Guidelines for Authors

Manuscript will be carefully scrutinized for evidence of plagiarism, duplication and data manipulation; in particular, images will be carefully examined for any indication of intentional improper modification.

Any suspected misconduct ends up with a quick rejection and is then reported to the US Office of Research Integrity.

Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission. Professional copyediting can help authors improve the presentation of their work and increase its chances of being taken on by a publisher. In case you feel that your manuscript would benefit from a professional a professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:

The Corresponding Author must submit the manuscript online-only through our Manuscript Submission System.

Authors are kindly invited to suggest potential reviewers (names, affilitations and email addresses) for their manuscript, if they wish.

Manuscript preparation

General obligations for Authors

  • An author's central obligation is to present a concise, accurate account of the research performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance.
  • A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to public sources of information to permit the author's peers to repeat the work.
  • An author should cite those publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work and that will guide the reader quickly to the earlier work that is essential for understanding the present investigation. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, should not be used or reported in the author's work without explicit permission from the investigator with whom the information originated. Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as refereeing manuscripts or grant applications, should be treated similarly.
  • Fragmentation of research papers should be avoided. A scientist who has done extensive work on a system or group of related systems should organize publication so that each paper gives a complete account of a particular aspect of the general study.
  • It is inappropriate for an author to submit manuscripts describing essentially the same research to more than one journal of primary publication.
  • A criticism of a published paper may sometimes be justified; however, in no case is personal criticism considered to be appropriate.
  • To protect the integrity of authorship, only persons who have significantly contributed to the research and paper preparation should be listed as authors. The corresponding author attests to the fact that any others named as authors have seen the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. Deceased persons who meet the criterion for co-authorship should be included, with a footnote reporting date of death. No fictitious names should be listed as authors or co-authors. The author who submits a manuscript for publication accepts the responsibility of having included as co-authors all persons that are appropriate and none that are inappropriate.

Instructions to Authors

The authors are fully responsible for the language of their articles. Those for whom English is not the first language are advised to seek assistance of a native English speaker. Papers not meeting the standards of sound English grammar might not be published. All papers are refereed. Acceptance of papers is the responsibility of the Editor in Chief in consultation with the Editorial Advisory Committee. Manuscripts submitted will be subject to peer review by two reviewers familiar with the relevant field of research, being from a different country or at least from different institution from the author. Only papers of high scientific quality will be accepted for publication. After review process, the Editor-in-Chief will inform the authors of the acceptance, rejection or necessity of revision of the manuscript. Manuscripts are accepted for review only when they report unpublished work that is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Please read and follow these instructions carefully. The Publisher reserves the right to return manuscripts that are not prepared in accordance with these instructions.

SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS BASED ON UNIFORM REQUIREMENTS FOR MANUSCRIPTS (URM).

Licence and permissions

It is a condition of publication that authors grant an exclusive licence to Journal of the Siena Academy of Sciences or Siena Academy of Sciences. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently, and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. In assigning copyright, authors may use their own material in other publications, provided that the journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Journal of the Siena Academy of Sciences is notified in writing and in advance. Work submitted for publication must be original, previously unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. If previously published figures, tables, or parts of text are to be included, the copyright-holder’s permission must have been obtained prior to submission. For more information on how to obtain permissions, please consult Rights and Permissions.

Preparation of the manuscript

General: Papers must be clearly written in English, also in Italian for the Italian section are accepted. In any case abstract and keywords must be necessarily in English. Anyway the manuscript may have the same characteristics: Authors should submit Word or rich-text files (RTF). The text of observational and experimental articles is usually (but not necessarily) divided into the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This so-called “IMRAD” structure is not an arbitrary publication format but rather a direct reflection of the process of scientific discovery. Long articles may need subheadings within some sections (especially Results and Discussion) to clarify their content. Other types of articles, such as case reports, reviews, and editorials, probably need to be formatted differently.

The title page should have the following information:

  1. Article title. Concise titles are easier to read than long, convoluted ones. Authors should include all information in the title that will make electronic retrieval of the article both sensitive and specific.
  2. Authors’ names and institutional affiliations.
  3. The name of the department(s) and institution(s) to which the work should be attributed.
  4. Disclaimers, if any.
  5. Contact information for corresponding authors. The name, mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address of the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript.
  6. Source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these.

References: The Uniform Requirements style for references is based largely on an American National Standards Institute style adapted by the NLM for its databases. Authors should consult a list of examples (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html) for information on its recommended formats for a variety of reference types.
Samples of references:

  • Journal: [1] Smith, M. A.; Casadesus, G.; Joseph, J. A.; Perry, G. Amyloid-β and τ serve antioxidant functions in the aging and Alzheimer brain. Free Radic. Biol. Med. 33:1194-1199; 2002.
  • Book: [2] Sen, C. K.; Packer, L.; Hänninen, O., eds. Handbook of oxidants and antioxidants in exercise. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1999.
  • Chapter in edited book: [3] Zuo, L.; Clanton, T. L. Detection of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species in tissues using redox-sensitive fluorescent probes. In: Sen, C. K.; Packer, L., eds. Redox cell biology and genetics, part A. Methods in enzymology, volume 352. San Diego: Academic Press; 2002: 307-325.
  • Abstract: [4] Freeman, B.; Aslan, M. Tissue oxidation and nitration reactions in a mouse model and humans with sickle cell disease (abstract). Free Radic. Biol. Med. 33:S298; 2002.

Figures: Figures should be supplied in an electronic format at a suitable size for printing with the following resolutions: 600 dots per inch (dpi) for line drawings and combinations; 300 dpi for greyscale and colour. Colour figures must be supplied in CMYK not RGB colours. Please ensure that the prepared electronic image files print at a legible size and are of a high quality for publication. All nonstandard abbreviations should be defined in a footnote. For nonstandard abbreviations only few abbreviations (ATP, NAD, NADH, NADP, NADPH, ANOVA etc.) can be considered.

Proofs: All manuscripts will undergo some editorial modification, so it is important to check proofs carefully. PDF page proofs will be sent via e-mail to the corresponding author for checking. To avoid delays in publication, proofs should be checked and returned within 7 days. Corrections should be returned by annotated PDF, e-mail or fax. Extensive changes to the text may be charged to the author.

Post-production corrections: Corrections are made if the publication record is seriously affected by the academic accuracy of published information. Where these amendments concern peer-reviewed material, the correction will be published as a formal notice (erratum) in a subsequent issue.

Offprints and copies of issue: Corresponding authors also have the opportunity to order free hard copy offprints of their article. Copies of the issue can be purchased by authors at €30,00.

Peer-review policy

All manuscripts submitted to our journal are critically assessed by external and/or in-house experts in accordance with the principles of peer review (http://www.icmje.org/#peer), which is fundamental to the scientific publication process and the dissemination of sound science. Each paper is first assigned by the Editors to an appropriate Associate Editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. The first step of manuscript selection takes place entirely in-house and has two major objectives: i) to establish the article appropriateness for our journals readership; ii) to define the manuscript priority ranking relative to other manuscripts under consideration, since the number of papers that the journal receives is much greater than it can publish. If a manuscript does not receive a sufficiently high priority score to warrant publication, the editors will proceed to a quick rejection. The remaining articles are reviewed by at least two different external referees (second step or classical peer review). Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Uniform Requirements established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (http://www.icmje.org/#prepare).

Authorship and Contributorship
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to: i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data, and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published; and iv) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions. Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading. Authors can find detailed information on the Publisher's web site.

Obligation to Register Clinical Trials 
The ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/faqs/clinical-trials-registration/). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.

Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research
When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. An Informed Consent statement is always required from patients involved in any experiments. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.  Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.