[KBCS] BioChip Journal Author’s Check List
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Titles should not exceed 90 characters (including spaces), and should not normally include numbers, acronyms, abbreviations, or punctuation. They should include sufficient detail for indexing purposes but be general enough for readers outside the field to understand what the paper is about.
Full-length papers and reviews should fill no more than eight (8) pages of BioChip Journal. A short abstract and a maximum of five keywords should be given at the top of the manuscript. An uninterrupted page of text contains about 300 words. A typical paper or review should contain about 3,000 words of text and, additionally, about five display items (figures and/or tables) with brief legends. When submitting new or revised manuscripts, authors should state in a cover letter to the editor their rough estimate of the length of their paper in terms of the number of BioChip Journal pages. Longer papers are sometimes allowed but only if explicitly suggested by the editor. Authors of contributions that significantly exceed the limits stated here or specified by the editor will have to shorten their papers before acceptance, inevitably delaying publication. BioChip Journal prefers authors to be listed without details of relative status, but instead to specify the contribution made by the coauthors in the acknowledgements. BioChip Journal strongly encourages coauthors to specify their contributions in this way. If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more coauthors are equal in status, they may be identified by a symbol with the caption ‘these authors contributed equally to the work’ immediately under the address list. Current addresses should appear immediately below the author list; all other essential author related explanation should be in the acknowledgements. Authors should format articles or letters using BioChip Journal’s Microsoft Word template, and before finalizing their manuscript, should use the author’s checklist for format (applies to revised manuscripts as well as original submissions). The style tags in the template should be deleted before submission.
The SI system should be used for all dimensional quantities.
If brief (less than 200 words in total), they can be included in the body at an appropriate place. Otherwise, they should be described at the end of the text in a ‘Methods’ section, subdivided by short, bold headings referring to methods used. Descriptions of methods already published should be avoided; a reference number can be provided to save space, with any addition or variation briefly stated. This whole section should not exceed 800 words and should ideally be shorter. If more space is required for Methods, the editor may suggest the use of online-only supplementary information for this purpose after submission and after receiving the referee reports. Supplementary material is also peer-reviewed.
Acknowledgements should be brief and should follow the reference list. Authors are encouraged to include a statement to specify the contributions of each coauthor. Acknowledgements should contain grant or contribution numbers, but should not contain thanks to anonymous referees and editors, or effusive comments.
References should be numbered and ordered sequentially as they appear in the body, methods, tables, and figure legends. When cited in the text, reference numbers should be superscripts, and not in brackets unless they are likely to be confused with a superscript number. The maximum number of references: 50 for full papers, is strictly enforced. Only one publication can be listed for each number. Only articles that have been published or submitted to a named publication should be in the reference list. Papers in preparation should be mentioned in the text with a list of authors (or initials if any of the cited authors are also coauthors in the present submission). Published conference abstracts, numbered patents, and preprints on recognized servers may be included in reference lists, but the text, grant details, and acknowledgements of such references may not.
Tables should each be presented on a separate page, portrait (not landscape) orientation, and upright on the page, not sideways. Tables should have a short, one-line title in bold text: upright roman (not bold or italic) type of the same size as the rest of the text is used. The body of the table should not contain horizontal or vertical rules; these will be added by BioChip Journal when necessary after the paper has been accepted for publication. Tables should be as small as possible. Bear in mind the size of a BioChip Journal page as a limiting factor when compiling a table and ensure that it will reduce appropriately.
Symbols and abbreviations are defined immediately below the table, followed by essential descriptive material as brief as possible, in double-spaced text.
Figure legends should be listed one-after-the-other, as part of the text document, separate from the figure files. Please do not write a legend below each figure. Each figure legend should begin with a brief title for the whole figure and continue with a short description of each panel and the symbols used. For contributions with methods sections, legends should not contain any details of methods, or exceed 100 words (fewer than 500 words in total for the whole paper). In contributions without methods sections, legends should be fewer than 300 words (800 words or fewer in total for the whole paper).
