Author Guidelines

Preparing your manuscript

Submission guidelines for research article

Manuscripts should include the following elements:

• Title page: title, authors, and affiliations 
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusions 
• Acknowledgments
• Ethics approval and consent to participate
• Funding 
• Competing interests 
• References
• Supplementary material (if applicable)
• General formatting guidelines

Instructions for each element of the manuscript.

• Title page

This section should include a full title that is specific, descriptive, and informative. Please provide the full names and institutional addresses of all authors. Author names should be written in the following order: first name, middle name, last name. Please indicate the corresponding author and provide an email address. This is the primary contact for the journal office and will handle correspondence at all stages of publication. When authors contributed equally to work, please indicate with an asterisk.

• Abstract 

This section should clearly state the purpose of the study, explain how the study was performed, and summarize the main findings and potential implications. The abstract should not exceed 300 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and citations in the abstract.        

• Keywords 

Please provide 4 to 8 keywords representing the main contents of the manuscript.

• Introduction 

This section should provide the background of the study, present the problem addressed while reviewing the key literature, and conclude with a brief statement of the overall objectives of the study and its contribution to the field. If abbreviations are used anywhere in the manuscript, they should be defined when they first appear.

• Materials and methods

This section should provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicated by other researchers. A clear description of all materials and methods should be made. If the materials and methods are well-established, authors may cite articles where appropriate and only include relevant modifications in the description.  This section should provide the type of statistical analysis used in the study. Provide an explanation regarding how the errors and statistical significance levels were determined. 

 

• Results 

This section should present all the findings of the study. Corresponding figures and tables should be included accordingly. For more information on how to prepare figures and table legends, please refer to our General formatting guidelines.

• Discussion 

This section should explain how the results relate to the overall objectives of the study and discuss the implications of the findings in the context of the current literature. Present any limitations of the study as well as potential future research directions.

• Conclusions

This section should briefly summarize the most important results and their significance. 

• Acknowledgments

This section should mention any individuals who contributed to the work but are not named as authors. Please provide a short description of the contribution. Please also ensure that everyone agrees to be named in this section. 

• Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data, or human tissue must:

• Include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
• Include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number, if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval, and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

• Funding 

Please provide details of all funding sources used in the study.

• Competing interests

This section should include a declaration of all financial and non-financial competing interests. Please use the authors' initials for this section. If you do not have any competing interests, please include the statement ‘No competing interests declared” in this section. 

• References

TJBS uses the reference style of the VANCOUVER style.

Citation: Reference citations in the text should be identified by numbers in square brackets.

Some examples:      

In pathologies like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and respiratory or cardiovascular disease which have all been found to associate with high-risk severe COVID-19 [5]

This effect has been widely studied [1-3, 7]

Reference list: The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should only be mentioned in the text. The entries in the list should be numbered consecutively.

Some examples:

Article within a journal

Tsakiri EN, Trougakos IP. The amazing ubiquitin-proteasome system: structural components and implication in aging. Int Rev Cell Mol Biol. 2015;314:171–237.

Hashimoto T, Perlot T, Rehman A, et al. ACE2 links amino acid malnutrition to microbial ecology and intestinal inflammation. Nature. 2012;487:477–81.

Article within a journal by DOI

Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Article within a journal supplement

Frumin AM, Nussbaum J, Esposito M. Functional asplenia: demonstration of splenic activity by bone marrow scan. Blood 1979;59 Suppl 1:26-32.

Book chapter or an article within a book

Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. p. 251-306.

Online First chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito Y, Hyuga H. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Top Curr Chem. 2007. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Complete book, authored.

Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.

Online document

Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase. US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. 1998. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J. Title of supplementary material. 2000. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

University site

Doe, J: Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html (1999). Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre: The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org (2006). Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

Dataset with persistent identifier

Zheng L-Y, Guo X-S, He B, Sun L-J, Peng Y, Dong S-S, et al. Genome data from sweet and grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). GigaScience Database. 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100012.

• Supplementary material

Supplementary material can be submitted together with the manuscript, and they are published exactly as they are received. All supplementary material should be submitted in a single pdf file. The exception can be made for movies or large tables. For more information on how to prepare and submit supplementary material, please refer to our General formatting guidelines.

• General formatting guidelines

Preparing main manuscript text

Quick points:

• Use double line spacing.
• Include line and page numbering.
• Use SI units: Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text; otherwise, they will be lost during conversion to PDF.
• Do not use page breaks in your manuscript.

*File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

• Microsoft word (DOC, DOCX)
• Rich text format (RTF)

Please note: editable files are required for processing in production. If your manuscript contains any non-editable files (such as PDFs), you will be required to re-submit an editable file when you submit your revised manuscript or after editorial acceptance in case no revision is necessary.

Preparing figures

When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.

• Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text and uploaded in this order. Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d, etc.) should be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure.
• Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation.
• Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.
• Figure keys should be incorporated into the graphic, not into the legend of the figure.
• Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site. For more information on individual figure file formats, see our detailed instructions.
• Individual figure files should not exceed 10 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is adequate for extremely high-quality figures.
• Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non-open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

• EPS (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
• PDF (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
• Microsoft Word (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
• PowerPoint (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
• TIFF (suitable for images)
• JPEG (suitable for photographic images, less suitable for graphical images)
• PNG (suitable for images)
• BMP (suitable for images)
• CDX (ChemDraw - suitable for molecular structures)

Figure size and resolution

Figures are resized during publication of the final full text and PDF versions to conform to the TJBS standard dimensions, which are detailed below.

Figures on the web:

• width of 600 pixels (standard), 1200 pixels (high resolution).

 

Figures in the final PDF version:

• width of 85 mm for half page width figure
• width of 170 mm for full page width figure
• maximum height of 225 mm for figure and legend
• the image resolution of approximately 300 dpi (dots per inch) at the final size

 

Figures should be designed such that all information, including text, is legible at these dimensions. All lines should be wider than 0.25 pt when constrained to standard figure widths. All fonts must be embedded.

Figure file compression

• Vector figures should, if possible, be submitted as PDF files, which are usually more compact than EPS files.
• TIFF files should be saved with LZW compression, which is lossless (decreases file size without decreasing quality) in order to minimize upload time.
• JPEG files should be saved at maximum quality.
• Conversion of images between file types (especially lossy formats such as JPEG) should be kept to a minimum to avoid degradation of quality.

 

Preparing tables

When preparing tables, please follow the formatting instructions below.

• Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e., Table 1, Table 2, etc.).
• Tables less than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed in the appropriate location within the manuscript.
• Tables larger than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed at the end of the document text file. Please cite and indicate where the table should appear at the relevant location in the text file so that the table can be added to the correct place during production.
• Larger datasets or tables too wide for A4 or Letter landscape pages can be uploaded as additional files. Please see [below] for more information.
• Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) or comma-separated values (.csv). Please use the standard file extensions.
• Table titles (max 15 words) should be included above the table, and legends (max 300 words) should be included underneath the table.
• Tables should not be embedded as figures or spreadsheet files but should be formatted using the ‘Table object’ function in your word processing program.
• Color and shading may not be used. Parts of the table can be highlighted using superscripts, numbering, lettering, symbols, or bold text, the meaning of which should be explained in a table legend.
• Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values.

Preparing supplementary materials

As the length and quantity of data are not restricted to many article types, authors can provide datasets, tables, movies, or other information as additional files.

All Additional files will be published along with the accepted article. Do not include files such as patient consent forms, certificates of language editing, or revised versions of the main manuscript document with tracked changes. Such files, if requested, should be sent by email to the journal’s editorial email address, quoting the manuscript reference number. Please do not send completed patient consent forms unless requested.

Results that would otherwise be indicated as "data not shown" should be included as additional files. Since many web links and URLs rapidly become broken, TJBS requires that supporting data are included as additional files or deposited in a recognized repository. Please do not link to data on a personal/departmental website. Do not include any individual participant details. The maximum file size for additional files is 20 MB each, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. Each additional file should be cited in sequence within the main body of the text.

If additional material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text:

• File name (e.g., Additional file 1)
• File format including the correct file extension for example .pdf, .xls, .txt, .pptx (including name and a URL of an appropriate viewer if format is unusual)
• Title of data
• Description of data

Additional files should be named "Additional file 1" and so on and should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g., 'An additional movie file shows this in more detail [see Additional file 1]'.