ISSN 2386-8228

DOI 10.29094/FiSHMED

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscript files should be sent attached in an e-mail to the editors-in-chief. If files are too big to be sent as attachments, contact that same e-mail address to agree with the editors on other possibilities.

Instructions for authors

Authorship

All authors submitting a manuscript to FiSHMED must agree with manuscript contents and with the submission to this Journal. All authors must have had an active role in the idea, design, analysis, interpretation and/or the drafting of the paper and should have critically reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version submitted for publication. The contribution of each author should be made explicit after the acknowledgements section (e.g. AT – participated on the sampling design and interpretation, as well as in the writing process; PJ – conceived the idea, analysed the data and led the writing). Contributors who do not qualify as authors should be mentioned under Acknowledgments.

General guideline for authorship: Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to (a) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to (b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on (c) final revision of the version to be published. Conditions (a), (b), and (c) must all be met.

Source: International Committee for Medical Journal Editors. 1991. Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. New England Journal of Medicine 324: 424-428. DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199102073240624

Ethical statements

If you use animals for your experiments, please indicate the measures taken to minimize pain or discomfort. If the animals were killed/sacrificed for your work (e.g. biology studies) please indicate the specific procedure to reduce the pain. The competent authority licensing animal capture and handling must be stated in the acknowledgments.

Manuscript types

The authors are free to organize their manuscript as they prefer. For standard research papers, we recommend a classical Introduction / Methods / Results / Discussion organization, but authors can arrange headings and subheadings in any other manner.

We also encourage the submission of works departing in any form from the standard research papers, including notes, distribution updates, book reviews, opinion papers (comments on published articles, comments on important event or news, ideas and proposals) in any format that authors would like to give to their work.

Fish pictures and portfolios

  • FiSHPIC, Fish pictures. These publications involve the presentation of a single photograph depicting fish, a fish detail or fish-associated species (e.g. parasites). Other themes can be considered if relevant (e.g. a fish habitat, a predation episode on fish). A short text, of not more than 250 words, should describe the photograph and its message. Up to five references, not necessarily cited in the text.
  • FiSHPOR, Fish portfolios. These publications should be collections of 3 to 10 photographs, which make coherent groups for illustrating a common theme (e.g. the fish fauna of an area, species of a taxonomic group, a fish behavior, a conservation issue…). FiSHPORs will include a short introductory text of not more than 400 words. Each photograph will be presented in an independent page, with a legend of not more than 200 words. Up to 10 references.

Both FiSHPICs and FiSHPORs can have an acknowledgements section.

Publishing decisions will be made by the editorial team, with or without external advice. Publishing priority will be given to high-quality photographs (both aesthetically and technically) and to those illustrating an interesting story on fish biodiversity, ecology or conservation.

Manuscript length

Manuscripts should be concise, not including superfluous text, tables or figures. Wordy writing styles should always be avoided. In any case, works should never be longer than 10,000 words (count from the start of the introduction to the end of the acknowledgements). A manuscript will not be sent for review if editors judge it to be longer than it needs to be.

Manuscript language

All manuscripts must be written in correct English. Manuscript in which English language usage do not allow a simple understanding of what authors want to explain will not be sent to peer review. All authors have the possibility of including an abstract of the paper in a second language chosen by them. The responsibility of the linguistic quality of this second-language abstract will be exclusively of the authors.

Manuscript preparation

Send a full pdf or MS word document. The manuscript text should be double spaced with continuous line numbers and page numbers.

The first page should include:

  • Full title
  • Names of all the authors, mentioning the corresponding author
  • A list of the institutions where the work was carried out, including their addresses
  • An abstract of no more than 250 words
  • A short title (maximum 50 characters, counting spaces)
  • 5 to 7 key-words, arranged in alphabetical order.

The following pages should include, in this order:

  • Main text, with headings and subheadings as decided by authors
  • Acknowledgements
  • Authors’ contributions
  • Reference list
  • Tables, one in each page together with their captions
  • Figures, one in each page together with their legends

Latin names

The full scientific name, including the authority and year correctly noted (i.e. with or without parentheses), should appear for each species at least once in the paper, preferably in a table or at first mention in the main text. In the abstract, simply give the common and Latin names on first citation, and afterwards just one of them (preferably the common name). FiSHMED recommends using the nomenclature of the Catalog of Fishes by Eschmeyer, WN (ed). If other source is used, please cite them in the text. A list of the common names of fishes could be used from Fishbase, or any other reference properly cited and justified.

Units and spelling

British and American English spelling are acceptable, but language usages must be constant within manuscripts. Units of measurement, symbols and abbreviations must be given in metric units. Use dot “.”, never comma “,”, to indicate decimals.

References

Cited references should be listed after the end of the main text and before tables and figures.

Authors are free to choose the citation style, i.e. there are no specific rules to arrange the reference list. The only guideline is that the style of references should be maintained across the whole reference list. This means that features such as journal names (abbreviated or full), the presentation of editors, pages and other information for book chapters, the use of italics or the use of dots and commas in authors’ lists should be coherently maintained in the reference list. A suggested style to be followed by authors is the APA style as provided by Google Scholar, which can be directly pasted in documents (please, check for mistakes and consistency in formats).

When citing works with more than 5 authors list the first three followed by et al. The citation of accepted though not yet published papers (in press) should include a DOI (digital object identifier), if available.

Citation examples:

  • Direct citations. Smith (1997, 1999), Andrew (1998a, 1998b), Coleman & Tauber (2000a), Coleman et al. (1990)
  • Indirect citations. (Smith & Coleman 1997, 1999; Andrew 1998a, 1998b; Coleman et al. 1990)

Tables

Tables should be used to support text statements and clarify important points. Tables must, as far as possible, be self-explanatory.  The tables should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals.  Avoid the use of vertical bars in tables.

Table caption: Provide a short title for each table (5-10 words), followed by a concise but complete explanation of the table content. Do not repeat information in tables and in the main text.

Each table should be presented in an independent page, together with its corresponding caption.

Figures

All graphs, drawings and photographs are considered figures and should be numbered in sequence with Arabic numerals.  Figures should not contain detail that may be lost when reduced in size for printing. Figures, together with their legends, must be easy to understand without references to the main text. Provide a short title for each figure (5-10 words), followed by a concise but complete explanation of the figure content. Instead, present each figure, together with its legend in a separate page.

FiSHMED publishes full-color figures, including photographs and other art-work, at no cost for authors. Please, do not hesitate to use colours for figure preparation (but bear in mind that default settings in MS Excel are objectively ugly). We encourage the submission of photographs and drawings to illustrate your study sites and species.

FiSHMED is an international scientific journal edited by 
the Iberian Society of Ichthyology – SIBIC

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