Tables

Page Layout

Tables should be positioned in portrait wherever possible; however, where necessary tables may be rotated to appear landscape (see table 1).
Landscape tables should be positioned either as single column in the left-hand column, or double column, centred on the page.
In ALL journals, the table should be full-column width (i.e. either one or two columns).
Place tables at the top of the page (column) on which their first text mention occurs (or as near as possible). Place figures above tables if they are to appear on the same page.
Tables should not appear on the first page of an article unless unavoidable.

Tables split over two pages:

Tables split over two pages should always be on facing pages not back to back. The second page of the table should be centred for 1-column journals, and left-aligned, if in landscape format, for 2-column journals.
Tables that extend over more than one page (see table 2) require the following:
- right-aligned footnote underneath rule on first (and all subsequent to penultimate) page – ‘(Continued.)’;
- repetition of column headers on subsequent pages;
- additional legend(s) left-aligned – e.g. ‘Table 1. (Continued.)’.

Citation

All tables must be cited and appear in sequence.
Cite in the text as ‘table 1’, not ‘Table 1’ (this is also the case for tables cited in other works).

Tables in the Appendix

Numbering of tables in appendices is continuous with that of the rest of the paper.
Tables in Appendix must be cited in the Appendix section.

Titles and labelling

All tables MUST have titles, if missing, query the author.
Tables of nomenclature must be labelled as table 1, placed at the start of the article (ideally page 2) and the author queried for a table citation. All subsequent tables are to be renumbered.

Borders, columns and sections

Spanner rules may be used to indicate relations between headings and subheadings (see table 1).
Table borders: rules top, bottom and separating heading from table body.
Where column-heading lengths vary from one to two or more lines, the headings should be positioned on the baseline (see table 3).
Sections within the table body should be separated by the dotted lines (see table 4).
Column headings are left-aligned – the column heading should be aligned with the left-most character in the entries below.
If there are only two columns in a table, ensure there is no large white space in the middle.
Where author supplies shading in a table please replace in all instances with italic font, then if further differentiation is required use bold font.

Lettering, units and dates

Lower-case lettering (except, for example, Latin binomials, acronyms).
Put non-breaking spaces for the thin spaces in numbers (Ctrl+shift+space) or between a number and unit.
Decimal data in columns should be aligned under decimal points.
Related decimal data in columns should be aligned under decimal points. Where ‘±‘ signs occur, align under these.
Integers should be aligned according to thousands, hundreds, tens and units.
Em-rules indicate where no data points exist (left aligned).
Units (e.g. cm) pertaining to all data in a column should be given only in the column heading.
Do not abbreviate days.
Dates in tables should be in the format ‘26 Jan 2002’ (month as three letter abbreviation).
Query authors that have been inconsistent in the number of decimal points to which they have set numbers.

Legends

Table legends are justified and roman, have a closing full stop and appear above the table.
Additional explanatory information, including abbreviations, should be provided in a fully punctuated section.
Where the legend is less than one line in length, text should be left aligned.

Footnotes

Use superscript ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, unless a logical system has been used by the author
Each footnote ends with a full stop
In the event of there being more than 26 table footnotes restart labelling as “aa”, “ab”, “ac”, etc.
Statistical significance in probability tests should be indicated by asterisks in table body and e.g. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, and should be considered as one footnote, thereby running on one line.
Table footnotes should each start on a new line. If there are many footnotes (more than 30) then these can be set to run on from each other.

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