Instruction for authors
An EndNote style for Parasite is available here.
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 consult COPE http://publicationethics.org/.
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 Material and Methods section.
1.4 Publication fees
The publication fee for manuscripts is 1200 Euros per paper, whatever their type or length. This includes colour figures if necessary. VAT is added for residents in the EU. A few partial or total fee waivers can be granted by the Editor-in-Chief, on a case-by-case basis; fee waivers should be requested before the paper is submitted.
1.5 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 website of the journal (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.
2 Types of papers
Four types of publications are considered:
- Articles, reporting original research, and longer than 4 printed pages. No length limit is imposed, 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 be of broad interest.
- Others. These include editorial matter, announcements and obituaries, i.e. all material which 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 minimal.
3 Presentation of manuscripts
Use Times 10 with 1.5 interline throughout the manuscript and avoid unnecessary formatting. Pages should be numbered. Lines should be numbered in continue all over the article. Use up to three subheading levels in total. Italics should be used in the text for all scientific names and other terms such as genes, mutations, genotypes and alleles. SI units should be used throughout the manuscript.
3.1 Order of parts
Manuscripts should be prepared according to the following order (but Reviews, very long articles and systematic papers may use a different presentation; see 11):
- Title Page
- English Abstract and 4–6 keywords
- French Title and French Abstract (if possible; see 3.3). No French keywords are necessary.
- Introduction
- Material and Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Tables
- Figure Legends
- References
3.2 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 less than 250 characters in length (including spaces). Do not include authors and dates of taxa in the title, except if absolutely necessary.
3.3 Abstracts
All manuscripts, except those classified above as “others”, should include an English abstract and a French abstract. The Editorial team will assist authors who cannot write the French abstract. An additional abstract in a language other than English or French might be added, at the special request of the authors and at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief; this especially concerns papers which can have a readership in the general public, such as broad reviews, in regions where neither English nor French are spoken by the public.
The English abstract should be 150-250 words in length and comprises a single paragraph. It may be presented as a single part, or as three sections: Background – Results – Conclusions. The abstract should be factual: useless sentences such as “the results are discussed” should be avoided and replaced by a summary of this discussion. No reference should be cited in the abstract, except when this is unavoidable.
The French abstract is the exact translation of the English abstract, sentence by sentence, with nothing more and nothing less. Apply the same rules if an abstract in another language is added.
3.4 Main text
3.4.1 Introduction
No subsection. This section is headed “Introduction”.
3.4.2 Materials and Methods
This part may be presented as several subsections (up to two levels of subheadings).
3.4.3 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.
3.4.4 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 mix the results and discussion in a single section, headed “Results and discussion”.
3.4.5 Conflict of Interest
If necessary, insert this section just before the Acknowledgements. If the authors wish to report that there are no competing interests, simply insert the statement at the end of the Acknowledgements.
3.4.6 Acknowledgements
This section must be concise. No subdivisions. Mention here colleagues and grants.
3.4.7 References
This section should be arranged according to the precise format detailed below. Only works cited in the text should appear here. Citation of unpublished papers and grey literature should generally be avoided. Software cited in the Material 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).
4 Tables
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 or Excel. Vertical lines are not permitted; horizontal lines should be kept to a minimum.
5 Figures
5.1 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.
5.2 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 as grey levels.
Figures should be prepared to be of good quality both when they are viewed onscreen as HTML and when the PDF is printed. Figures may be arranged as “plates”, but keep 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 facing 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, 1200 dpi for line work). JPG format is not recommended – 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 be immediately sent back for revision by the editorial team and will not begin the review process before correct files are uploaded. In other words, sending a manuscript with incorrect figures will gain nothing and may delay its possible publication.
6 Online material
Online material may include data too long to be included in the manuscript, additional illustrations and movies. Online material is subjected to strict refereeing. Formats accepted are: PDF, graphic formats for supplementary figures (see 5.2), MPEG for videos. Files should preferably be less than 20 Mb.
7 Scientific names
The full binomen should be written in full at the first use of a species name. The genus should be abbreviated in subsequent usages in the text. Genus and species names are 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:
- 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.
8 Mathematics, statistics and significant figures
Write mathematical equations as simply as possible. Statistical software should be clearly indicated and cited.
Figures should be indicated with a reasonable number of digits, coherent with the significance of the result. This is especially important for the abstract.
Example: a percentage of “30.30%” for a sample of 99 cases should be indicated as 30%.
9 Accession numbers
The accession numbers of nucleic acid sequences and protein sequences must be cited in the text. In the Material and Methods, a sentence should indicate: “New sequences were deposited in GenBank (or other) with accession numbers xxx–xxx”. No article will be published without this valid information.
10 References
Authors are encouraged to use a reference manager software. An EndNote style for Parasite is available here.
10.1 References in the text
References are numbered as [1], [2,3,7] or [5–9]. This allows copious lists of references without lengthening the text itself. The use of numbered references 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 special 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).
10.2 Presentation of references
References are numbered in alphabetical order of authors (not of appearance in the text). Only species names and genes (see 3, above) are italicised. Words in titles are not capitalised. No journal name begins with “The”.
- 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.
- 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.
- Brooks DR, McLennan DA. 1993. Parascript - Parasites and the language of evolution. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Articles within a journal
Book chapter
Complete book
11 Special manuscripts
11.1 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), as in the present Instructions for Authors. In this case, internal references to other parts of the text may easily be indicated, such as: “see 3.2.5”.
11.2 Taxonomic papers
11.2.1 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.
11.2.2 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.
11.2.3 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.
11.2.4 Electronic publication of taxonomic papers and ICZN
Parasite will apply the recent amendment of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) about the availability of electronic publications (Zootaxa, 2012, 3450:1-7). All papers including 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 want.
11.3 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.
11.4 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.
12 Electronic submission
Authors should use the electronic submission system powered by Editorial Manager (http://parasite.edmgr.com/). Before you begin submission, 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;
- A Word file of the covering letter, explaining why the manuscript is of importance and any other detail. The covering letter is included in the final PDF sent to the referees.
- The electronic files of all figures, with appropriate resolution and technical quality (see 5.2).
The submission system will produce a PDF from these elements, which will be submitted for your approval, and will eventually be sent to the referees after evaluation by the Editors.
Please double-check the PDF before you approve it – this PDF will be sent to the reviewers.
Authors who wish to send confidential comments about their manuscript to the Editor should send a separate email.