This page contains detailed information to help authors prepare, format and submit a manuscript. Please see our guide to authors for additional information and policies relevant to authors.

Contents

Choose a content-type ⤴

Read more about our Aims & Scope and content-types in our guide to authors. To publish in Scientific Data authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC), regardless of the selected content-type.

Select a repository for your data ⤴

When submitting a Data Descriptor, authors must deposit all relevant datasets in an appropriate public repository prior submission, and the completeness of these datasets will be considered during editorial evaluation and peer-review. Datasets must be made publicly available without restriction in the event that the Data Descriptor is accepted for publication (except reasonable controls related to human privacy issues or public safety - where depostion is still mandated, but with an controlled repository). Articles and Comments with data should also use a repository for related outputs as needed. 

Check our data repositories guidance, and read our full data deposition policies. Authors may also upload their data to figshare or to Dryad during manuscript submission (find out more here).

Draft your manuscript ⤴

All submissions should be clearly written, and understandable by scientists from diverse backgrounds, not just specialists. Technical jargon should be avoided as far as possible and clearly explained where its use is necessary. Titles and abstracts, in particular, should be written in language that will be readily intelligible to any scientist. We recommend that authors ask a colleague with different expertise to review the manuscript before submission, in order to identify concepts and terminology that may present difficulties for non-specialist readers. Abbreviations, particularly those that are non-standard, should also be kept to a minimum and, where unavoidable, should be defined in the text or legends at their first occurrence.

Please note that as long as the key section headings for the article type and present and completed we do not place any restrictions on article formatting or layout for manuscripts in review. This is because all formatting will replaced with our house style during typsetting should the paper be accepted. For this reason, we do not require or encourage the use of article templates. Authors that require a pre-defined structure are advised to copy the headings into a blank document. 

Beyond typsetting and formatting, manuscripts published in Scientific Data are not subject to in-depth copy editing. Authors are responsible for procuring copy editing or language editing services for their manuscripts, either before submission, or at the revision stage, should they feel it would benefit their manuscript. Such services include those provided by our affiliates Nature Research Editing Service and American Journal Experts. Please note that the use of such a service is at the author's own expense and in no way implies that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted for publication.

Sections are described for all content types unless noted. 

Titles & Abstracts 

Titles may not exceed 110 characters, including whitespaces. They should avoid the use of acronyms, abbreviations, and unnecessary punctuation where possible. Colons and parentheses are not permitted.

We recommend the Abstract should not exceed 170 words. It should not include references and should succinctly describe the data and how it may be used but should not make any claims regarding new scientific findings. We recommend URLs for download, or other details on dataset access, are not included. Please do not use sub-headings to break the Abstract into sections. 

Authors & Affiliations 

Author affiliations should provide enough detail for the author to be reached, including the department, institution and country wherever possible. Full postal addresses are not required. Affiliations should be cited in numerical order within the author list, starting with the affiliations of the first author. Email addresses should be provided for corresponding authors. If you wish to name more than one first author please use a footnote such as "These authors contributed equally". All other contributions should be described in the author contributions statement. We do not use other status label footnotes, such as "Senior Author". 

Background & Summary / Introduction 

This section should provide an overview of the study that generated the data, as well as outlining the potential reuse value of the data. Any previous publications that used these data, in whole or in part, should be cited and briefly summarized. Introductions for Articles and Comments should provide a similar explanation of why the work was performed and any relevant prior art. 

Methods 

The Methods section in Data Descriptors should describe any steps or procedures used in producing the data, including full descriptions of the experimental design, data acquisition and any computational processing. Specific data inputs should be explicitly referenced via our data citation format. See our detailed guidance for providing reproducible methods descriptions in Step 5. Articles should desribe the full scientific process for how the output or study was generated. 

Data Records (Data Descriptors only)

This section should be used to explain each data record associated with this work, including the repository where this information is stored, and to provide an overview of the data files and their formats and any folder structure. Each external data record should be cited using our data citation format. Please do not include extensive summary statistics, which should be limited to less than half a page, with 1-2 tables or figures, if required at all. Note the general expectation is that, if readers wish to scrutinise your dataset's contents, they will download and analyse it for themselves. 

Technical Validation (Data Descriptors only)

This section should present any experiments or analyses that are needed to support the technical quality of the dataset. This section may be supported by figures and tables, as needed.

Usage Notes (Data Descriptors only, optional)

'Usage Notes' is an optional section that can be used to provide information that may assist other researchers who reuse your data. Most commonly these are additional technical notes about how to access or process the data. Please do not use this section to write a conclusions section, or similar, as we do not publish these. 

Code Availability

For all publications, a statement must be included under the subheading "Code Availability" indicating whether and how and custom code can be accessed, including any restrictions to access. This section can also include information on the versions of any software used, if relevant, and any specific variables or parameters used to generate, test, or process the current dataset if these are not included in the Methods. Please see our policy on code availability for more information. The code availability statement should be placed at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the references. 

If no custom code has been used then the statement is still required in order to state this. 

Acknowledgements, Author Contributions & Competing Interests

Data Descriptors and Articles must include Acknowledgements, Authors contributions & Competing interest statements immediately before the References. Comments do not require an author contribution statement.

The 'Acknowledgements' statement should contain text acknowledging non-author contributors. Acknowledgements should be brief, and should not include thanks editors or effusive comments. Grant or contribution numbers may be acknowledged.

The 'Author contributions' statement should briefly describe each author's contribution to the work. Please see also the Nature journals' authorship policies.

A 'Competing interests' statement is required for all papers accepted by and published in Scientific Data. If there is no conflict of interest, a statement declaring this must still be included in the manuscript (e.g. "The author(s) declare no competing interests"). Please see our policies for more information on what may constitute a competing interest.

References

All references should be numbered sequentially, first throughout the text, then in tables, followed by figures and, finally, boxes; that is, references that only appear in tables, figures or boxes should be last in the reference list. Only one publication is given for each number. Only papers that have been published or accepted by a named publication or recognized preprint server should be in the numbered list; preprints of accepted papers in the reference list should be submitted with the manuscript.Grant details and acknowledgments are not permitted as numbered references. Footnotes are not used.

For LaTeX files, please note that references should be embedded directly within the .TEX file. Please do not use separate .bib or .bbl files, so if you .tex requires these, remove the dependency and replace it with the reference list. 

The correct abbreviation for Scientific Data is 'Sci. Data'.

Scientific Data uses standard Nature referencing style. All authors should be included in reference lists unless there are six or more, in which case only the first author should be given, followed by ‘et al.’. Authors should be listed last name first, followed by a comma and initials (followed by full stops, '.') of given names. Article titles should be in Roman text; only the first word of the title should have an initial capital and the title should be written exactly as it appears in the work cited, ending with a full stop. Book titles should be given in italics and all words in the title should have initial capitals. Journal names are italicized and abbreviated (with full stops) according to common usage. Volume numbers and the subsequent comma appear in bold. The full page range should be given where appropriate. Published conference abstracts, numbered patents, and archived code with an assigned DOI may be included in the reference list. See the examples below for a journal article¹, book², book chapter³, preprint⁴, computer code⁵, online material^6-8 and government report⁹.

1. Schott, D. H., Collins, R. N. & Bretscher, A. Secretory vesicle transport velocity in living cells depends on the myosin V lever arm length. J. Cell Biol. 156, 35‐39 (2002).
2. Hogan, B. Manipulating The Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual 2nd edn (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1994)
3. Haines, N. & Cotter, R. in Studies in Manic Depression Vol. 1 (ed. Boase, N.) Ch. 2 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).
4. Babichev, S. A., Ries, J. & Lvovsky, A. I. Quantum scissors: teleportation of single-mode optical states by means of nonlocal single photon. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208066 (2002).
5. Gallotti, R. & Barthélemy, M. Source code for: The multilayer temporal network of public transport in Great Britain. Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1249862.v1 (2014).
6. Manaster, J. Sloth squeak. Scientific American Blog Network http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2014/04/09/sloth-squeak (2014).
7. QGIS Development Team. QGIS Geographic Information System, version 2.18.10. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project https://qgis.org/en/site/ (2016).
8. Hijmans, R. J., Phillips, S. J., Leathwich, J. & Elith, J. dismo: Species Distribution Modelling https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dismo (2018).
9. Akutsu, T. Total Heart Replacement Device. Report No. NIH-NHLI-69 2185-4 (National Institutes of Health, 1974).

Citing Data

In line with emerging industry-wide standards for data citation, references to all datasets described or used in the manuscript should be cited in the text with a superscript number and listed in the ‘References’ section in the same manner as a conventional literature reference.

An author list (formatted as above) and title for the dataset should be included in the data citation, and should reflect the author(s) and dataset title recorded at the repository. If author or title is not recorded by the repository, these should not be included in the data citation. The name of the data-hosting repository, URL to the dataset and year the data were made available are required for all data citations. We strongly encourage the use of stable persistent identifers, such as DOIs, for datasets described in the journal. These should be included in references in a URL format (https://doi.org/XXXXX, where XXXX is the DOI). Please note some repositories may require these be requested in advance. For repositories using accessions (e.g. SRA or GEO) an identifiers.org URL should be used where available. For first submissions, authors may choose to include just the accession number. Scientific Data staff will provide further guidance after peer-review. Please refer to the following examples of data citation for guidance:

1. Zhang, Q-L., Chen, J-Y., Lin, L-B., Wang, F., Guo, J., Deng, X-Y. Characterization of ladybird Henosepilachna vigintioctopunctata transcriptomes across various life stages. figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4064768.v3 (2018).
2. NCBI Sequence Read Archive https://identifiers.org/ncbi/insdc.sra:SRP121625 (2017). [See note]
3. Barbosa, P., Usie, A. and Ramos, A. M. Quercus suber isolate HL8, whole genome shotgun sequencing project. GenBank https://identifiers.org/ncbi/insdc:PKMF00000000 (2018).
4. DNA Data Bank of Japan https://ddbj.nig.ac.jp/resource/sra-submission/DRA004814 (2016).

[Note]: Please note the SRP accession number should be used, if available, rather than any lower order accession number. This allows the SRA dataset to be cited via a single reference, rather than many.

Figures & Tables

Manuscripts may reference figures (e.g. Figure 1), tables (e.g. Table 1), and Supplementary Information (e.g. Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary File 2, etc.). Please see the additional guidance below for submitting figures, tables and supplementary information.

Check methods for transparency and reproducibility ⤴

Methods should be described in enough detail to allow other researchers to interpret and repeat, if required, the full study. Authors should cite previous descriptions of the methods under use, but ideally the method descriptions should be complete enough for others to understand and reproduce the methods and processing steps without referring to associated publications. There is no limit to the length of the Methods sections.

For Data Descriptors, the Methods section should describe any steps or procedures used in producing the data, including full descriptions of the experimental design, data acquisition assays, and any computational processing (e.g. normalization, image feature extraction). Specific data outputs should be explicitly referenced via data citation (see Data Records and Citing Data).

Authors should review the transparent methods checklist below, and ensure that their manuscript complies with any relevant points. Authors are also encouraged to search FAIRsharing.org for community reporting standards that may be relevant to their specific data-type.

 Cover letters ⤴

We recommend authors do not write cover letters. 

All submissions that meet our technical criteria are sent for review, so there is no requirement to sell the impact or importance of the work. Any technical notes required for the submission, such as suggested reviewers, notifications on prior publications, or further information on data access, should be input directly as answers to questions in the submission system. If you have information you wish to communicate to the editorial team that does not fit within these sections please add it to the general "Manuscript Comment" filed (though again, please do not use this to pitch the importance of the work). 

Any details included in Cover Letters but not otherwise visible on the system risks being missed by the editorial team. 

We encourage authors to provide names and contact information for suitable scientific referees and suggest Editorial Board Members to facilitate peer review. Authors may also add information on the exclusion of certain referees, if required, alongside any information needed for data access or details of any prior discussions with editorial staff that are relevant to the review, such as agreed exemptions to journal policies that are not stated elsewhere. As stated above, these details need to be provided in the manuscript comment section of the submission system (do not use a cover letter). 

We ask that authors discuss any related works under consideration or in press at other journals - please use the relevant question on the submission process to provide these details. Authors must provide a copy of any related works within their manuscript files to facilitate peer review.

For Revised Manuscripts or Appeals, a separate document is required in all cases, however this should be marked as a "Response to Reviewers" file on the system (which is visible to all, including reviewers), rather than "Author Cover Letter" (not visible to reviewers). Appeal letters should state why the previous decision should be reversed, rather than just responding to the previous reviews.
  

 

Submit ⤴

Submit your manuscript and related files via our online system.

For first submissions (i.e. not revised manuscripts), authors may submit a single PDF with integrated figures and tables – the figures may be inserted within the text at the appropriate positions, or grouped at the end.

Authors should note that only the following file types should be uploaded:

• For article text: DOC, DOCX, TEX
• For figures: PDF, EPS, TIFF, JPG
• For tables: XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX

Supplementary Information files may also be uploaded: see further guidance here.

Additional Guidance ⤴

Figures

We recommend Data Descriptors and Articles not have more than eight figures, however this is not a mandate should you deem more to be editorially crucial. In addition, a limited number of uncaptioned molecular structure graphics and numbered mathematical equations may be included if necessary.

Scientific Data requires authors to present digital images in accord with the policies employed by the Nature-titled journals.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any figures or illustrations that are protected by copyright, including figures published elsewhere and pictures taken by professional photographers. The journal cannot publish images downloaded from the Internet without appropriate permission.

Figures should be numbered separately with Arabic numerals in the order of occurrence in the text of the manuscript. Figures presenting quantitative information should include error bars where appropriate and a description of the statistical treatment of error analysis should be included in the figure legend.

Figure lettering should be in a clear, sans-serif typeface (for example, Helvetica); the same typeface in the same font size should be used for all figures in a paper. Use Symbol font for Greek letters. All display items should be on a white background, and should avoid excessive boxing, unnecessary colour, spurious decorative effects (such as three-dimensional ‘skyscraper’ histograms) and highly pixelated computer drawings. The vertical axis of histograms should not be truncated to exaggerate small differences. Labelling must be of sufficient size and contrast to be readable, even after appropriate reduction. The thinnest lines in the final figure should be no smaller than one point wide. Authors will see a PDF proof that will include figures.

Figures divided into parts should be labelled with a lower-case bold a, b, and so on, in the same type-size as used elsewhere in the figure. Lettering in figures should be in lower-case type, with only the first letter of each label capitalized. Units should have a single space between the number and the unit, and follow SI nomenclature (for example, ms rather than msec) or the nomenclature common to a particular field. Thousands should be separated by commas (1,000). Unusual units or abbreviations should be spelled out in full or defined in the legend. Scale bars should be used rather than magnification factors, with the length of the bar defined on the bar itself rather than in the legend. In legends, please use visual cues rather than verbal explanations such as ‘open red triangles’.

Unnecessary figures should be avoided: data presented in small tables or histograms, for instance, can generally be described briefly in the text instead. Figures should not contain more than one panel unless the parts are logically connected; each panel of a multipart figure should be sized so that the whole figure can be reduced by the same amount and reproduced at the smallest size at which essential details are visible.

Figures for peer-review

At the initial submission stage authors may choose to upload separate figure files or to incorporate figures into the main article file, ensuring that any inserted figures are of sufficient quality to be clearly legible. When submitting a revised manuscript all figures must be uploaded as separate figure files ensuring that the image quality and formatting conforms to the specifications below.

Figures for publication

When creating and submitting final figure files, please follow the guidelines below. Failure to do so can significantly delay publication of your work.

Each complete figure must be supplied as a separate file upload. Multi-part/panel figures must be prepared and arranged as a single image file (including all sub-parts; a, b, c, etc.). Please do not upload each panel individually.

Authors are asked to provide figures of a sufficient resolution for final online publication, however, please do not upload figures that are excessively large. As long as the image is legible it will be suitable for peer review and publication, noting the our typesetting process will compress files to standard quality for web and pdf publication anyway. 

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figure legends begin with a brief title sentence summarizing the purpose of the figure as a whole and continue with a short description of what is shown in each panel and an explanation of any symbols used. Legends must total no more than 350 words and may contain literature references.

Any descriptions too long for the figure legend should be included in the Methods section. Please also refer to our statistical guidelines.

Tables

Authors may provide tables within the Word document or as separate files. Legends, where needed, should be included in the Word document. We recommend Data Descriptors and Articles should no more than ten tables, but more may be allowed if needed. Tables may be of any size, but only tables that fit onto a single printed page will be included in the PDF version of the article.

Supplementary Tables

Due to typesetting constraints, tables that cannot be fit onto a single A4 page cannot be included in the PDF version of the article and will be hosted as Supplementary Tables. Any such tables must be labelled in the text as ‘Supplementary' tables and numbered separately from the main table list e.g. ‘Table 1, Table 2, Supplementary Table 1’ etc. Please note bibliographic references cannot be included within Supplementary Tables and should not be listed in the reference list, which only refers to references used in the main article file. If you do wish to formally cite information used in any supplementary file please find a means of mentioning these references on the main text. Finally, please note it may be preferable to host large tables within your repository-deposited dataset instead and avoid using supplementary files entirely (see 'Supplementary information' guidance below) – please refer to them via a data citation to the repository page if so, without the use of a Supplementary Table label.

 

Equations

Equations and mathematical expressions should be provided in the main text of the paper. Equations that are referred to in the text are identified by parenthetical numbers, such as (1), and are referred to in the manuscript as ‘equation (1)’.

Supplementary information

Scientific Data discourages authors from supplying text, figures or tables as supplementary files. As much as possible, these types of content should be included in the main manuscript. 

The main sections of the Data Descriptor manuscript, and particularly the Methods section, have no word length limits and the journal is not printed, so unless the supplementary information document would extend the length of the paper significantly (e.g. by 10 pages or more) we recommend the content is included in a single article file. Data Descriptors are designed to be focused publications: if extensive supplementary text or figures are required, authors should consider whether the manuscript might best be subdivided into multiple Data Descriptors. Similarly, any primary data files should be deposited in an appropriate public repository, rather than included as Supplementary Information. Scientific Data does not allow statements of ‘data not shown’. Please see our data deposition policies.

The guidelines below detail the creation, citation and submission of Supplementary Information. Publication may be delayed if these are not followed correctly. Please note that modification of Supplementary Information after the paper is published requires a formal correction, so authors are encouraged to check their Supplementary Information carefully before submitting the final version.

1. Supplementary information is typically limited to two types -  a) A supplementary information document (containing any supplementary text, figures, small tables or references if these elements are too numerous to fit in the main text.). These should always be submitted as self-contained pdfs, containing all supplementary figures and small tables (please do not include these as separate files). Items should be numbered in the document and this numbering should be separate from that used for regular tables and figures appearing in the main article. b) Oversize Supplementary Tables. These should only be used where the table is too large for either the main article or supplementary information document AND the table is not suitable for deposition within a repository (large dataset tables should not be hosted with the manuscript). For any items that fit these criteria, please submit as an xlsx file. Do not supply supplementary tables as pdfs or docs, on the basis that if they can fit into these formats they should be included within the main SI document or article file. Note that separate supplementary tables cannot have captions in the main text or SI document (these should only be used where the item is visible above the caption). 
2. Refer to each piece of supplementary material at the appropriate point(s) in the Data Descriptor. Be sure to include the word ‘Supplementary’ each time one is mentioned. Every piece of Supplementary Information must be mentioned at least once in the main article. Please do not use the word 'supplementary' to refer to any externally hosted file (e.g. a dataset hosted within a repository) or items included in the main paper. 
3. Remember to include a brief title and legend for items within the supplementary information document.
4. File sizes should be as small as possible, with a maximum size of 10 MB, so that they can be downloaded quickly. We mandate pdf formats for supplementary documents and xlsx or csv files for supplementary tables (see above)
5. When supplying multiple supplementary figures, they should be merged into the main supplementary information file, with figure legends immediately below each figure. A table of contents should be included on the first page, listing the page number of each supplementary figure. Do not share separate supplementary figure files.

Statistical guidelines

All data-processing steps must explain the statistical methods in detail either in the Methods or the relevant figure legend. Any special statistical code or software needed for scientists to reuse or reanalyse datasets should be discussed in the Usage Notes section of Data Descriptors. We encourage authors to make openly available any code or scripts that would help readers reproduce any data-processing steps (see our code availability policy). In addition, authors must ensure that the version of the data described and analysed in the Data Descriptor is permanently available so that others can reproduce any statistical analyses.

Authors are encouraged to use statistical techniques to assess and report aspects related to data quality in the Technical Validation section, but not to include any general analyses or summaries as per the scope of a Data Descriptor (encourage users to analyse it for themselves). Graphs should include clearly labelled error bars. Authors must state whether a number that follows the ± sign is a standard error (s.e.m.) or a standard deviation (s.d.).

Authors must clearly explain the independence of any replicate measurements, and ‘technical replicates’ – repeated measurements on the same sample – should be clearly identified.

Data Descriptors should not test new hypotheses or provide extensive interpretive analysis, and therefore should not usually contain statistical significance testing. When hypothesis-based tests must be employed, authors should state the name of the statistical test; the n value for each statistical analysis; the comparisons of interest; a justification for the use of that test (including, for example, a discussion of the normality of the data when the test is appropriate only for normal data); the alpha level for all tests, whether the tests were one-tailed or two-tailed; and the actual p-value for each test (not merely ‘significant’ or ‘p < 0.05’). It should be clear what statistical test was used to generate every p-value. Use of the word ‘significant’ should always be accompanied by a p-value; otherwise, use ‘substantial’, ‘considerable’, etc. Multiple test correction must be used when appropriate and described in detail in the manuscript.

Please also see our specific recommendations for figure legends.

Genetic & chemical nomenclature

Molecular structures are identified by bold Arabic numerals assigned in order of presentation in the text. Once identified in the main text or a figure, compounds may be referred to by their name, by a defined abbreviation or by the bold Arabic numeral (as long as the compound is referred to consistently as one of these three).

When possible, authors should refer to chemical compounds and biomolecules using systematic nomenclature, preferably IUPAC. Standard chemical and biological abbreviations should be used. Unconventional or specialist abbreviations should be defined at their first occurrence in the text.

Authors should use approved nomenclature for gene symbols, and use symbols rather than italicized full names (for example Ttn, not titin). Please consult the appropriate nomenclature databases for correct gene names and symbols. A useful resource is NCBI Gene.

Approved human gene symbols are provided by HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee see also www.genenames.org. Approved mouse symbols are provided by The Jackson Laboratory (e-mail: nomen@informatics.jax.org); see also www.informatics.jax.org/mgihome/nomen.

For proposed gene names that are not already approved, please submit the gene symbols to the appropriate nomenclature committees as soon as possible, as these must be deposited and approved before publication of an article.

Avoid listing multiple names of genes (or proteins) separated by a slash, as in ‘Oct4/Pou5f1’, as this is ambiguous (it could mean a ratio, a complex, alternative names or different subunits). Use one name throughout and include the other at first mention: ‘Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1)’.

Instructions for LaTeX users

Note that these are instructions for revised manuscripts, where we require an editable version in preparation for typesetting. Articles submitted for first round peer review may be supplied in pdf format (read only).

For revised manuscripts, the core requirement is to supply a single .TEX file marked as an "Article" on the system. This should be standalone, meaning it can be compiled to a pdf without any additional .bib files, style sheets, or other dependencies. To check this, please open the .TEX within your editor without providing read access to any other files. If it fails to compile, or sections are missing, please check to ensure it is truly standalone and no dependencies are required. If that has been checked, uploading the .TEX file to our submission system (as an "Article") without other files should allow a full full merged pdf to be generated. Note the most common issue is the the reference list is missing due to a reliance on a separate .bib/bbl. Please copy the reference list from the .bbl file, paste it into the main manuscript .tex file, and delete the associated \bibliography{sample} command. 

Please do not upload self-compiled pdfs to the system when submitting a revised manuscripts as these do not provide evidence we are able to compile the manuscript ourselves. Similar, .zip files of associated files are also not required due to the requirement for the .tex to compile by itself.

Please note we no longer suggest or recommend the use of LaTeX template. The only formatting requirement are the headings listed in section 1, so copying these into a blank document and using any legible formatting stype is acceptable for first and revised submissions. We recommend Computer Modern fonts. Non-standard fonts should be avoided. For the inclusion of graphics, we recommend graphicx.sty. Please use numerical references only for citations, and include the references within the manuscript file itself as explained.

Consortia authorships

​A consortium author is the name of a group, rather than an individual, in the author list. These should only be used if a standard author list, naming all contributors directly in the paper, would be considered excessively long (e..g 100 or more people). Conortia authorships should not be used for small groups that could easily be accomodating into the main list, or for advertising or promoting projects. 

If a consortium is included in the main author list, all members of the consortium are considered bona fide authors, and must be listed together with their affiliations at the end of the Author Contributions statement. The authors and affiliations for the consortium members are an extension of the main author list, used simply because there is no space for them at the start of the paper. Therefore any affiliations already included in the main author list should not be repeated in the Author Contributions statement and the numbering of the affiliations in the consortium should continue in numerical order from those in the main author list – they should not start again from 1. If a member of the consortium already appears as an individual name in the main author list, then his/her affiliations should be identical in the consortium author list. The consortia itself should be acknowledged with the footnote "A full list of members appears in the Author Contributions". If you need to give credit to a consortium, a project or a group of people who do not meet authorship criteria, you can add a mention in the Acknowledgements section or elsewhere (in which case, a full list of members can be provided as a Supplementary Note in the Supplementary Information, if desired). Please do not use consortia authorship to credit individuals who have not actively participatrf in the creation of the paper or new dataset. If you submitting a description of a secondary dataset compiled from previously published input data then authorship should not be typically granted to the data owner unless they have been actively involved in the (new) processing or compilation to create the secondary output. Instead, individuals should be credited via formal citation of the existing dataset, paper, or any other relevant works, in the same way as using any piece of prior art.