Guide to Authors

Please Note: the journal isn’t able to respond to pre-submission enquiries, please submit papers directly via the submission system.

House Style: Authors should adhere to the following formatting guidelines

• Refer to JESEE 15(1), 1-5, 2005 for the official ISEA glossary of terms at https://www.nature.com/articles/7500411
• It is suggested that text be double-spaced with a one-inch margin for ease of reviewing
• Do not make rules thinner than 1pt (0.36mm).
• Use a coarse hatching pattern rather than shading for tints in graphs.
• Colour should be distinct when being used as an identifying tool.
• Commas, not spaces should be used to separate thousands.
• At first mention of a manufacturer, the town (and state if USA) and country should be provided.
• Units: Use metric units (SI units) as fully as possible. Preferably give measurements of energy in kiloJoules or MegaJoules with kilocalories in parentheses (1 kcal = 4.186kJ). Use % throughout.
• Abbreviations: Try to restrict the use of abbreviations to Systeme Internationale (SI) symbols and those recommended by the IUPAC. On first using an abbreviation place it in parentheses after the full item. Abbreviations of standard biochemical compounds such as ATP, DNA, nucleotides in nucleic acids, need not be defined. Abbreviations should be preceded by the words they stand for in the first instance of use. Note these abbreviations: gram g; litre l; milligram mg; kilogram kg; kilojoule kJ; megajoule MJ; weight wt; seconds s; minutes min; hours h. Do not add ‘s’ for plural units. Terms used less than four times should not be abbreviated.
• Reference Text: Please consult any of the following texts for specific standards regarding units and statistical abbreviations:

1. IUPAC's Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry (the green book), available here
2. IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the gold book), available here
3. Standard for Use of the International System of Units (SI): The Modern Metric System, IEEE/ASTM SI 10-2002. (The standard can be ordered from IEEE, Customer Service, PO Box 1331, Piscataway NJ 08855-1331; or from ASTM, 100 Barr Harbor Drive, West Conshohocken PA 19428.)
4. Biometry (2nd edn) by R. R. Sokal and F. J. Rohlf (Freeman, New York, 1981)
5. Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd edn) by R. Siegel and N. J.Castellan Jr (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1988)

• Title page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Materials (or Subjects) and Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Data Availability Statement
• References
• Acknowledgments (Mandatory)
• Author Contribution Statement
• Funding (Mandatory)
• Ethical Approval
• Competing Interests (Mandatory)
• Figure legends
• Tables
• Figures

Cover Letter: Authors should provide a cover letter that includes the affiliation and contact information for the corresponding author. Authors should briefly discuss the importance of the work and explain why it is considered appropriate for the diverse readership of the journal. The cover letter should confirm the material is original research, has not been previously published and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere while under consideration. If the manuscript has been previously considered for publication in another journal, please include the previous reviewer comments, to help expedite the decision by the Editorial team.

Title Page: The title page should contain:

• Title of the paper - brief, informative, of 30 words/150 characters or less and should not make a statement or conclusion
• Full names of all the authors and their affiliations, as well as the e-mail address of the corresponding author. Authors should disclose the sources of any support for the work, received in the form of grants and/or equipment and drugs. 
  If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more co-authors are equal in status, they may be identified by an asterisk symbol with the caption ‘These authors contributed equally to this work’ immediately under the address list.
• Consortia: For papers containing one or more consortia, all members of the consortium who meet the criteria for authorship must be listed individually as authors on the title page. The name of the consortia needs to also be on the title page and listed as an author (e.g. The BP Consortia). However, phrases such as “on behalf of” should not be used. If necessary, individual authors can be listed in both the main author list and as a member of a consortium. When submitting your manuscript via the online submission system, the consortium name should be entered as an author, together with the contact details of a nominated consortium representative. The Consortium should be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section, not as an Author, when it is made up of a group of people who do not meet authorship criteria. See here for further consortia formatting guidelines, which should be adhered to prior to acceptance.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Abstract and Keywords: Articles must be prepared with a structured abstract designed to summarise the essential features of the paper in a logical and concise sequence under the following mandatory headings:

• Background
• Objective
• Methods
• Results
• Significance

 Three to 6 keywords can be included.

Impact Statement: Please include an Impact Statement after the abstract of 100 words or less. This should succinctly convey the focus of your paper.

Graphical Abstracts (optional): A graphical abstract, which summarizes the manuscript in a visual way, is designed to attract the attention of readers in the table of contents of the journal. Graphical abstracts are published in the table of contents and in the article. The graphic should be submitted as a single file using a standard file format (.tiff, .eps, .jpg, .bmp, .doc, or .pdf.), it should be 9 cm wide x 5 cm high when printed at full scale and a minimum of 300 dpi. All graphical abstracts should be submitted with a white background and imagery should fill the available width, whenever possible. Colour graphical abstracts are encouraged and will be published at no additional charge. Textual statements should be kept to a minimum.

Introduction: The Introduction should assume that the reader is knowledgeable in the field and should therefore be as brief as possible but can include a short historical review where desirable.

Materials/Subjects and Methods: This section should contain sufficient detail, so that all experimental procedures can be reproduced, and include references. Methods, however, that have been published in detail elsewhere should not be described in detail. Authors should provide the name of the manufacturer and their location for any specifically named medical equipment and instruments, and all drugs should be identified by their pharmaceutical names, and by their trade name if relevant.

Results: The Results section should briefly present the experimental data in text, tables or figures. Tables and figures should not be described extensively in the text.

Discussion: The Discussion should focus on the interpretation and the significance of the findings with concise objective comments that describe their relation to other work in the area. It should not repeat information in the results. The final paragraph should highlight the main conclusion(s), and provide some indication of the direction future research should take.

Data Availability Statement: Please include a statement at the end of your paper that tells readers where the data generated or analysed during this study can be found e.g. within the published article and its supplementary files, within a recognised repository, with a link to the data in said repository, or if additional data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Please see the Data Availability and Policy page for more information.

References: Only papers directly related to the article should be cited. Exhaustive lists should be avoided. References should follow the Vancouver format. In the text they should appear as numbers starting at one and at the end of the paper they should be listed (double-spaced) in numerical order corresponding to the order of citation in the text. Where a reference is to appear next to a number in the text, for example following an equation, chemical formula or biological acronym, citations should be written as (ref. X). Example “detectable levels of endogenous Bcl-2 (ref. 3), as confirmed by western blot”.
All authors should be listed for papers with up to six authors; for papers with more than six authors, the first six only should be listed, followed by et al. Abbreviations for titles of medical periodicals should conform to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The first and last page numbers for each reference should be provided. Abstracts and letters must be identified as such. Papers in press may be included in the list of references.
Personal communications can be allocated a number and included in the list of references in the usual way or simply referred to in the text; the authors may choose which method to use. In either case authors must obtain permission from the individual concerned to quote his/her unpublished work.

Examples:
Journal article:
Neidlein, S, Wirth, R, Pourhassan, M. Iron deficiency, fatigue and muscle strength and function in older hospitalized patients. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2020; 75:456–463

Journal article by DOI:
Kurotani K, Shinsugi C, Takimoto H. Diet quality and household income level among students: 2014 National Health and Nutrition Survey Japan. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2020; doi.org/10.1038/s41430-020-00794-1. 

Journal article, in press:
Gallardo RL, Juneja HS, Gardner FH. Normal human marrow stromal cells induce clonal growth of human malignant T-lymphoblasts. Int. J Cell Cloning (in press).

Complete book:
Atkinson K, Champlin R, Ritz J, Fibbe W, Ljungman P, Brenner MK (eds). Clinical Bone Marrow and Blood Stem Cell Transplantation. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.

Chapter in book:
Coccia PF. Hematopoietic cell transplantation for osteopetrosis. In: Blume KG, Forman SJ, Appelbaum FR (eds). Thomas' Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Malden, 2004. pp 1443–1454

Abstract:
Abstracts from the 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting of the British and Irish Hypertension Society (BIHS). J Hum Hypertens 34; 2020; 1–20

Website:
Kassambara A. rstatix: pipe-friendly framework for basic statistical tests. 2020. rpkgs.datanovia.com/rstatix/.

Online Document:
Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.  

Acknowledgements: These should be brief, and should include sources of technical assistance, critical advice or other assistance, which contributed to the final manuscript.

Author Contributions: This section is mandatory. The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section (for example JS designed experiments and helped write the manuscript; NAL contributed to data extraction and provided feedback on the report. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in the section on Authorship on the Editorial Policies page.

Funding: The funding section is mandatory. Authors must declare sources of study funding including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organization) and sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially. If no financial assistance was received in support of the study, please include a statement to this fact here.

Ethical Approval
Authors must provide a statement regarding ethical approval (see information on Human and Other Animal Experiments in the Editorial Policy section for further details). If ethical approval was not required, authors must provide an explanation of why it was not needed.

Competing Interests: Authors must declare whether or not there are any competing financial interests in relation to the work described. This information must be included at this stage and will be published as part of the paper. Please see the Competing Interests section under Editorial Policies for detailed information.

Figure Legends: These should be brief, specific and appear on a separate manuscript page after the References section.

Tables: Tables should only be used to present essential data; they should not duplicate what is written in the text. All tables must be editable, ideally presented in Excel. Each must be uploaded as a separate workbook with a title or caption and be clearly labelled, sequentially. Please make sure each table is cited within the text and in the correct order, e.g. (Table 3).  Please save the files with extensions .xls / .xlsx / .ods / or .doc or .docx. Please ensure that you provide a 'flat' file, with single values in each cell with no macros or links to other workbooks or worksheets and no calculations or functions.

Figures: Figures and images should be labelled sequentially and cited in the text. Figures should not be embedded within the text but rather uploaded as separate files. The use of three-dimensional histograms is strongly discouraged unless the addition of the third dimension is important for conveying the results. Composite figures containing more than three individual figures will count as two figures. All parts of a figure should be grouped together. Where possible large figures and tables should be included as supplementary material.
Detailed guidelines for submitting artwork can be found by downloading our Artwork Guidelines. Using the guidelines, please submit production quality artwork with your initial online submission. If you have followed the guidelines, we will not require the artwork to be resubmitted following the peer-review process, if your paper is accepted for publication.
Figures should be: as small as possible (for reasons of space in the journal); supplied in a comparable size to similar figures in printed issues of the journal; able to fit into a single column of the printed journal wherever possible (single column width is 86mm wide and double column is 178mm); able to reduced significantly without loss of quality wherever possible.

Page Charges
Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology levies a fixed page charge of US $153 per typeset page, which is fully inclusive of colour reproduction of all colour images in print, HTML and PDF.

First or corresponding authors who are members of the International Society of Exposure Science are charged US $50 per typeset page, provided they indicate at submission when directed to do so via the submission form that they are a member and provide their memberhsip account number. This number can be found in the left area of your account screen below the camera icon.

If applicable, 20% VAT will be added to the total page charge amount upon invoicing. This also applies to all EU authors who do not provide a valid VAT number upon returning their form.

Page charges will NOT apply to authors who choose to pay an article processing charge to make their paper open access.

Graphs, Histograms and Statistics

• Plotting individual data points is preferred to just showing means, especially where N<10
• If error bars are shown, they must be described in the figure legend
• Axes on graphs should extend to zero, except for log axes
• Statistical analyses (including error bars and p values) should only be shown for independently repeated experiments, and must not be shown for replicates of a single experiment
• The number of times an experiment was repeated (N) must be stated in the legend

Supplementary Information: Supplementary information is peer-reviewed material directly relevant to the conclusion of an article that cannot be included in the printed version owing to space or format constraints. The article must be complete and self-explanatory without the Supplementary Information, which is posted on the journal's website and linked to the article. Supplementary Information may consist of data files, graphics, movies or extensive tables. Please see our Artwork Guidelines for information on accepted file types.
Authors should submit supplementary information files in the FINAL format as they are not edited, typeset or changed, and will appear online exactly as submitted. When submitting Supplementary Information, authors are required to: 

• Include a text summary (no more than 50 words) to describe the contents of each file.
• Identify the types of files (file formats) submitted.

Please submit supplementary figures, small tables and text as a single combined PDF document. Tables longer than one page should be provided as an Excel or similar file type. For optimal quality video files please use H.264 encoding, the standard aspect ratio of 16:9 (4:3 is second best) and do not compress the video. Supplementary information is not copyedited, so please ensure that it is clearly and succinctly presented, and that the style and terminology conform to the rest of the manuscript, with any tracked-changes or Review mark-ups removed.

Please note: We do not allow the resupplying of Supplementary Information files for style reasons after a paper has been exported in production, unless there is a serious error that affects the science and, if by not replacing, it would lead to a formal correction once the paper has been published. In these cases we would make an exception and replace the file; however there are very few instances where a Supplementary Information file would be corrected post publication.

Non-Targeted Analysis (NTA) Study Reporting Tool (SRT): The Benchmarking and Publications for Non-Targeted Analysis (BP4NTA) working group published a study reporting tool to assist with preparation and review of non-targeted analysis manuscripts. We encourage authors to consider using and submitting the SRT with their NTA manuscripts to improve reporting, transparency, and reproducibility. More information and two formats of the SRT are available at nontargetedanalysis.org/srt.

Conventions: In general, the journal follows conventions given in Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors and Publishers (1994) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 6th edn. Please follow Chemical Abstracts and its indices for chemical names. For guidance in the use of biochemical terminology, please follow the recommendations issued by the IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature.

Subject Ontology: Choosing the most relevant and specific subject terms from our subject ontology will ensure that your article will be more discoverable and will appear on appropriate subject specific pages on nature.com, in addition to the journal’s own pages. Your article should be indexed with at least one, and up to four unique subject terms that describe the key subjects and concepts in your manuscript. Click here for help with this.