Author Guidelines
Writing and formatting
Title
The title should be concise, omitting terms that are implicit and, where possible, be a statement of the main result or conclusion presented in the manuscript. Abbreviations should be avoided within the title.
Witty and creative titles are welcome, but only if relevant and within measure. Consider if a title meant to be thought-provoking might be misinterpreted as offensive or alarming. In extreme cases, the editorial office may veto a title and propose an alternative.
Authors should avoid:
titles that are a mere question without giving the answer
unambitious titles, for example starting with 'Towards,' 'A description of,' 'A characterization of' or 'Preliminary study on'
vague titles, for example starting with 'Role of', 'Link between', or 'Effect of' that do not specify the role, link, or effect
including terms that are out of place, for example the taxonomic affiliation apart from species name.
Abstract
As a primary goal, the abstract should make the general significance and conceptual advance of the work clearly accessible to a broad readership. The abstract should be no longer than a single paragraph and should be structured, for example, according to the IMRAD format. For the specific structure of the abstract, authors should follow the requirements of the article type or journal to which they're submitting. Minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references, figures or tables.
For clinical trial articles, please include the unique identifier and the URL of the publicly accessible website on which the trial is registered.
Manuscript length
We encourage you to closely follow the article word count lengths given in the 'Article types' page of the journals. The manuscript length includes only the main body of the text, footnotes, and all citations within it, and excludes the abstract, section titles, figure and table captions, funding statement, acknowledgments, and references in the bibliography. Please indicate the number of words and the number of figures and tables included in your manuscript on the first page.
Sections
The manuscript is organized by headings and subheadings. The section headings should be those appropriate for your field and the research itself. You may insert up to 5 heading levels into your manuscript (i.e.,: 3.2.2.1.2 Heading Title).
For Original Research articles, it is recommended to organize your manuscript in the following sections or their equivalents for your field.
Introduction
Succinct, with no subheadings.
Materials and methods
This section may be divided by subheadings and should contain sufficient detail so that when read in conjunction with cited references, all procedures can be repeated. For experiments reporting results on animal or human subject research, an ethics approval statement should be included in this section (for further information, see the 'Bioethics' section of our policies and publication ethics.)
Results
This section may be divided by subheadings. Footnotes should not be used and must be transferred to the main text.
Discussion
This section may be divided by subheadings. Discussions should cover the key findings of the study: discuss any prior research related to the subject to place the novelty of the discovery in the appropriate context, discuss the potential shortcomings and limitations on their interpretations, discuss their integration into the current understanding of the problem and how this advances the current views, speculate on the future direction of the research, and freely postulate theories that could be tested in the future.
For further information, please check the descriptions defined in the journal's 'Article types' page, in the 'For authors' menu on every journal page.
Language editing
Frontiers requires manuscripts submitted to meet international English language standards to be considered for publication.
For authors who would like their manuscript to receive language editing or proofreading to improve the clarity of the manuscript and help highlight their research, we recommend the language-editing services provided by the following external partners.
Note that sending your manuscript for language editing does not imply or guarantee that it will be accepted for publication by a Frontiers journal. Editorial decisions on the scientific content of a manuscript are independent of whether it has received language editing or proofreading by these partner services or other services.
Editage
We recommend the language-editing service provided by our external partner Editage. These services may be particularly useful for researchers for whom English is not the primary language. They can help to improve the grammar, syntax, and flow of your manuscript prior to submission.
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