Submissions

Author Guidelines

S  U  B  M  I  T  T  I  N  G      A      S  C  I  E  N  T  I  F  I  C       S  T  U  D  Y

OVERVIEW:
The Research Data Policy of the Archives of Biological Sciences is available here: About the Journal | Archives of Biological Sciences


A submission must include
>   ITEMS I, II, IV, V, and only for micrographs ITEM III  [Files are not to be uploaded as a compressed folder]
>   ORCiD links to complete, publicly accessible author profiles for all authors entered in the Contributors section in the online submission system
Failure to meet the formatting/presentation and completeness requirements results in immediate rejection. 

ITEM I
The Archives of Biological Sciences Manuscript Template is downloaded here: ABS Manuscript Template
Failure to prepare a manuscript in full compliance with the manuscript template will result in immediate rejection.

ITEM II
A Cover Letter relating the study to published work and summarizing its contribution to scientific literature.
Potential reviewers with their email and ORCiD may be included.

ITEM III
TIFF file(s) only for micrographs

ITEM IV
The corresponding author must complete, and all authors must sign the License Agreement

ITEM V
The Data Availability Statement linking to deposited data
The Serbian Biological Society encourages authors to share the research data supporting their published findings. Open data enhances the credibility and impact of a manuscript, reflecting our commitment to the principle of as open as possible, as closed as necessary. Exceptions to open data sharing may include sensitive information, confidentiality obligations, security risks, personal data protection, or other legitimate constraints. If full open access is not possible, authors must provide restricted access to the extent permitted by legal and ethical considerations, with the Data Availability Statement specifying which data cannot be shared and the reasons for this restriction. Requests for exceptions must be submitted at the time of manuscript submission. Exceptions are granted at the journal’s discretion. 

For more details, please refer to the Instructions for Authors below.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS are also available here: ABS Author Instructions

MANUSCRIPT ORGANIZATION
The Manuscript Template Word document, containing step-by-step guidelines for presenting a manuscript in the Archives of Biological Sciences, must be implemented. The Template can be downloaded here: ABS Manuscript Template

PAPER DESCRIPTION
The paper description provides an overview of the work, introduces it, shows your interest in it, presents it to a reading audience, draws attention to it, and motivates readers to engage with it. The paper description is the first contact you have with a potential reader. The paper description will be posted on the journal’s social media.
The manuscript's first page is the Paper Description in 100 words in 4 bullet points. Do not use abbreviations and acronyms in the paper description.

• What is already known about the topic of your submission? Avoid stating how a process is not well understood. Provide the rationale for the research.
• Explain the design, methods, and experimental model employed in the research.
• Describe specific results; what is new in the work that has not already been reported?
• Indicate the work’s broader significance; what does it add to the existing body of knowledge?

COVER PAGE
Title: must not exceed 200 characters with spaces. Avoid abbreviations. The title must be straightforward. Avoid a title that is too general. Avoid manuscript titles phrased as a question.
Authors must be listed in the following order: first name, middle name initials (if applicable), family name.
Author affiliations: Each author must list an associated department, university, organizational affiliation, address, city, and country.

ORCiD links, leading to fully presented profiles including personal information and institutional affiliation, are mandatory for every author and a prerequisite for manuscript consideration. ORCiD must be provided only in the 'Contributors' section in the online system. ORCiD is intended to provide transparency and accountability in scientific publishing, and incomplete or empty profiles undermine the credibility of a submission.

Corresponding author: The author, designated as the corresponding author, must provide an email address that will be published if the article is accepted. The submitting author is automatically designated as the corresponding author in the submission system. A submission must be uploaded by the corresponding author as the primary contact. A paper not submitted by the corresponding author will be rejected before the review stage.
Preprint (if applicable): Please state the following: “The preprint version of this article was previously published on [name of pre-print server] with this DOI: [https://doi.org/….].”

ABSTRACT
The abstract is one paragraph, without headings, and must not exceed 200 words. The abstract should present the hypothesis, avoiding statements that a process is "not well understood", and should not use words that do not add meaning and are difficult to verify (novelty claims). Lay out the study's objectives, the experimental approach, the major results, and the conclusion. The last sentence of the abstract should provide a summary statement of the study. Unexplained abbreviations must be avoided.
Keywords: Five keywords for indexing should be provided after the abstract that will be used for indexing purposes. Keywords that are too general and have multiple concepts should be avoided.
Abbreviations: Avoid abbreviations and acronyms in the manuscript title, abstract, or paper description. The full name must be given on first use and only once in full, with the abbreviation/acronym in parentheses; the acronym should be used consistently thereafter.

INTRODUCTION
The introduction should provide a balanced, concise, and sufficiently informative overview of recent literature relevant to the manuscript's topic, a description of the problem addressed in the manuscript and its significance, and, where appropriate, diverging hypotheses. State the contribution and conclude with the aim of the work, and whether it was achieved.
References are numbered in order of appearance and indicated by a numeral or numerals in square brackets: [1] or [2,3], or [4-6].

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The Materials and Methods section must be divided into appropriate subheadings.
The ethics statement must be declared under the first subheading of the section. Any manuscript submitted without a suitable ethics statement will be returned to the authors and will not be considered further until an appropriate and explicit statement is presented.
Studies involving animals (live vertebrates) must be performed per internationally accepted standards and regulations. Authors must refer to the approval from the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee or equivalent Institutional Ethics Committee.
Studies involving human participants. The authors should confirm that the research was conducted per the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and local statutory requirements. Authors must present an Institutional Review Board (IRB) statement, identify the committee approving the experiments, and include a statement confirming that Informed Consent was obtained from all subjects.
Nomenclature
Scientific names of plant and animal species: A species name is written in italics. It consists of two words: the genus name, which is always capitalized, and the species epithet, which is never capitalized. Once a full scientific name has been used, the genus name may be abbreviated by its first letter. The names of families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms are capitalized but not italicized. For more information, please refer to http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/frank/kiss/kiss6.htm. Gene symbols should be italicized; gene names written out in full are not italicized; protein products of the loci are not italicized.
Experimental groups must not be presented as a bulleted list. Apply SI Unit rules and style conventions. The International System of Units (SI) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) for naming organic and inorganic compounds should be adhered to. Note that the parts-per notation is a pseudo-unit describing small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g., mole fraction or mass fraction. This notation is not part of the SI system, and its meaning is ambiguous. Use a SI-compliant expression as an alternative.
Units of measurement format
The SI prescribes inserting a space between a number and a unit of measurement and between units in compound units, but never between a prefix and a base unit (5.0 cm, not 5.0cm or 5.0 c m. However, temperatures should be written without a space (e.g., 20°C), as should the percent symbol %, which is written without a space (10%, not 10 %) because % is not an SI unit. The liter (liter) should be written using an uppercase “L”. Seconds are written as “s”, not “sec”, hours are written as “h”, not “hrs”, days are written as “days”. Centrifugation: express the acceleration applied to the sample in units of gravity or “×g”, not in rpm. Apply scientific rules for the use of space. The decimal mark is a dot (.), not a decimal comma. Numbers between −1 and +1 require a leading zero (0.01, not .01). The probability value or P is uppercase and not italicized, and there is no hyphen between “P” and “value”. All numbers should be given as numerals (e.g., “in 2 previous studies…”, “...4^th group”, etc.).
Information related to the Materials and Methods section, such as a list of primers, specialized methods, calculations, sites, localities, etc., must be either incorporated in the appropriate section in the text (not as an inserted table) or presented as Supplementary Material (see below).

RESULTS
The results must not be combined in a Results and Discussion section. The results section should be divided into subheadings conveying information about the findings. Use the subheadings of the results section in the figure legends to make the relationship clear. The results and subheading sections should begin by restating the aim. A subheading/section should conclude with a short paragraph summarizing the key outcome. Every table/figure/plate must be considered and appropriately analyzed. Related findings must be presented in one figure comprised of several sub-figures, labeled A, B, C, etc., and described under one figure legend.

DISCUSSION
The discussion section must not include subheadings.
The discussion should provide an interpretation of the results. The discussion section should be written at a high academic level. Authors should avoid overloading this section with excessive citations and lengthy reinterpretations of related literature and must focus on their findings. Avoid over-interpretation of data when sufficient experimental proof is not provided. Do not refer to any numbered tables/figures from the results section. Specific figure mention is allowed when a novel mechanism, model, or hypothesis is discussed and presented in the final figure.

CONCLUSIONS
This section is optional. 

• Funding: All funding sources must be fully acknowledged; provide grant support details. If funding was not received, it should be stated that “The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.”
  
  
• Acknowledgments: Support not covered by the author’s contribution or funding sections can be expressed, including administrative and technical support, or donations in kind (e.g., materials used for experiments).
  
  
• Author contributions: This must include a statement of the different responsibilities, specifying the contribution of every author. A paragraph specifying their contributions must be provided for research articles with several authors. The following statements should be used: Conceptualization, XX, and YY; methodology, XX; software, XX; validation, XX, YY, and ZZ; formal analysis, XX; investigation, XX; resources, XX; data curation, XX; writing - original draft preparation, XX; writing - review and editing, XX; visualization, XX; supervision, XX; project administration, XX; funding acquisition, YY. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work reported.
  
  
• Conflict of interest disclosure: Authors should describe any potential conflicts of interest.
  
  
• Data availability: The Serbian Biological Society strongly encourages authors to render the data supporting their published findings openly available. This practice enhances transparency, credibility, and the impact of scientific work, aligning it with our principle as open as possible, as closed as necessary. Exceptions to open data sharing may include sensitive information, confidentiality obligations, security concerns, personal data protection, or other legitimate constraints. Authors must provide restricted access when allowed by legal and ethical obligations. All manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement that either links to the publicly deposited data or explains why the data cannot be made fully accessible. For more information, please read the Research Data Policy
  
  Suggested data availability statements

• For data available in a publicly accessible repository: "The data presented in this study are openly available in: [repository name (e.g., FigShare), doi, handle or other persistent identifier, reference number]."
  
  
• For a dataset provided as online material: “The data supporting this article are available in the online dataset [persistent link in the article].”
     > Research raw dataset report guidelines
  The dataset must be carefully formatted according to the journal’s Instructions and not submitted as unorganized data. Data reports should include well-structured tables, beginning with Raw Table S1, each titled and captioned. Every table must be described in detail and linked, via a legend, to the corresponding final tables or figures in the main manuscript. Authors must present all quantified numerical data used in statistical analyses and any mathematical derivations that support their results.
  Figures presenting experimental replicates - where representative data are shown in the main manuscript - should be provided starting with Raw Fig. S1. These figures should also include additional essential background information that, while critical to understanding or reproducing the work, would disrupt the flow of the main text. Western blot and electrophoretic images must show the full membranes or profiles, complete with size markers and staining. Gel images must be clearly labeled to indicate the loading order, sample identities, and molecular weight markers; annotations must not obscure background bands, and inappropriate image manipulation is strictly prohibited. Authors must describe the methods used to capture and analyze all images in the data report.
  
  
• For data that cannot be shared for ethical/privacy reasons: "The data underlying this article is available as an online research dataset: [persistent link in the article]
     > Once all patient data have been fully anonymized following ethical and legal standards, the data must be organized in a clear, well-documented format. Each data point should be traceable to an anonymized subject identifier, and the dataset must include sufficient metadata to ensure reproducibility and to support accurate analysis and interpretation.

REFERENCES
The inclusion of more than 60 references must be avoided.
The ABS uses the Vancouver Citation Style outlined in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) sample references. References must be listed at the end of the manuscript and numbered in the order they appear in the text.
Formatting
In the text, citations must be indicated by the reference number in square brackets [...]. The numbers corresponding to references in the REFERENCES section must not be in brackets. More than two references in the numerical sequence should not be written one after another in sequence as [1-3], etc. Use an En Dash between page numbers, “120-130” not an Em Dash, “120—130." Avoid writing the name(s) of the author(s) followed by the reference number. Style the sentence so that only the reference number is stated.
Journal name abbreviations must be those found in NCBI databases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals].
References with more than three authors must not be shortened to “et al.” – all authors must be listed. Do not cite MSc theses, posters presented at scientific meetings, abstracts, unavailable and unpublished data, personal communications, or manuscripts that have been submitted but have not yet been accepted. Avoid the use of expressions such as “manuscript submitted”, “unpublished work", and “data not shown”. When an article is submitted to a journal and publicly available as a pre-print, the pre-print may be cited. References for accepted articles may be included as “in the press”, with the authors, the title of the work, the journal, and the DOI provided in the reference list.
The complete guide to the Vancouver Style is available in this online book: Citing Medicine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.TOC&depth=2
We suggest Mendeley, a free reference manager (www.mendeley.com), or a bibliography software package, such as EndNote, ReferenceManager, Zotero, to avoid typing mistakes and duplicated references. Include the digital object identifier (DOI) for all references where available. If Mendeley is used, copy this URL: https://csl.mendeley.com/styles/90452301/ABS  and paste it into your reference manager to use it.

DATA – Tables and Figures
The article should not contain more than a combination of EIGHT DEFINITIVE tables and/or complete figures.
Tables and figures must only contain novel research findings obtained in the study – new and original discoveries or insights made through your scientific research – the essential contribution of your research. Information auxiliary to the article content must be presented under the optional section designated SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL.

• Tables
  Authors must provide editable tables, written in WORD: use the Microsoft Word Table function to make tables. Format the tables using Word’s Table function; do not use tabs or spaces to create a table. Tables should be black and white, and rows and columns should not be shaded. Table fonts are in Unicode Times New Roman, font size 10 pt, single-spaced. Ensure consistency between the text and the tables (e.g., abbreviations, group names, treatment names, units of measurement, etc.). THE DECIMAL MARK IS A DOT (.), NOT A DECIMAL COMMA.
  Tables should have a clear, self-explanatory TITLE and a short description explaining the table without reference to the text. The table title and description must be above the table. Below the table is the table CAPTION, which should provide (i) definitions of the abbreviations and (ii) information on the applied statistical procedures.
  EACH TABLE MUST BE SEPARATED BY PAGE BREAKS so that only one complete table is presented on one page (unless the table is very long).

• Figures
  Results must be presented concisely. Avoid multiple redundant figure legends. Combine graphs that share a common legend into a single figure. When a composite figure is comprised of different plates labeled A, B, C, etc. (graphs, line drawings, micrographs, electropherograms, images of electrophoretic gels, western blots, etc.), it must be presented as ONE COMPLETE FIGURE that contains different plates, not as a figure comprised of several smaller independent plates. The number of the figure should be referred to in the document as “Fig. ...”, numbered consecutively in the order in which it is referred to in the Results section.

• Figures when line drawings
  Authors can provide graphs as an Excel graphic copied into the manuscript or a Word Chart. These figures should not be supplied as TIFF files.
  Data presented on graphs must include error bars. The graph should be 2D in black and white, or patterned horizontally or diagonally with striped bars as required. Ensure that the labels of the variables in the X- and Y-axes in graphs comply with the unit format described above. Ensure font consistency between the text in the figures: all label fonts in all graphs must be legible and uniformly presented in the same font type and size, depending on the location in the graph. Ensure consistency between the text and details in the figures (abbreviations, group names, treatment names, units of measurement). Figure fonts are in Unicode Times New Roman, font size 10 pts, single-spaced. The decimal mark is a dot (.), not a decimal comma. Do not use faint lines and/or lettering.

• Figures when they are IMAGES or contain images IN COMPOSITE FIGURES
  Image figures must be embedded in the manuscript after the list of figure legends. When a complex figure comprises different plates, labeled A, B, etc. (e.g., a composite figure containing micrographs), it must also be uploaded as ONE figure file containing different plates. Every image must contain clear labels: size indicators, pointers to major structural compartments, etc. The lettering in the illustrations should allow for size reduction. Micrograph(s) - ONLY micrographs - must be submitted as a TIFF file per complete figure. Do not include the figure number, title, or caption in the figure TIFF file.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
The SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL is not to be confused with the ONLINE Research Dataset/Data Report (ITEM V).
Information supplementing the main content should be presented in the optional SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL section embedded at the end of the manuscript. Every supplemental table and figure must be properly labeled and referenced in the manuscript, starting with Supplementary Table S1/Supplementary Fig. S1.

The Research Dataset should be deposited in a FAIR-compliant repository - institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose, with a persistent link in this part of the paper. If you need help finding a suitable repository, search the FAIRsharing Databases Registry.