Instructions to Authors
In silico Biology (ISB) is an international journal on
computational molecular biology. Primarily, it is an online journal
which is also issued as a printed version in regular intervals.
Size and arrangement of reviews: There is no size limitation for reviews. However, in case of excessive length, your contribution may be omitted from the paper-printed version unless it is shortened. The arrangement of reviews is exclusively determined by the content. Authors who want to contribute a review are encouraged to contact the Editorial Board at an early stage of preparation.
There is no a priori size limit for full-length articles. However, the length of a paper should appropriately correspond to its content and the reviewing procedure will emphasize this point. The article must be clearly structured. This will be especially important for long manuscripts. Any reasonable structure will be acceptable. However, the following arrangement is recommended: Abstract (mandatory!), Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, References. The sections and subsections of the articles will not be numbered. The Abstract should give a concise overview of the methods applied and the results obtained and should not exceed 250 words. It must be followed by a list of up to 20 keywords which should be sufficiently indicative and specific, i. e. terms like "protein" or "bioinformatics" should not be used and will be removed by the Editor. The Introduction should provide a short review of the state of the art in the pertinent research field and should outline the problem addressed in the manuscript. The Methods section should include all information about the algorithms and programs applied which is required for understanding the results. If newly developed algorithms have to be explained, the mathematical background should be given, the implementation including required hard- and software should be explained, and links to sites where these methods are available should be provided. Also, all experimental methods have to be explained properly. In general, phrases like "as described elsewhere" should be avoided unless the methods are clearly well known or active links to another site can substitute for a more detailed description within the manuscript itself. The Results and the Discussion sections should not be redundant and may be combined.
Short communications should not exceed 2000 words plus one figure and one table. They should present recent research results which are either particularly worth to be published quickly, or which present important details for understanding a problem of general interest; they are not intended as a platform for preliminary results. Short communications should also have an precedent Abstract and Keywords.
In the text body, you have the choice between the numerical and the author-date citation system. In the numerical citation system, the numbers have to be given according to the order in which the citations appear in the text. In the Reference list, the references have to appear accordingly. In the author-date system, if there is only one author, his/her last name has to be given with the year of publication; use initials only if necessary to distinguish between two otherwise identical citations. If there are two authors, give both last names with an "and" between, plus the year of publication. For more than two authors, the last name of the first author should be amended with "et al.", plus the year of publication. See the Citations document for examples. In case of unambiguities, append a lowe-case letter to the publication year (e.g., 2003a). In either case, the references should be given in square brackets, unless the reference is incorporated into a plain sentence; see the Citations document for details. In the Reference list at the end of the manuscript, the consecutively numbered references have to be listed in the order of their appearance in the text, if you chose the numerical citation system. If you chose the author-date system, list the references alphabetically according to the last name of the first author. For the publications with the same first author, list first all references where this author is the only one, followed by those where he/she is the first of two authors, and list all others afterwards. Secondary sorting criteria is the year of publication, tertiary the last name(s) of the co-author(s). In the List of references, the individual items should be presented in the following style: Aronheim, A., Shiran, R., Rosen, A. and Walker, M. D. (1993). Cell-specific expression of helix-loop helix transcription factors encoded by the E2A gene. Nucleic Acids Res. 21, 1601-1606. Lavery, D. L. and Schibler, U. (1994). DBP and related transcription factors of the PAR family. In: Liver Gene Expression, Tronche, F. and Yaniv, M. (eds.), R. G. Landes Company, Austin, pp. 259-275. McKnight, S. L. and Yamamoto, K. R (1992). Transcriptional Regulation. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor. References will be linked to the corresponding PubMed abstracts or other online resources, if available. Providing PMIDs or other URLs of the references by the authors may speed up publication of the article after acceptance. Make sure that all references cited in the text are listed in the Reference list, and that all items in the Reference list are called in the text body!
Manuscripts including tables should be submitted as HTML or MS Word documents. For other formats, please contact the Editor. For recommended styles of writing several frequently used terms, names or acronyms, see the list of standards. Tables should have one concise title, further explanatory details about the contents being left for a footnote to the table. Complex mathematical formulas will be included as image files. Optimally, they are written using the MS formla editor. They can also be provded as pitcture (bitmap, gif, jpg). Authors are kindly asked to take a previous article as template for the appearance of mathematical formulas in ISB. Figures should be submitted individually as original high-resolution picturs (600 dpi) in JPG, GIF, PNG or TIFF format. They must be appropriately named. Do not re-scale and embed them in MS Word or other applications. Use of colored pictures is encouraged, but be aware that later reprint of the article will be in black-and-white only unless you accept the extra fee for color reproduction charged by IOS Press. Formulate the figure legends accordingly. Figure legends should be placed at the location within the text where the corresponding figures should appear in the final layout. They must be self-explanatory, making references to the main text body obsolete.
Insertion of as many active links as reasonable into the manuscript is encouraged. Thus, author's names can be linked to their personal homepages, suppliers of equipment or chemicals to their Web sites, the WWW pages which offer services that may have been used. To avoid loss of information in the later printing process, all URLs should be given explicitly in the text.
Manuscripts have to be prepared in clear and error-free English. Those that cannot be assessed due to poor language quality will be rejected without reviewing. Authors whose first language is other than English are advised to have their manuscript checked by a native English speaker.
Use of the Manuscript Submission Form is strongly encouraged. All information asked for should be filled in. Particularly important is the e-mail address of the corresponding author. If no confirmation of receipt is received within 24 hours, the authors should contact the editorial office again. Alternatively, the manuscript can be sent to the Editor-in-Chief by e-mail (e.wingender[at]bioinf.med.uni-goettingen.de), with all files including any accompanying letter packed in one zip archive. WITH THE SUBMISSION OF A MANUSCRIPT, THE CORRESPONDING AUTHOR ASSURES AND ACCEPTS THE RESPONSIBILITY THAT THIS MANUSCRIPT HAS NOT BEEN PUBLISHED BEFORE AND THAT IT IS NOT UNDER SIMULTANEOUS CONSIDERATION AT ANY OTHER JOURNAL. The corresponding author also assures with the submission the consent of all co-authors.
After submission, the responsible Editor will ask at least two referees for reviewing the manuscript. The reviewing is done in a double-blind manner: the names of the authors will not be known to the referees, reviewers will see an anonymized version of the manuscript. Nevertheless, authors are encouraged to suggest up to four names of experts who will be able to evaluate their contribution. Also, authors may request exclusion of potential referees from the reviewing procedure. The authors will normally be notified about acceptance of their submission within 4 weeks. Although online publishing is a very rapid medium, the bottleneck is still the necessary quality control by peer reviewers by volunteer experts. While this step cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, ISB can, however, assure a rapid online publication after final acceptance of the article.
After acceptance of the manuscript for publication in ISB, the final HTML layout will be arranged by the editorial office. The authors will be provided with a URL where they can check for any errors which may have been introduced during this procedure.
The authors are granted the right to install the html version of their article on one additional server such as that of their home institution for public access, provided the source of original publication (ISB) is mentioned. |
