Submissions

Author Guidelines

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS

Format of articles

IJORU strongly recommends that authors write concisely and stick to the following guidelines:

1. Research Articles should not be less than seven and not more than 15 typeset pages of font 12, Times New Roman (1.5 Spacing).
2. The main text should not be more than 6,000 words (excluding Abstract, References and figure legends)
3. The title should not be more than 20 words
4. The Abstract should not be more than 300 words
5. Short Communication may be less than seven pages, communicating preliminary findings of work still going on.

Please do not include any references in your Abstract. Make sure it serves both as a general introduction to the topic and as a brief, non-technical summary of the main results and their implications.

Manuscript

Your manuscript text file should start with a title page that shows author affiliations and contact information, identifying the corresponding author with an asterisk. 

For the main body of the text, there are no specific requirements. You can organize it in a way that best suits your research. However, the following structure will be suitable in many cases:

• Title Page with authors and their affiliations
• Abstract with not more than seven keywords
• Introduction/Literature Review
• Materials and Methods
• Results (with subheadings)
• Discussion (without subheadings)

You should then follow the main body of text with:

• References (limited to 60 references, though not strictly enforced)
• Acknowledgements (optional)
• Author contributions
• Data availability statement (mandatory)
• Additional Information (including a Competing Interests Statement)
• Figure legends (these are limited to 350 words per figure)
• Tables (maximum size of one page)

Please note that footnotes should not be used.

You may include a limited number of uncaptioned molecular structure graphics and numbered mathematical equations if necessary. Display items are limited to eight (figures and/or tables). However, to enable typesetting of papers, we advise making the number of display items commensurate with your overall word length. So, for Articles of 2,000 words or less, we suggest including no more than four figures/tables. Please note that schemes should not be used and should be presented as figures instead.

Your submission must also include:

• A cover letter
• Individual figure files and optional supplementary information files

For first submissions (i.e. not revised manuscripts), you may incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single file up to 3 MB in size in Microsoft Word format. 

Figures can be inserted in the text at the appropriate positions or grouped at the end.

Supplementary information should be combined and supplied as a single separate file, preferably in PDF format.

Cover letter

In your cover letter, you should include the affiliation and contact information of your corresponding author

Revised manuscripts

For revised manuscripts, you should provide all textual content in a single file, prepared using Microsoft Word. Please note that we do not accept PDF files for the article text of revised manuscripts. Make sure you:

1. Format the manuscript file as single-column text without justification.
2. Number the pages using an Arabic numeral in the footer of each page.
3. Use the default Modern Computer fonts for your text and the 'symbols' font for any Greek characters.
4. Supply any figures as individual files.
5. Combine and supply any Supplementary Information as a separate file, preferably in PDF format.
6. Include the title of the manuscript and author list on the first page of the Supplementary Information file.

If you do not wish to incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single file, please provide all textual content in a separate single file, prepared using Microsoft Word.

Writing your manuscript

The IJORU journal is read by a truly diverse range of readers. Please, therefore, give careful thought to communicating your findings as clearly and simply as possible.

Although you can assume a shared basic knowledge of science, please don't expect that everyone will be familiar with your particular field's specialist language or concepts. Therefore:

• Avoid technical jargon wherever possible, explaining it clearly when it is unavoidable.
• Keep abbreviations to a minimum, particularly when they are not standard.
• If you must use an acronym, spell it out entirely in the text or legend the first time it appears.
• Clearly explain the background, rationale, and main conclusions of your study.
• Write titles and abstracts in language that any reader will readily understand.

We strongly recommend that you ask a colleague with different expertise to review your manuscript before submitting it. This will help you identify concepts and terminology that non-specialist readers may find hard to grasp.

Copy editing services

We don't provide in-depth copy editing as part of the production process. So, if you feel your manuscript would benefit from someone looking at the copy, please consider using a copy editing or language editing service. You can either do this before submission or at the revision stage. You can also get a fast, free grammar check of your manuscript that considers all aspects of readability in English.

References

We don't copy-edit your references. Therefore, it's essential you format them correctly, as they will be linked electronically to external databases where possible. 

• Use APA referencing style
• Only include papers or datasets that have been published.
• Include published conference abstracts and numbered patents if you wish.
• Don't include grant details and acknowledgments.

Acknowledgments

Please keep any acknowledgments brief, and don't include thanks to anonymous referees and editors or any effusive comments. You may acknowledge grant or contribution numbers. You should also acknowledge assistance from technical writers, proofreaders, and editors.

Author contributions

Authors must supply an Author Contribution Statement in the prescribed form. 

Please be aware:

• The author name you give as the corresponding author will be the main contact during the review process and should not change.
• The information you provide in the submission system will be used as the source of truth when your paper is published.

Competing interests

You must supply a competing interest’s statement. If there is no conflict of interest, you should include a statement declaring this.

Your statement must be explicit and unambiguous, describing any potential competing interest (or lack thereof) for EACH contributing author. The information you provide in the submission system will be used as the source of truth when your paper is published.

Examples of declarations are:

The author (s) declares no competing interests.

OR

Dr X's work has been funded by A. He has received compensation as a member of the scientific advisory board of B and owns stock in the company. He also has consulted for C and received compensation. Dr Y and Dr Z declare no potential conflict of interest.

Data availability

You must include a Data Availability Statement in all submitted manuscripts (at the end of the main text, before the References section).

Ethics declarations

If your research includes human or animal subjects, you will need to include the appropriate ethics declarations in the Methods section of your manuscript.

Approval for animal experiments

For experiments involving live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates, your Methods section must include a statement that:

1. Identifies the institutional and/or licensing committee that approved the experiments, including any relevant details.
2. Confirms that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant named guidelines and regulations.
3. Confirms that the authors complied with the ARRIVE guidelines.

Approval for human experiments

For experiments involving human subjects (or tissue samples), your Methods section must include a statement that:

1. Identifies the institutional and/or licensing committee that approved the experiments, including any relevant details.
2. Confirms that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant named guidelines and regulations.
3. Confirms that informed consent was obtained from all participants and/or their legal guardians.

Consent to participate/Consent to publish

Please note that:

1. Study participant names (and other personally identifiable information) must be removed from all text/figures/tables/images.
2. The use of coloured bars/shapes or blurring to obscure the eyes/facial region of study participants is not an acceptable means of anonymization. For manuscripts that include information or images that could lead to the identification of a study participant, your Methods section must include a statement that confirms informed consent was obtained to publish the information/image(s) in an online open-access publication.

Supplementary Information

You should submit any Supplementary Information together with the manuscript so that we can send it to referees during peer-review. This will be published online with accepted manuscripts.

It's vital that you carefully check your Supplementary Information before submission, as any modification after your paper is published will require a formal correction.

Please avoid including any "data not shown" statements and instead make your data available via deposition in a public repository.

If any data that is necessary to evaluate the claims of your paper is not available via a public depository, make sure you provide it as Supplementary Information.

We do not edit, typeset or proof Supplementary Information, so please present it clearly and succinctly at initial submission, making sure it conforms to the style and terminology of the rest of the paper.

To avoid any delays to publication, please follow the guidelines below for the creation, citation, and submission of your Supplementary Information:

1. You can combine multiple pieces of Supplementary Information and supply them as a single composite file. If you wish to keep larger information (e.g. supplementary videos, spreadsheets [.csv or .xlsx], or data files) as another separate file, you may do so.
2. Designate each item as a Supplementary Table, Figure, Video, Audio, Note, Data, Discussion, Equations, or Methods, as appropriate. Number Supplementary Tables and Figures as, for example, "Supplementary Table S1". This numbering should be separate from that used in tables and figures appearing in the main article. Supplementary Notes or Methods should not be numbered; titles for these are optional.
3. Refer to each piece of supplementary material at the appropriate point(s) in the main article. Be sure to include the word "Supplementary" each time one is mentioned. Please do not refer to individual panels of supplementary figures.
4. Use the following examples as a guide (note: abbreviate "Figure" as "Fig." when in the middle of a sentence): "Table 1 provides a selected subset of the most active compounds. The entire list of 96 compounds can be found in Supplementary Table S1 online." "The biosynthetic pathway of L-ascorbic acid in animals involves intermediates of the D-glucuronic acid pathway (see Supplementary Fig. S2 online). Figure 2 shows...".
5. Remember to include a brief title and legend (incorporated into the file to appear near the image) as part of every figure submitted and a title as part of every table.
6. Keep file sizes as small as possible, with a maximum size of 50 MB, so that they can be downloaded quickly.
7. Supplementary video files should be provided in the standard video aspects: 4:3, 16:9, 21:9.

Figure legends

Please begin your figure legends with a brief title sentence for the whole figure and continue with a short description of what is shown in each panel. Use any symbols in sequence and minimize the methodological details as much as possible. Keep each legend total to no more than 350 words. Provide text for figure legends in numerical order after the references.

Tables

Please submit any tables in your main article document in an editable format (Word document) and not as images. Tables that include statistical analysis of data should describe their standards of error analysis and ranges in a table legend.

Equations

Include any equations and mathematical expressions in the main text of the paper. Identify equations that are referred to in the text by parenthetical numbers, such as (1), and refer to them in the manuscript as "equation (1)", etc.

For submissions in a .doc or .docx format, please make sure that all equations are provided in an editable Word format. You can produce these with the equation editor included in Microsoft Word.

General figure guidelines

You 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. We cannot publish images downloaded from the internet without appropriate permission.

You should state the source of any images used. If you or one of your co-authors has drawn the images, please mention this in your acknowledgements. For software, you should state the name, version number, and URL.

Number any figures separately with Arabic numerals in the order they occur in the text of the manuscript. Include error bars when appropriate. Include a description of the statistical treatment of error analysis in the figure legend.

Please do not use schemes. You should submit sequences of chemical reactions or experimental procedures as figures with appropriate captions. You may include in the manuscript a limited number of uncaptioned graphics depicting chemical structures - each labelled with their name, by a defined abbreviation, or by the bold Arabic numeral.

Use a clear, sans-serif typeface (for example, Helvetica) for figure lettering. Use the same typeface in the same font size for all figures in your paper. For Greek letters, use a 'symbols' font. Put all display items on a white background, and avoid excessive boxing, unnecessary colour, spurious decorative effects (such as three-dimensional 'skyscraper' histograms) and highly pixelated computer drawings. Never truncate the vertical axis of histograms to exaggerate small differences. Ensure any labelling is of sufficient size and contrast to be legible, even after appropriate reduction. The thinnest lines in the final figure should be no smaller than one point wide. You will be sent proof that will include figures.

• Figures divided into parts should be labelled with a lower-case, bold letter (a, b, c 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 spelt 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". Avoid unnecessary figures: data presented in small tables or histograms, for instance, can generally be stated 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.