Manuscript Preparation

1. Order of Manuscript

For original research articles and review articles but not for letters to the editor or editorials, the manuscript should have the following material and be in the following order:

  • Cover letter
  • Title page
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Note: the information required in this position are different for original research articles and for review articles and will be discussed in their individual sections.
  • Acknowledgments (if any)
  • Funding (if any)
  • Author contributions
  • Conflicts of Interest
  • Ethics approval statement
  • Permission to reproduce material from other sources
  • References
  • Tables and figures
  • Supplementary Material (uploaded separately)

2. Author Guidelines

Cover letter

Because ESEM wants to have a high-quality journal, an acceptance rate of ~30% is anticipated. To help the editorial board evaluate your submission and its acceptability, please provide the following information.

1. Please look at the Aims and Scope of ESEM and its Areas of Interest https://www.sciltp.com/journals/index.php/esem
Please list the area (or areas) of interest in which your manuscript can be included. If your manuscript does not fit within a specific area listed, please justify why your manuscript should be considered for publication.

2. Explain why your submission is important, different, novel, and/or adds to the knowledge base of areas of interest within ESEM.

3. Please provide names, affiliations, and email addresses of at least three people who have the background sufficient to review the manuscript and have no conflict of interest. If you feel that there might be someone who should be excluded from reviewing your manuscript, please explain. Providing these names does not guarantee that these people will or will not be asked to review the manuscript but will allow the journal to recruit appropriate reviewers. The cover letter is confidential to the editors and will not be available to reviewers.

Title page

Title of no more than 125 characters, including spaces.

The title page should include: (1) A concise and informative title; (2) Name(s) of the author(s) and their 16-digit ORCID if available; (3) Affiliation(s) and address(es) of the author(s); (4) Email address and telephone number of the corresponding author. (5) Word count of the manuscript.

For authors who are (temporarily) unaffiliated with an institution, we will record their city and country of residence, not their email address, unless specifically requested.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, currently do not meet our authorship criteria. It is worth noting that authorship attribution carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. The use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section of the manuscript (or in an appropriate alternative part if there is no Methods section).

Abstract

Abstracts are required for all types of manuscripts (except for opinions, commentaries, and letters to the editor) and should consist of no more than 275 words. Abstracts for research articles should include the following structure: Objectives, Methods, Results, and Conclusion. Abstracts should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references. Reference citations are not permitted.

Keywords

All manuscripts should include 4-6 keywords, not included in the title of the paper.

Acknowledgments (if any)

  1. Identify funding sources. Authors are required to state in the acknowledgments all funding sources, and the names of companies, manufacturers, or outside organizations providing technical or equipment support. 
  2. All contributors of the paper who are not named as co-authors should be mentioned in the acknowledgments section.
  3. The acknowledgments section should be proofread carefully, as any amendments or corrections are unlikely to be considered for publication as corrections.

Author contributions

For articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. Please refer to the CRediT taxonomy for term explanation https://credit.niso.org/. Please include individual contributions to planning, conducting, and reporting of the work in this manuscript. Conception and design, acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data, etc. may also be considered. Please note that persons listed as authors who do not fulfill all three of the criteria mentioned above should be moved to the acknowledgments section.

Conflicts of Interest

Any interest or relationship (financial or otherwise) that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this at submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose all pertinent commercial and other relationships during submission.

Ethics approval statement, if relevant

Our policy is to ensure that all articles published by ESEM report on work that is morally acceptable and ESEM expects authors to follow the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki. To achieve this, we aim to appraise the ethical aspects of any submitted work that involves human participants, whatever descriptive label is given to that work including research, audit, and sometimes debate. If a study involves human subjects and/or animals, and also if the manuscript includes case reports/case series, please provide the following:

Authors must provide the name of the ethical approval committee/Institutional Review Board from which they have obtained the consent form.

Authors should specifically mention if a waiver was obtained for the study and the reason for the waiver. They should confirm that the study was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, as revised in 2013.

Authors must state that written informed consent was obtained from the participants of the study (the relevant document[s] must be provided when requested by the journal). If verbal informed consent was obtained, the reason(s) for the absence of written consent must be provided.

Detailed explanations of how investigators and authors have considered and justified the ethical and moral basis of their work will be considered. If such detail does not easily fit within the manuscript, please provide it in the cover letter or upload it as a supplemental file when submitting the article. ESEM will also be pleased to see copies of explanatory information given to participants. Even if such detailed information is not included in a final published version, it may be made available to peer reviewers and editorial committees.  Peer reviewers will be asked to consider and comment on the ethics of the submitted work.

Permission to reproduce material from other sources, if relevant

Articles using any previously published material (including figures/diagrams, short extracts, or content taken from websites) must obtain written permission from the copyright owner. The copyright owner is usually the publisher (for material taken from journal or proceedings articles), website owner/company (for material taken from websites), or the author or their employer (if the work is unpublished). Some publishers will also require permission of the original author. Please check the terms of the publisher’s permission.

Please submit written evidence:

That all necessary permissions have been obtained by providing the actual written permission granted by the copyright owner, or

That permission is not required, e.g., where the material is available under one of the Creative Commons licenses which allow commercial reuse and suits the purpose for which the content is being used.

References

The reference list shall be in order of citation (rather than in alphabetic order) and numbered. There shall not be more than 60 references for original investigations. Review articles are limited to 100 references. All references shall appear in the text. The format for references is ACS reference style.

ACS Style: Common Types of References with Examples

Journal article
with article title		 Klingler, J. Influence of Pretreatment on Sodium Powder. Chem. Mater. 2005, 17, 2755–2768.
Nonscientific magazine
and newspaper

Squires, S.  Falling Short on Nutrients. The Washington Post, Oct 4, 2005, p H1.
Book
without editors		 Le Couteur, P.; Burreson, J. Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Mol-ecules Changed History; Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam: New York, 2003; pp 32–47.
with editors Almlof, J.; Gropen, O. Relativistic Effects in Chemistry. In Reviews in Computational Chemistry; Lipkowitz, K. B., Boyd, D. B., Eds.; VCH: New York, 1996; Vol. 8, pp 206–210.
Series publication
cited as a book		 Puls, J.; Saake, B. Industrially Isolated Hemicelluloses. In Hemi-celluloses: Science and Technology; Gatenholm, P., Tenkanen, M., Eds.; ACS Symposium Series 864; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2004; pp 24–37.

cited as a journal

 Puls, J.; Saake, B. ACS Symp. Ser. 2004, 864, 24–37.
Meeting or conference,
full citation		 Garrone, E.; Ugliengo, P. In Structure and Reactivity of Surfaces,Proceedings of the European Conference, Trieste, Italy, Sept 13–20, 1988; Zecchina, A., Cost, G., Morterra, C., Eds.; Elsevier: Amsterdam, 1988.
Thesis Mäckel, H. Capturing the Spectra of Silicon Solar Cells. Ph.D. Thesis, The Australian National University, December 2004.
Patent Sheem, S. K. Low-Cost Fiber Optic Pressure Sensor. U.S. Patent 6,738,537, May 18, 2004.
Personal communications Henscher, L. X. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Personal communication, 2001.
Website ACS Publications Home Page. https://pubs.acs.org/ (accessed 2019-02-21).

Figures and tables

Figures and tables should appear in the body of the paper near the place where they are mentioned. High-resolution images should be uploaded separately as figure files. The figures and tables should be cited in numeric order in the text.

All image files for figures should be labeled with the figure number (label each part if figures include multiple parts, e.g., 2A, 2B). The figure legend should be placed below each figure and should include descriptions of each figure part and identify the meaning of any symbols or arrows. Terms used for labels and in the legend must be consistent with those in the text.

Color will be used in ESEM where needed (e.g., histology slides). All other figures, such as bar graphs and charts, should be submitted in black and white.

Figures for papers accepted for publication must meet the image resolution requirements. Files for line-based drawings (no grayscale) should ideally be submitted in the format in which they were originally created. If submitting scanned versions, files should be 1200 dots per inch (dpi). Color photos should be submitted at 600 dpi and black-and-white photos at 300 dpi.

Charts and graphs can be submitted in the original form created (e.g., Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Photographs or scanned drawings embedded in Word or PowerPoint are not acceptable for publication.

All photographs of patients or research subjects that disclose their identity must be accompanied by a signed photographic release granting permission for their likeness to be reproduced in the article. If this is not provided, the eyes must be occluded to prevent recognition.

For tables, the system accepts the most common word-processing formats. Tables should have a title that describes the content and purpose of the table. Tables should enhance, not duplicate, information in the text.

  • All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
  • Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
  • For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table.
  • Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption.
  • Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

If figures that have already been published elsewhere are included, permission from the copyright owner(s) must be obtained.

Headings

Please use no more than three levels of displayed headings.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter.

Footnotes

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation and should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively. Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols. Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Supplementary material

Authors are encouraged to include only concise Figures and Tables that directly support the study design and outcome to the main document of the manuscript. All other relevant information should be submitted as supplementary material.

2. Submission Types

2.1 Original research articles

Original research articles are based on primary data collected through a systematic study and can be interventional or observational in nature. Special attention should be given to the description of the methods (i.e., the intervention). Cohort studies may be considered only if the activities of the cohort are described in detail and conclusions are presented. The content of the study should be described concisely in the title of the paper. Research articles must provide an abstract, as well as a summary box presenting the key facts of the paper. Pre-registration for original research is recommended and mandatory for clinical trials. The registration ID should be reported in the manuscript. Authors of randomized clinical trials (RCT) are also asked to follow the CONSORT statement when drafting the manuscript and to upload the CONSORT checklist. In case the work does not comprise a randomized design, modifications to the CONSORT guidelines should be reported. Please consult the CONSORT webpage for further information: http://www.consort-statement.org  Cohort studies should follow the STROBE guidelines and upload the corresponding checklist: https://www.strobe-statement.org/index.php?id=available-checklists

Word limit: 6000 words, excluding abstract, methods, references, and figure legends. Please cite the word count of the manuscript on the title page.

The structure of original articles should be as follows:

Introduction

State clearly the purpose and hypothesis of the study. Provide relevant references. Do not exhaustively review the subject.

Methods

  1. Present subject information
  2. Describe the experimental participants/subjects and their control groups
  3. Insert a statement of “written informed consent” or an animal-use statement and ethics committee approval statement (required) (see “Human & Animal Experimentation Policy Statements”)
  4. Identify the methods, apparatus, and procedures employed with sufficient details to allow others to reproduce the results
  5. Provide references for established methods and statistical procedures
  6. Provide a rationale for use and include a description of possible limitations for utilizing unfamiliar methods
  7. Statistics: Report statistical significance, effect size, and confidence intervals when appropriate and include detailed descriptions of statistical analyses, mathematical derivation, or computer programs as supplemental digital content (SDC).

Authors should justify the adequacy of their sample size in the Methods section by reporting the power calculations for the main statistical test(s). Although there are different approaches that authors may take in performing these calculations, the book by Cohen is recommended as an appropriate starting point [Cohen J. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. 2nd ed. Hillsdale (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 1988. 567 p.].

Results

  1. Present findings of the study in the text, tables, or figures
  2. Do not include data in the text that is also available in tables and figures

Discussion

  1. Emphasize the original and important features of the study and avoid repeating all the data presented in the results section
  2. Incorporate the significance of the findings and the relationship(s) and relevance to published observations

Conclusions

  1. Provide only those conclusions that are supported by the study

2.2 Review Articles

Review articles should follow the detailed guidelines outlined below:

Where possible, reviews should be supported by meta-analytical data. The literature search should have been completed within 12 months of manuscript submission. Manuscripts should follow the PRISMA checklist and each item should be addressed. Authors of unsolicited reviews must submit them directly via the online submission system, following the standard submission procedure. Per ESEM editorial policy, authors are not allowed to include any original data in reviews.

The structure of review articles should be as follows:

Word limit: 8,000 words excluding abstract, references, and figure legends. Please cite the word count of the manuscript on the title page.

Title: Up to 160 characters (including spaces).

Abstract: No more than 275 words; must be non-structured.

References: Up to 100 references.

Structure: Authors should break up their reviews into headed sections.

Figures/Tables: There should be a minimum of two figures, one of which should illustrate the major findings/pathways discussed. There should be a total of no more than 10 figures and tables (combined). The use of explanatory figures in the form of cartoons, flow diagrams, etc. is encouraged. Professional assistance can be provided – please contact the editorial office.

2.3 Letters to the Editor

ESEM welcomes correspondence on content published in ESEM.

Letters to the Editor present preliminary reports of unusual urgency, significance, and interest, whose subjects may be republished in expanded form. Letters to the Editor are a commentary on articles that have been published in ESEM within the previous 6 months.

Letters to the Editor are reviewed prior to acceptance and may be edited for clarity or length. The Editor-in-chief may accept or reject the letter, consult with board members, or send the letter for full peer review.

Word limit: 500 words. (The word count must be cited).

Abstract: Letters to the Editor do not contain an abstract and keywords.

References: Up to 5 references.

Figures/Tables: 1 display item

If the letter is accepted for publication, a copy will be sent to the author of the original article with an invitation to submit a rebuttal that will be published with the letter.

Letter responses will be held to the same length and reference requirements.

2.4 Editorials

Editorials are non-peer-reviewed texts used to introduce the launch of a new journal, a new section, a new Editor-in-Chief, a Special Issue, or an invited editorial. The main text should present a brief introduction of the purpose and aim of the Editorial—to display the new journal, discuss the Special Issue, report on a pressing topic, etc. Editorials should not include unpublished or original data. They must provide a Conflict of Interest statement, if deemed necessary. Editorials composed for the inauguration of new journals may also include a short biography of the Editor-in-Chief.