Instructions for authors
- Download the Parasite instructions for authors in PDF format.
- An EndNote style for Parasite is available here.
Parasite: a reminder on instructions, scope and limits
Parasite is a journal owned by the French Society of Parasitology, serving the scientific community. The journal was first published as Annales de Parasitologie Humaine et Comparée (1922–1993) then as Parasite (1994–present).
Parasite is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed, online journal publishing high quality papers on all aspects of human and animal parasitology. Reviews, articles and short notes may be submitted. Fields include, but are not limited to: general, medical and veterinary parasitology; morphology, including ultrastructure; parasite systematics, including entomology, acarology, helminthology and protistology, and molecular analyses; molecular biology and biochemistry; immunology of parasitic diseases; host-parasite relationships; ecology and life history of parasites; epidemiology; therapeutics; and new diagnostic tools.
All papers in Parasite are published in English. Manuscripts should have a broad interest and must not have been published or submitted elsewhere. No limit is defined for the length of manuscripts, but they should be concisely written.
We welcome submissions of broad interest, including extensive research articles and review papers. There is no page limit.
Papers of limited interest are generally not accepted, although they may be considered if the authors convincingly demonstrate their relevance. “Papers of limited interest” include, but are not limited to: case reports; epidemiological studies restricted to very narrow areas; isolated new geographical records; molecular studies of limited significance (e.g., a single mitogenome); lists of parasite species without precise—and preferably molecular—identification; studies on the effects of plant extracts without a detailed chemical analysis of the compounds involved; and systematic descriptions of single species.
Papers reporting parasite prevalence will be considered only if they include several parasite and/or host species, and if the study area is sufficiently broad to attract international interest. Consequently, a study reporting the prevalence of a single parasite species in a single host species will generally be rejected.
Short notes are discouraged and will be considered only if they present findings of exceptional interest that deserve rapid publication.
- 1. General
- 1.1 Conditions of acceptance
- 1.2 Conflict of interest
- 1.3 Ethics for animal experiments and medical studies
- 2. Publication fees (article processing charges)
- 3. Open access
- 4. ORCID
- 5. Types of papers
- 6. Presentation of manuscripts
- 6. 1. Order of parts
- 6. 2. First page, title
- 6. 3. Abstract
- 6. 4. Main text
- 6. 5. Conflict of Interest
- 6. 6. Acknowledgements
- 6. 7. References
- 6. 8. Tables
- 7. Figures
- 7. 1. Figure numbers and legends
- 7. 2. Technical information
- 8. Online material
- 9. Scientific names
- 10. Mathematics, statistics and significant numbers
- 11. Accession numbers
- 12. References
- 12. 1. Citations in the text
- 12. 2. Presentation of references
- 13. Special manuscripts
- 13. 1. Long manuscripts (including long Reviews)
- 13. 2. Taxonomic papers
- 13. 3. Short notes
- 13. 4. Other types of papers
- 14. Use of AI
- 15. Electronic submission
- 16. Reprint requests
1. General
1.1 Conditions of acceptance
Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing, please consult COPE http://publicationethics.org.
All submitted manuscripts are screened for possible plagiarism; any paper found to contain such issues will be rejected immediately.
1.2 Conflict of interest
Authors should disclose any conflict of interest (financial, personal or other).
1.3 Ethics for animal experiments and medical studies
All laws and regulations should be strictly followed. Authors are requested to indicate ethical declarations issued by their institution and concerning their research, including permit numbers, in the Materials and Methods section.
2. Publication fees (article processing charges)
The publication fee for manuscripts is the same for all papers, regardless of their type or length. This includes colour figures, if necessary. VAT is added for residents in the EU. Some partial or total fee waivers can be granted by the Editor-in-Chief, on a case-by-case basis. Requests for fee waivers should be made before the paper is submitted.
3. Open access
All articles published by Parasite are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Articles are available from the journal website (http://www.parasite-journal.org), from PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/2071/) and from Europe PubMed Central (http://europepmc.org/journals/2156/), in various formats. Authors are the copyright holders of their articles. All articles bear the following mention: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
4. ORCID
From October 2024, only authenticated ORCIDs will be published in this journal. Any ORCIDs included in the manuscript files or provided outside of the authentication process outlined below will not be included in the published article.
Corresponding authors should link their own ORCID to their profile at the time of submission. They should also enter their co-authors’ details (names and email addresses) in the system at this time. Co-authors listed in this way will be automatically invited to confirm that they are co-authors of the manuscript, and to validate their ORCID. This must be done before article acceptance. See also EDP Sciences ORCID policy.
5. Types of papers
Four types of publications are considered:
- Articles, reporting original research, and longer than 4 printed pages. There is no limit on article length, but concision is necessary.
- Short notes, similar to articles, but shorter than 4 printed pages, and with a shorter abstract.
- Reviews, on any subject of interest in parasitology, especially modern topics. Reviews must not concentrate on the author’s personal work and must be of broad interest.
- Other material, that includes editorial matters, announcements and obituaries, i.e. all material that is not original research and is not intended to be cited in the scientific literature. Concision is mandatory, and the number of these publications will be kept to a minimum.
6. Presentation of manuscripts
Use Times 12 with 1.5 line spacing throughout the manuscript, and avoid unnecessary formatting. Number pages. Number all lines consecutively from the first to the last page. Use up to three subheading levels in total. Italics should be used in the text for all scientific (Latin) names and other terms such as genes, mutations, genotypes and alleles. SI units should be used throughout the manuscript.
6. 1. Order of parts
Manuscripts should be prepared according to the following order (Reviews, very long articles and systematic papers may use a different presentation; see 11):
- Title Page
- English Abstract and 4–6 keywords
- Title and Abstract in French: this will be provided by the Editors. No keywords in French are necessary.
- Introduction
- Materials and Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Tables (Tables can be included in the main Word file)
- Figure Legends
- References
6. 2. First page, title
The first page should include: title of paper, list of all authors with full given and family names (not capitalised), addresses of all authors, and name of corresponding author with email address. The title should be short and descriptive, and fewer than 250 characters in length (including spaces). Do not include authors and dates of taxa in the title, except if absolutely necessary.
6. 3. Abstract
All manuscripts, except those classified above as “others”, should include an abstract in English. The Editorial team will provide the abstract in French. An additional abstract in a language other than English or French may be added, at the special request of the authors and at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. This especially concerns papers that could have a readership in the general public, such as broad reviews, in regions where neither English nor French are spoken by the public. The abstract in English should be 150–250 words in length and should be a single paragraph. It may be presented as a single part, or as three sections: Background – Results – Conclusions. The abstract should be factual: uninformative sentences such as “the results are discussed” should be avoided and replaced by a summary of this discussion. No citations should be provided in the abstract, except when this is unavoidable. Abstracts in languages other than English should be the exact translation of the abstract in English, sentence by sentence, with nothing more and nothing less.
6. 4. Main text
Introduction
No subsections. This section is headed “Introduction”.
Materials and Methods
This section may be presented as several subsections; up to two levels of subheadings.
Results
This section may be presented as a single part or as several subsections; maximum of two subheading levels. The results generally include no citations.
Discussion
This section may be presented as a single part or as several subsections; maximum of two subheading levels. The last subsection can be “Conclusions”. Follow instructions for citations. In certain cases, it might be appropriate to combine the results and discussion in a single section, headed “Results and discussion”.
6. 5. Conflict of Interest
Conflicts of interest are situations that have the potential to influence people’s judgements. Please report all necessary details, including affiliations, grants from third parties such as pharmaceutical companies, and free material or reagents obtained from such third parties. If there is no conflict of interest, simply use the sentence: “The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest”.
6. 6. Acknowledgements
This section must be concise. No subdivisions. Mention here colleagues and grants.
6. 7. References
This section should follow the precise format detailed below. Only references cited in the text should appear here. Citation of unpublished papers and grey literature should generally be avoided. Software cited in the Materials and Methods should have a citation. Papers may be cited as “in press” only when they have been accepted for publication (in this case, include the DOI).
6. 8. Tables
Tables should be included in the main text. Use landscape formatting, if necessary. Tables (numbered as Table 1, Table 2, etc.) should be presented as one per page. Avoid complex formatting and use the basic Table format in Word. Tables in Excel should be converted into Word. Vertical lines are not permitted; horizontal lines should be kept to a minimum. Large Excel Tables should be provided as Supplementary Files.
7. Figures
7. 1. Figure numbers and legends
Figures should be numbered as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. They are referred to in the text as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Legends are grouped on a separate page.
7. 2. Technical information
All figures are published free of charge (i.e. they are included in the publication fee), including colour photographs and diagrams. However, only photographs of scientific interest and pertaining to the subject of the article should be included. Colour illustrations, especially diagrams, should be understandable even if they are printed in grey scale.
Figures should be prepared to be of good quality both when they are viewed onscreen in HTML and when the PDF is printed. Figures may be arranged as “plates”, but it should be kept in mind that PDFs are prepared to be printed on A4 pages. “Plates” should be 178 mm in width and up to 178 mm in length (legend below the figure) or, exceptionally, 178 mm in width and up to 220 mm in length (legend on the opposite page).
The electronic submission system will accept PNG (preferred), TIFF (with compression) and EPS files, with appropriate resolution (300 dpi for colour photographs, 600 dpi for halftone work, 1 200 dpi for line work); images should generally be at least 2 000 pixels in width. JPG format is not recommended as PNG is preferred.
Figures should never be submitted in Word format nor included in the main manuscript.
Manuscripts with figures of insufficient technical quality will immediately be sent back by the editorial team for revision, and the review process will not begin before correct files are uploaded. In other words, sending a manuscript with incorrect figures will be of no use and may delay its possible publication.
8. Online material
Online material may include content that is too long to be included in the manuscript, additional large Tables, illustrations and movies. Online material is subjected to strict refereeing. Formats accepted are: PDF, graphic formats for supplementary figures (see “Figures”) and MPEG for videos. Files should preferably be less than 20 Mb.
9. Scientific names
The complete binomen (example: Toxoplasma gondii) should be written in full at first use of a species name. The genus should be abbreviated in subsequent usages in the text (example: T. gondii), except at the start of a sentence. Genus and species names should be italicised. Authors of taxa should generally not be indicated in titles of papers.
Authors are encouraged to indicate full authorships of parasite species (author and date) and to cite the original descriptions, even in non-taxonomic papers; for hosts, this should be done only if necessary.
Example of text: This paper describes proteins from Enterocytozoon bieneusi Desportes et al., 1985 [8] which are involved…
Reference [8] will be:
- 8 Desportes I, Le Charpentier Y, Galian A, Bernard F, Cochand-Priollet B, Lavergne A, Ravisse P, Modigliani R. 1985. Occurrence of a new microsporidian: Enterocytozoon bieneusi n. g., n. sp., in the enterocytes of a human patient with AIDS. Journal of Protozoology, 32(2), 250–254.
10. Mathematics, statistics and significant numbers
Write mathematical equations as simply as possible. Statistical software should be clearly indicated and cited.
Numbers, especially percentages, should be indicated with a reasonable number of digits, coherent with the significance of the result. This is especially important in the abstract.
- Example: a percentage of “30.30%” for a sample of 99 cases should be indicated as 30%.
11. Accession numbers
Accession numbers of nucleic acid sequences and protein sequences must be cited in the text. In the Materials and Methods, a sentence should indicate: “New sequences have been deposited in GenBank (or other) under accession numbers xxx–xxx”. No articles will be published without this information, when relevant.
12. References
Authors are encouraged to use reference management software. An EndNote style for Parasite is available here. A Zotero style is available.
12. 1. Citations in the text
Citations are numbered as [1], [2,3,7] or [5–9]. This allows for copious lists of references without lengthening the text itself. The use of numbered citations does not mean that author names and dates of cited papers are prohibited in the text, but this should be used only if necessary.
- Example: Many studies [1–9] have addressed … (no specific need to indicate authors here). In 2003, Smith [10] claimed that … but Dupont [11,12] later demonstrated that… (names of authors and dates are useful here).
12. 2. Presentation of references
References are numbered in alphabetical order of authors (not of appearance in the text). Only species names and genes (see 10, above) are italicised. Words in titles are not capitalised. No journal name should begin with “The”.
- Articles within a journal
- de Buron I. 1988. Hypoechinorhynchus thermaceri n. sp. (Acanthocephala: Hypoechinorhynchidae) from the deep-sea zoarcid fish Thermaceres andersoni Rosenblatt and Cohen, 1986. Journal of Parasitology, 74, 339-342.
- Durette-Desset M-C, Ganzorig S, Audebert F, Kamiya M. 2000. A new species of the genus Ohbayashinema (Nematoda, Trichostrongylina, Heligmosomoidea), parasite of Ochotona daurica (Ochotonidae, Lagomorpha) from Buriatia. Zoosystema, 22, 667-676.
- Grover M, Chaubey S, Ranade S, Tatu U. 2013. Identification of an exported heat shock protein 70 in Plasmodium falciparum. Parasite, 20, 2. Book chapter
- Littlewood DTJ, Olson PD. 2001. Small subunit rDNA and the Platyhelminthes: signal, noise, conflict and compromise, in Interrelationships of the Platyhelminthes, Littlewood DTJ, Bray RA, Editors. Taylor & Francis: London & New York. p. 262-278. Complete book
- Brooks DR, McLennan DA. 1993. Parascript - Parasites and the language of evolution. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
13. Special manuscripts
13. 1. Long manuscripts (including long Reviews)
For long manuscripts (more than 20 printed pages), a numbered presentation of subheadings may be preferred, such as: 1. Introduction; 2. Material and Methods; 3. Results and subsections numbered as 3.1 (including 3.1.1, 3.1.2) then 3.2. (including 3.2.1, 3.2.2). In this case, internal references to other parts of the text may easily be indicated, such as: “see 3.2.5”.
13. 2. Taxonomic papers
Deposition of specimens
Authors should state where the holotype is deposited and make paratypes available for examination by the referees. Deposition of type specimens in well-known curated collections is strongly recommended. Authors are encouraged to deposit vouchers in curated collections even when no new species is described.
Authors and date of taxa
In taxonomic papers, authors and date of taxa should be used for all parasite taxa; for hosts, it is acceptable to use only authors. The citation of original descriptions of parasite taxa is encouraged but must correspond to a numbered citation in the text.
Example: Two species of the Genus Author1, date1 are known, namely Genus species1 Author2, date2 and Genus species2 Author3, date3 [1,5,12]. The numbered references 1, 5, 12 correspond, respectively, to the original descriptions by Author1, Author2 and Author3.
Arrangement of sections
Taxonomic papers may use a distinct arrangement of sections. The Results may be replaced by a section headed Description. Within this section, taxa are presented with a hierarchical taxonomic heading. If a few species are described, the names of these species are the headings of major sections (example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/parasite/2012004). Descriptions must be in telegraphic style.
Electronic publication of taxonomic papers and ICZN
Parasite will apply the amendment of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) about the availability of electronic publications (Zootaxa, 2012, 3450:1-7). All papers that include taxonomic work will be registered in ZooBank before they are published. The date of online publication will be precisely indicated on the papers, and the ZooBank registration will state the name of an electronic archive intended to preserve the work and the ISSN of the journal. Taxa will thus be fully published according to the ICZN. Registration in ZooBank is usually done by the Editor-in-Chief, but authors who have editing privileges in ZooBank may prepare their manuscripts with ZooBank numbers if they so wish.
13. 3. Short notes
Short notes are similar to Articles but do not exceed 4 printed pages in length. The abstract should be no longer than 150 words.
13. 4. Other types of papers
Generally, these papers should be prepared in collaboration with the Editorial Board. Presentation will be adapted to each case. Obituaries are published only on commission.
14. Use of AI
Manuscripts generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not be accepted. Authors who use AI for permissible tasks—such as bibliographic searches or limited assistance with spelling and grammar—must clearly disclose this usage. Any graphics created with the help of AI must be explicitly labelled as such. In accordance with COPE guidelines, AI tools cannot be listed as authors of a paper.
15. Electronic submission
Authors should use the electronic submission system powered by Editorial Manager (https://www.editorialmanager.com/parasite). Before you begin submission, please prepare the following:
- A list of the full names of all authors and a valid email address for each of them (copy and paste from the first page of the manuscript)
- A list of preferred referees and their valid emails, with a short text explaining why you chose them – please avoid colleagues in your own institution
- Only if necessary, a list of opposed referees, with a short text explaining why
- A Word file of the manuscript, preferably including all Tables at the end
- A covering letter (Word or PDF), explaining why the manuscript is of importance and any other detail. The covering letter is not included in the final PDF sent to the referees; you may include confidential comments to the Editor-in-Chief here
- The electronic files of all figures, with appropriate resolution and technical quality (see “Figures”).
Please double-check the PDF before you approve it – this PDF will be sent to the reviewers!
Printing the PDF before submitting your paper is always time well spent. Carefully examine the printout to ensure that everything is clear and readable, including all Tables and Figures. Remember: the reviewers’ first impression of your work comes from the quality of the presentation, even before they begin evaluating the science.
16. Reprint requests
Parasite is published online and has no printed version. However, authors wishing to order reprints of their papers may order them directly from the publisher. Please contact the production department at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.