific fact that would cause misunderstandings to readers, and printer's (introduced) errors. Other correction requests will not be fulfilled. Therefore it is CRITICAL that you check your article Word file, the figures, and the tables very carefully when you see the copyedited article. Requests for corrections to any of these items may be denied once the article is in proofs.

9. Reader Responses and Notes, Comments and Ratings

On the 28th March 2009, the Reader Response functionality on PLoS Biology articles was discontinued in preparation for our launch on a new publishing platform that features a number of 'Web 2.0' tools to facilitate community evaluation and discourse around published articles.

All the Reader Response contributions that were in our archive are now available as comments directly added to the relevant article.

To contribute to an existing discussion about an article or to start a new one, see the guidelines explaining how you can add Notes, Comments and Ratings to any PLoS Biology article.

All site content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.