Sections and subsections

After the title material and abstract there is usually an introduction and several more sections before the list of references. There may also be an acknowledgements section and one or more appendices. Standard text sections include: Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion; these may be divided into subsections by the author. However, some authors may choose to use different section headings after the Introduction, or have the Results section before Material and Methods, and both variations are OK. Leave as author supplied. Sections are numbered, with subsections following the Latin alphabet (subsection 1), Roman numerals (subsection 2) and then unnumbered (subsection 3).

The sections are usually presented in the following order, but not inclusive/exclusively:

1. Introduction
2. Material and Methods
3. Results
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion
6. Note added in proof
7. Disclaimer
8. Ethics statement
9. Acknowledgements
10. Funding statement
11. Conflict of interests
12. Endnote(s)
13. Appendices
14. References
15. Glossary

• First line of text after a section heading is full out – but subsequent paragraphs in that section are indented.
  • To cross reference a (sub)section use, for instance:
  • section 4, subsection (b), subsubsection (iii) = §4b(iii)
  • sections 2 and 3 = §§2 and 3
  • subsections 2a and 2b = §2a,b
• If the author has written, for example, "see Material and methods" then do not change it
• Additional levels of headings should fit to an appropriate style for the material presented, e.g. unlabelled italic run-on.

Note added in proof

• Insert before the acknowledgements.
• Unnumbered heading.

Ethics statement, acknowledgements and other sections

• Small point font size.
• Style as one paragraph, regardless of how long section is.
• Authors’ names should be abbreviated to closed-up initials with full stops.
• Grants: do not use a capital ‘G’.
• Use ‘no.’ or ‘nos.’, not ‘#’, to represent a grant number.
• Unless part of a proper noun, ‘studentship’ and ‘fellowship’ should be kept lower-case.
• Note ‘The Open University’ not ‘the Open University’, but use ‘the Royal Society’ not ‘The Royal Society (unless this phrase starts a sentence) and ‘the Wellcome Trust’ not ‘The Wellcome Trust’.
• There is no need for acronyms of funding bodies to be given in full.
• This is the order sections should appear and the standardised heading which should be used, not all sections will be needed for all articles, see individual notes next to each heading.
  • Ethics
  • To be included as required, checked by editorial. Sometimes editorial will ask production to add this, if this is the case the specific wording will be provided. This section should not be included if it is not applicable, if authors have done this editorial should ask production to remove it.
  • For ethics statements, all Authors should include details of animal welfare (such as species, number, gender, age, weight, housing conditions, welfare, training and the fate of the animals at the end of the experiment) and steps taken to ameliorate suffering in all published papers that involve non-human primate research. These details should be included in the Methods section of the article. This must be included where experiments have been carried out on humans, animals or fish. A brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments must be included at the end of the article before the acknowledgements section.
  • Where no ethics statement has been included by the author, please query. If in doubt about whether an ethics statement is necessary, query the author.
  • Ethics statements are only required for Research papers (ie. not Reviews). Examples are:
  • "This study conforms to the terms of the Declaration of Helsinki (human trials)."
  • "This study meets the terms of the ethics committee at the institution where the trials were carried out (animal trials)."
  • Data accessibility
• All manuscripts that report primary data must include a Data accessibility section which states where the article's supporting data can be accessed. Where appropriate, full details of the data should be provided in the reference list and a citation should be included in the Data accessibility section.
• Reference citations should only be added if specific data sets/repositories are mentioned. A citation does not need to be included when, for example, the author states that the data has been uploaded as ESM.
• If details of a data set are included in the reference list then a citation should be included in the Data accessibility section.
• If details of a data set are not included in the reference list, but it is mentioned in a Data accessibility statement, then the following query should be added to the query sheet: ‘Please provide full citation details for the data mentioned in the Data accessibility section of your article.’ The proofreader should then mark the details as a reference on the corrected proof.
• The data reference style should appear as:
• Torres-Campos I, Abram PK, Guerra-Grenier E, Boivin G, Brodeur J. 2016 Data from: A scenario for the evolution of selective egg colouration: the roles of enemy-free space, camouflage, thermoregulation, and pigment limitation. Dryad Digital Repository. (http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5qt2k)
• The Data Accessibility section should continue to appear as it does now, but with a citation included for the data reference.
  • Authors’ contributions
  • To be included as required, checked by editorial. Sometimes editorial will ask production to add this, if this is the case the specific wording will be provided. This section should not be included if there is only one author, if author has done this production should remove it.
  • Competing interests
  • All papers should have this statement. To be checked and included by editorial. If there are no competing interests the following statement should be included ‘I/We declare I/we have no competing interests’. Editorial will ask for this to be added, i.e. ‘please add no competing interests statement’ in the notes to production.
  • Funding
  • It is now a requirement for articles published in Royal Society journals to include a Funding section as an end section. Funding received for the work described in the paper or for the publication itself, for all authors, must be declared within the publication. Examples of funding are:
• Research funds – the source and any grant numbers should be included in a funding section at the end of the paper
• Funding of the article processing charge for an open access article.

We have found that there are often discrepancies in the funding information provided. This is likely to be caused by having two places for authors to provide the funding information, as well as potentially providing the information at different stages in the review process.

To overcome this we have now asked Techset to include details based on the various following scenarios.

No funding

For articles that do not have a Funding section in the manuscript or funding details in the ScholarOne metadata the following statement should be included in the manuscript: ‘No funding has been received for this article.’ In addition, the following query should be added to the query sheet: ‘A funding statement has been added to your paper; please check that this is correct.’

Funding metadata matches Funding section in manuscript, or funding statement only supplied in manuscript

The Funding section should be kept as supplied in the manuscript. A query does not need to be added to the query sheet.

No Funding section in manuscript but funding metadata supplied

The funder names and grant numbers should be added to the proof as a Funding section along with the following query on the query sheet: ‘Funding details were supplied when submitting your manuscript; please check your Funding section and rewrite if necessary.’

Mismatch between Funding section in manuscript and funding metadata

The Funding section should be included as supplied in the manuscript with the additional details (funder names and grant numbers) from the metadata included directly below the Funding section. The following query should be included on the query sheet: ‘Funding details were supplied when submitting your manuscript; please check your Funding section and rewrite if necessary.’

Any changes to the funding section should be collated by the proofreader and marked on the corrected proof.

• Acknowledgements
• To be included if supplied by author. Funding information is sometimes given in the acknowledgements, if this is the case it should be moved to a separate Funding section by production.
• Disclaimer
• To be included as required, checked by editorial. Sometimes editorial will ask production to add this, if this is the case the specific wording will be provided. This section should not be included if it is not applicable (though I don’t think it ever would be), if authors have done this editorial should ask production to remove it.

Endnotes

• Where footnotes are too extensive to be included at the bottom of their respective pages, endnotes are used.
• These are placed at the end of the article, before the references, using the unnumbered heading style similar to the references.
• These are numbered using superscript Arabic numerals.

Appendices

• In the text use ‘appendix A’, etc., even if there is just one appendix (note, lower case ‘a’ for ‘appendix’).
• Where appendix subsections are cited in the text, do not use the section symbol §, but cite as follows. See appendix Aa(i).
• If appendices contain equations that do not fit into the double column format, the appendix should be set as single column.
• The sections of the appendix are listed by the Latin alphabet (uppercase), followed by the lower case alphabet (subsection 1) and then Roman numerals (subsection 2).

Glossary

• If the author has provided a lists definitions of the abbreviations used in the text these should be set as a Glossary and follow the references.
• Small font size for glossary text.
• Unnumbered heading.

Electronic supplementary material