Guide to Authors

To download our complete Guide to Authors, please click here

Modern Pathology and Springer Nature are pleased to share detailed online Author Tutorials - including interactive quizzes - which cover the following topics:

  • Writing a journal manuscript
  • Submitting a journal and peer review
  • Writing in English
  • Open Access

You can also watch a brief video giving an overview of the tutorials here.

Further information can be found in our guidelines on How to Get Published, available in English and Mandarin .

Article Type Specifications

Article: Research Articles must describe in detail a significant advance in human diagnostic pathology.
Specifications:  Unstructured abstract, max. 300 words; main body of text (excluding abstract, tables/figures, and references) not to exceed 7,000 words; max. 8 figures or tables; max. 100 references.

Review Article: Review Articles require prior approval by the Editor. Review articles must be of general interest to pathologists and contain original, in-depth analysis of the chosen topic.
Specifications:  Unstructured abstract, max. 300 words; main body of text (excluding abstract, tables/figures, and references) not to exceed 5,000 words; max. 5 figures or tables; max. 150 references.

Correspondence: Correspondence articles are short Letters to the Editor responding to a specific article published in Modern Pathology.
Specifications:  No abstract; main body of text (excluding abstract, tables/figures, and references) not to exceed 1,000 words; max. 2 figures or tables; max. 10 references.

Publication charges

If your manuscript is accepted, there will be no charge for 1-4 color illustrations. After that, additional color images are charged at $627 USD each. Please do not submit images in color unless you are willing to pay these charges. Color charges will not apply to authors who choose to pay an article processing charge to make their paper open access - for further information on open access publication see our Open Access & Self Archiving page.

Preparation of Articles

House Style: Authors should adhere to the following formatting guidelines

  • Text should be double spaced with a wide margin.
  • All pages and lines are to be numbered.
  • 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.
  • Spaces, not commas should be used to separate thousands.
  • At first mention of a manufacturer, the town (and state if USA) and country should be provided.
  • Statistical methods: For normally distributed data, mean (SD) is the preferred summary statistic. Relative risks should be expressed as odds ratios with 95% confidence interval. To compare two methods for measuring a variable the method of Bland & Altman (1986, Lancet 1, 307–310) should be used; for this, calculation of P only is not appropriate.
  • 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: On first using an abbreviation place it in parentheses after the full item. Very common abbreviations such as FFA, RNA, need not be defined. 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.

Cover Letter: In the cover letter, provide full contact information for corresponding author, verify that each author approves of the submitted version of the manuscript, state that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere, and declare any business relationships that might lead to a conflict of interest. Optional: Provide information about related submissions or publications; explain why your research is a good fit for the journal and what it adds to the field, and add anything else that the editors may find useful.

Manuscripts should be organized according to the following style:

Title Page: The title page should contain:

-Groups where there is an ‘on behalf of’, or ‘representing the’, or ‘for the’ will appear in the HTML/PDF as follows: Author A, Author B, Author C and Author D on behalf of…The list of individual members should then appear in the Acknowledgements section and not under Notes or Appendix

-A Group name who is an author in its own right should have the list of authors as usual and then all the individual authors of the group listed in their own section at the end of the article, NOT in Acknowledgement/Appendix or Notes

  • Title of the paper - brief, informative, of 150 characters or less and should not make a statement or conclusion
  • Full names of all the authors and their affiliations, together with the name, full postal address, telephone number and e-mail address of the corresponding author. 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. Group Authorship/Collaborations - Please note that if in the list of authors you wish to include additional authors/collaborators/ groups/consortiums that aren’t part of the core list of authors as ‘on behalf of’, ‘for the’ or ‘representing the’ you need to ensure you list the authors correctly within the paper to ensure these are there deposited correctly in PubMed.
  • Competing Interests statement (see the section below on Editorial Policy). Authors should disclose the sources of any support for the work received in the form of grants and/or equipment and drugs.

As part of our efforts to improve transparency in authorship, we now request that all authors identified as 'corresponding author' create and link their Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) with their account on the Manuscript Tracking System (MTS) prior to acceptance. For more information please visit http://www.springernature.com/orcid.

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:  Articles must be prepared with an unstructured abstract designed to summarise the essential features of the paper in a logical and concise sequence.

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.

Acknowledgements: These should be brief, and should include sources of support including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organisation) and sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially.

Conflict of Interest:  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, but should also be noted in the cover letter. Please see the Competing Interests definition in the Editorial Policies section for detailed information.

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); the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate; a statement that the study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including individual details, images or videos), written consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. If the participant is deceased, consent must be sought from the next of kin of the participant. In all such instances, all reasonable measures must be taken to protect patient anonymity. In certain cases, the journal may insist upon obtaining evidence of informed consent from authors. Images without appropriate consent must be removed from publication.

If your study did not require ethical approval, please state this.

Author Contributions: Authors must include a statement about the contribution of each author to the manuscript (see section on Authorship). The initials of each author may be used.

This is an example of a typical author contribution statement: E.R. and V.S. performed study concept and design; E.P., C.S., M.J. and O.D. performed development of methodology and writing, review and revision of the paper; M.J., O.D., C.S., B.L., and T.C. provided acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data, and statistical analysis; M.D. provided technical and material support. All authors read and approved the final paper.

To understand more about authorship definitions, please refer to the ICMJE Authorship Guidelines.

Funding: The funding section is mandatory. Authors must declare sources of study funding including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organization). If no funding was received, please state “The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.”

Data Availability Statement: All manuscripts must include an ‘Data availability’ statement. Data availability statements should provide information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study. Examples of suitable statements include:

  • The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
  • The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].

We strongly encourage that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. Please see the journal's guidelines on Research Data policy here.

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:
Matsushita K, Wu Y, Pratt RE, Dzau VJ. Deletion of angiotensin II type 2 receptor accelerates adipogenesis in murine mesenchymal stem cells via Wnt10b/beta-catenin signaling. Lab Invest 96, 909–917(2016)
Journal article, e-pub ahead of print:
Matsushita K, Wu Y, Pratt RE, Dzau VJ. Deletion of angiotensin II type 2 receptor accelerates adipogenesis in murine mesenchymal stem cells via Wnt10b/beta-catenin signaling. Lab Invest (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/labinvest201666
Complete book:
Verveer PJ. Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy. New York: Humana Press, 2015.
Chapter in book:
Williamson SR, Eble JN and Chang L. Molecular Pathology of Kidney Tumors. In: Chang L and Eble JN, editors. Molecular Surgical Pathology. 1st ed. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 2013. p. 171– 212.
Website:
National Research Council (US)Committee Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, [Internet], 8th edn. National Academies Press: Washington (DC), 2011, [cited 23 October 2015]. Available from https://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/Guide-for- the-Care-and-use-of-laboratory-animals.pdf.
Preprint:
Babichev SA, Ries J & Lvovsky AI. Quantum scissors: teleportation of single-mode optical states by means of a nonlocal single photon. Preprint at http://arXiv.org/quant-ph/0208066 (2002).
Abstract:
Huang X, Chen H, Ding Q, Robinson M, Bassett R & Tang G et al. Clinicopathological Features of HER2 Positive Classic Invasive Lobular Carcinoma. United States & Canadian Academy of Pathology 109th Annual Meeting Abstracts: Eyes on You. Mod Pathol 33, 188 (2020)

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.

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

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. 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.

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 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 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.

Subject Ontology 
Upon submission authors will be asked to select a series of subject terms relevant to the topic of their manuscript from our subject ontology. Providing these terms will ensure your article is 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.