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

Overview

Microscopie publishes
Research articles, Technical and Instrumental Reports, Reviews, and Editorials.
Brief Reports (max 3500 words including references, and 2 figures/tables) are particularly encouraged.

Each manuscript should be typewritten, double spaced throughout and line-numbered; pages should be in A4 format and numbered.

The manuscript should be divided into: Title page; Abstract; Text; Acknowledgments; References; Tables; Figures; Tables/Figure legends.

The Title page should contain the following information:

  • title of the paper (lowercase);
  • name and surname of author(s);
  • full name and address of the institution(s) where the work was done; 
  • complete address (postal and E-mail address, and phone number) of the corresponding author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed);
  • key words (no more than seven); 
  • authors' contributions, i.e., information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in the study (role of authors and contributors); 
  • disclosure sabout potential conflict of interest.


The Abstract should not exceed 1600 characters, spaces included.

The Text of the Experimental Articles and Brief Reports should be subdivided into: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion (Results and Discussion can be combined). Technical and Instrumental Reports, Reviews and Editorials may freely be organized in sections at the authors’ will.

If abbreviations are used in the text, authors are required to write full name+abbreviation in parentheses [e.g. Multiple Myeloma (MM)] the first time they are used; then only the abbreviations are to be written.
If names of equipment or substances are mentioned in the text, their brand, company names and locations (city and state) should be reported in parentheses in the text.

Acknowledgments must be placed at the end of the text.

Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last names of the first author of each article.
Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses as follows: (Falcieri, 2014), (Cavallini and Biscarini, 2003; Montone et al., 2007). References to personal communications and unpublished data should be incorporated in the text and not be placed in the reference list [Examples: (Wright 2011, unpublished data); (Wright 2011, personal communication)].


Illustrations. Figures and graphs must be submitted as .tif or .jpg files, with the following digital resolution at the final printing size (one column width: 8.5 cm; two column width: 17.5 cm):

  • Color: at least 300 dpi
  • Black and white/grays: at least 600 dpi.

Figures with different panels have to be grouped into a plate, and panels marked with letters;  the figure lettering (letters, arrows or symbols) must be clearly visible. In the micrographs, reference scale bars must be reported.

The legends of Tables and Figures should be informative and concise without duplicating information presented within the body of the text. Remarks such as “see comments in the text” must be avoided.

Permissions
In case extracts (text/figures/tables) from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright holder(s), and credit the source(s) in the article where the extracts were originally published (for example: 'Adapted from Costanzo et al., Microscopie 2017;27:66-71; with permission'). The Editorial Office of Microscopie needs to receive a copy of the written permission before proceeding with publication.


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.

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.