Article title page

Here you can view information relating to the individual elements that make up an article title page. To get started, use the sample article page on the right to access details for each constituent part.

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A note about pagination...

Following the change to continuous publication, page numbers are no longer included on the footer of the title page of the articles. All articles are paginated individually rather than as an issue. Continuous publication articles have no pagination on title page, and each paper starts at p.1. When cited, the page range will be referred to by the last six digits of the DOI e.g. Open Biol 1: 110234.

ORCID

The Royal Society now provides authors with the option to include an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) during the article submission process. ORCIDs, a sixteen digit identifier, will be displayed in the published article, along with the green id logo.

• The ORCIDs are listed in the same order as the author list, although some author ORCIDs may not be supplied.
• ORCIDs are given as follows: [author initials], [16 digit ORCID];
• e.g. AH, 0000-0002-4555-7924;

Article title

• Lower-case except for first letter and any acronyms or proper nouns. Only well-known acronyms (e.g. DNA) are permissible.
• Multi-part papers should use Roman numerals and full stops only, in the title and in the references, but within the text the word ‘Part’ can be added for clarification, for instance
  • Olhede, S. & Walden, A. T. 2003 Polarization phase relationships via multiple Morse wavelets. I. Fundamentals. Proc. R. Soc. A 459, 413–444.
  • Olhede, S. & Walden, A. T. 2003 Polarization phase relationships via multiple Morse wavelets. II. Data analysis. Proc. R. Soc. A 459, 641–657.
• If the article is an Introduction, Preface or Editorial, avoid having the word 'Introduction', 'Preface' or 'Editorial' in the title, but instead add this word in the side heading
• Replace em-rules with a colon.
• Notes Rec: article title is upper case, with the exception of Reports (lower-case, bold).

Author names

• Full author names, if given, are retained.
• Remove titles such as ‘Sir’ or Lord’ etc.
• If authors have different addresses, then superscript Arabic numerals are used as tags, seperated by commas.
• For collaborations see http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1943/2073.full.pdf+html from the old journal style as an example.

Addresses

• Left aligned, indent to width of Abstract, written in full with no full point at the end.
• Give the name of any country in English (e.g. Republic of Ireland not Eire). Do not allow European country codes, e.g. ‘D-‘, ‘SE-‘, ‘CH-‘, except for 'USA' and 'UK' (don’t use England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland).
• Use: People’s Republic of China; Taiwan, Republic of China.
• There is no comma between town and postcode, or between state and zip code.
• The postcode should not appear after the country name (excluding Canada).
• All states (except US states) and provinces should be written in full. Abbreviate American states, i.e. CA for California, etc.
• Write, for example, ‘University of Cambridge’, not ‘Cambridge University’ or ‘The University of Cambridge’. This format applies to UK universities only, and it should be applied elsewhere in the article. Note there are some exceptions (e.g. Swansea University, Cardiff University), check the university's website for clarification.
• Do not use ‘St.’, ‘Rd’, ‘Bd.’, etc. Spell these out in full and, if in doubt, query the author.
• When authors are from different departments at the same address, their addresses may be coupled together:

³Department of Mathematics, and ⁴Department of Biology, University of Bristol, Bristol BS6 6AU, UK

• For Singapore addresses use the following convention:

³Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117543, Republic of Singapore

Abstract

• The abstract follows immediately after the full postal addresses.
• Any references should most preferably be deleted, but if absolutely necessary they require full publication details (see References).
• Abstracts are presented in a box shaded to match the journal colour except for Notes Rec and Open Biology where the box is not present.
  • Open Biology articles have a numbered summary section rather than a shaded abstract section
• Font remains the same in abstract/main body for all journals.
• An abstract is not present in editorials or preface articles, and hence no keywords are present either. Those introductions without abstracts also do not have keywords.
• The abstract should be one continuous paragraph. Do not break into multiple paragraphs.
• In Trans A and Trans B articles, the abstract should include one of the following sentences (consistent with the footnote) as a separate paragraph:

"This article is part of the theme issue ‘[theme issue title]’."

"This article is part of the discussion meeting issue '[discussion meeting issue title]'."

Logos

• The old journal logos have been removed and replaced with the journal name. See https://sites.google.com/site/royalsocietystyleguidebeta/journal-websites for the new logos.

Article types

• Aligned to the left of the Open Access padlock (where applicable) and CrossMark logo (see below).
• see Article types page

Category headings

• Found in Biology Letters only.
• Category heading appears in white on black background at top of page.
• In leading capitals only
• Categories:

Animal behaviour

Biomechanics

Community ecology

Conservation biology

Evolutionary biology

Evolutionary developmental biology

Genome biology

Global change biology

Marine biology

Molecular evolution

Neurobiology

Palaeontology

Pathogen biology

Phylogeny

Physiology

Population ecology

Population genetics

Cite this article

Cite this article: Author names [surname, initial (s)], year, title. Journal abbreviation, volume: UI [unique identifier - contains year and article number].

• Located underneath category and Open Access/CrossMark logos.
• DOI (on next line down - DOI is not wrapped, while other content in citation will be].
• Journal abbreviations

Notes Rec. R. Soc.

Interface

Interface Focus

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Proc. R. Soc. A

Proc. R. Soc. B

Open Biol.

Biol. Lett.

R. Soc. open sci. (lower case 'o' and 's')

Dates

• Footer, left-aligned catchline.
• Notes Rec articled do not display history dates.
• Trans A, Trans B and Focus articles should include the accepted date only.
• History dates should not be included for Editorials and Prefaces.

Subject areas