Authors guidelines | | Forest@ - Journal of Silviculture and Forest Ecology

Authors guidelines for manuscript submission

Manuscript submission

All manuscripts must be submitted through the Manuscript Processing System (MPS), following carefully the instructions reported therein. Only in case of technical problems, manuscripts can be submitted by E-mail at the following address: editorial.staff@sisef.org.

Text (main text including tables and figure legends) and figures must be submitted as separate files.

There is no explicit limit on the length of articles submitted, but authors are encouraged to be concise.

Preparing file to be submitted

Manuscript file

Manuscript file (including tables) should be prepared in one of the following format: MS Word (.doc, .docx); Open Office Writer (.odt, .sxw); RTF (.rtf); plain text (.txt); or compressed archives of such formats (.zip). Please do not submit manuscript files in PDF format. Files larger than 1 Mb should be compressed into a Winzip archive. Files larger than 2.5 Mb will not be accepted by the form.

Files must be named with a file extension appropriate to file type (e.g., .doc, .odt, .zip, .txt). Please provide an adequate name for your manuscript file (e.g., "Smith_text.doc", where Smith is the surname of the first author).

Tables less than 2 pages (about 90 rows) should be included at the end of the manuscript. Avoid as far as possibile longer tables, which should be submitted as additional files. Please avoid also to include images of tables (as often uotput from several software, as well as images within tables: tables are expected to be editable with a normal text editor, and should contain only text.

Figures & additional files

Files must be named with file extension appropriate to file type. Please provide an adequate filename for each file to be uploaded (e.g., "Smith_fig01.jpg", where Smith is the surname of the first author and the number of the figure is such as referred to in text).

Allowed file types: (images or diagrams) JPG, GIF, PNG, EPS, PDF, BMP, PPT; (tables) XLS, DOC, DOCX, RTF, ODT, ODS, ODP; (other files) ZIP, PDF. Files should not exceed 500 KB each.

Files can be uploaded as separate files or embedded into a single Winzip archive and uploaded as a single file.

Preparing the main text (including tables and figure legends)

The main text (including tables and figure legends) must be submitted as a single file.

Typographic rules

double line spacing with wide margins
Times Roman font or equivalent (avoid ‘sans serif’ fonts)
font dimension: 12 pt
type the text unjustified, without hyphenating words at line breaks.
all pages and lines should be numbered.
use italics only for scientific names of plant and animal species.
footnotes to text should not be used.
abbreviations should be used as sparingly as possible, define them when first used
SI Units should be used throughout (cm, litre and molar permitted).

All figures and tables must be referred to along the main text using Arabic numerals (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Table 1, Table 2, etc.).

Where appropriate, manuscripts should be structured in the following sections:

Title page
Text
Reference list
Acknowledgments
Tables (with legends)
Legends to figures

All submitted manuscripts must contain a Title page and an Abstract.

Title page

This should list:

title of the article;
full names of the authors;
full names of institutional addresses, and e-mail addresses for all authors;
indication of the corresponding author;
summary in English (at least 300 words for scientific manuscripts)
five key-words, in English

Text

In case of standard research articles, the following structure is suggested: Introduction, Material and methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, References.

Notice: Please avoid the use of footnotes. Wherever possible, footnote contents should be integrated within text.

Notice: Please also avoid to include web addresses along text. Wherever needed, please insert a bibliographic citation referring to the reference list, where the web address suitably formatted (see below) may be reported.

References

All the in-text citations must be listed in the reference list and vice-versa.

Citations along the text must report the name of the author (and wherever appropriate of the second author) followed by the year of publication.

In case of more than two authors, the name of the first author is followed by "et al." (no italic). Papers by the same authors and published in the same year will be labelled with the letters a, b, c, etc.

Multiple citations along the text must be in chronological order, separated by commas. Example of in-text citations:

(Comps 1990)
(Comps & Thiébaut 1990, Comps et al. 1990)
(Comps et al. 1990a, Comps et al. 1990b, Thiébaut & Comps 1995)

Full name of journals (not abbreviations) should be reported in the reference list in which citations, listed in alphabetical order, must conform to the following style:

Journal:
Ovington JD (1957). Dry-matter production by Pinus sylvestris L. Annals of Botany 21: 287-314.
Book section:
Pereira JS, Chaves MM (1993). Plant water deficits in Mediterranean ecosystems. In: “Water Deficits. Plant Responses from Cell to Community” (Smith JAC, Griffiths H eds). Bios Scientific, Oxford, UK, pp. 237-251.
Conference Proceeding:
Jones X (1996). Zeolites and synthetic mechanisms. In: Proceedings of the “First National Conference on Porous Sieves” (Smith YS ed). Baltimore (USA), 27-30 June 1996. Butterworth-Heinemann, New York, pp. 16-27.
Book:
Smith WK, Hinckley TM (1995). Resource physiology of Conifers. Academic Press, San Diego, USA, pp. 341.
Internet Resource:
IPCC (1996). Revised 1996 IPCC guidelines for National greenhouse gas. [online] URL: http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gl/invs1.htm
Other Material:
Kohavi R (1995). Wrappers for performance enhancement and oblivious decision graphs. PhD thesis, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, USA, pp. 89.

Web links cited in the text should be included in the reference list. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site, the URL and the retrieval date.

Citing an article from an online magazine:
Zeng N (2008). Carbon sequestration via wood burial. Carbon Balance and Management 3 (1). [online 3 January 2008] URL: http://www.cbmjournal.com
Citing a professional site:
IPCC (1996). Revised 1996 IPCC guidelines for National greenhouse gas. [online 7 February 2008] URL: http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gl/invs1.htm
Citing a personal site:
Rug G (2008). Home page. [online 25 January 2008] URL: http://www.student.cornell.edu/~greg/

Tables and captions

Tables, with their captions, should be placed at the end of the main text. Each table (numbered in sequence using Arabic numerals, Tab. 1, 2, etc.) must be included on a single page preceded by a self-explaining caption. All tables must be cited in text. Detailed legends may follow the table, but should be concise. Commas should not be used to separate decimal values.

Avoid as far as possible large tables. Wherever apply, column headers should be labelled with abbreviations referred to in the caption.

Do not use special formats in tables like borders, paragraph sign, cell unions, etc.

Legends below the main table are not allowed. Please report abbreviations abd/or symbols (e.g., asterisks, small letters or numbers, etc.) in the table caption, following its main text.

Notice: please avoid to include images of tables (such as the output of several softwares), as well as pictures (or formulas) included within tables: tables must be editable with any text editor and must contain only text.

Figure legends

The legends should be included in the main manuscript text file, immediately following the references, rather than being a part of the figure file.

For each figure, the following information should be provided: Figure number (in sequence, using Arabic numerals - i.e. Figure 1, 2, 3 etc); short title of figure (maximum 15 words); detailed legend, up to 300 words.

Preparing and submitting figures

Each figure should be submitted as a separate file, numbered with Arabic numerals according the way the figure is referenced in the main text (e.g., for Fig. 1 an appropriate file name could be ’surname_first_author_fig01.jpg’). Graphs should not be gridded.

Avoid as far as possible large and too complex figures.

Each figure should include a single illustration and should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Text within figures should use the Arial font.

For figures with multiple panels, each panel should be labelled with capital letters (A, B, etc.) and referred to in the legend.

Figures should be designed such that all information is legible when viewed at a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch). When preparing figure for submission, please consider that maximum size for visualization on web pages is 600px at 72 dpi, while maximum size for visualization on PDF is 17 cm at 300 dpi. Larger figures with exceeding resolution will be suitably reduced to such standards during editing.

Photographs should be provided with a scale bar if appropriate.