Submissions

Author Guidelines

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Key points

> An ORCiD record is mandatory for the corresponding author and co-authors and a prerequisite for manuscript consideration. ORCiD links must be entered in the 'Contributors' part of the online submission.

> A submission must include ITEMS I, II, III for micrographs, IV, and V prepared as stated below.

ITEM I
Authors must follow the Manuscript Template WORD document with step-by-step instructions for presenting a scientific manuscript, which is downloaded here: https://www.serbiosoc.org.rs/NewUploads/Uploads/Manuscript.Template.docx

ITEM II
The Serbian Biological Society encourages open scientific exchange, enabling authors to achieve best practices in sharing and archiving research data supporting the central findings of their published study.

The Data Availability Statement* should indicate where the data analyzed or generated during the study can be accessed, either by providing a link to a publicly archived dataset hosted in a recognized public repository or by including a RAW DATASET (ITEM II) that will be accessible via a hyperlink in the published article.
ITEM II should be submitted as a single Word document in which the data, beginning with Raw Table S1/Raw Image S1, are comprehensively labeled and have descriptive legends linking them to the final data.
*
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, reference number]."
For data available in a publicly accessible repository that does not issue DOIs:
"Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: [link/accession number]."
For an archived dataset (ITEM II) that can be accessed via a hyperlink provided by the journal in the published article;
For studies involving human participants (privacy or ethical issues), a dataset must be provided after the data are appropriately anonymized and de-identified to protect participants' privacy:
"The dataset underlying the reported findings is available here: [hyperlink provided by the journal]."

ITEM III
Fig TIFF files per micrographs 

ITEM IV
License Agreement signed by all authors

ITEM V
A Cover Letter relating the study to published work and summarizing its contribution to scientific literature.
Information for potential reviewers with e-mail address, affiliation, ORCiD, and a brief explanation of why the scientists would be good referees may be included.

U N S O L I C I T E D   S C I E N T I F I C   R E V I E W   A R T I C L E

A review is only considered if authored by a verified expert supported by original research, including self-citations. The review must adhere to the Manuscript Template WORD document with some sections omitted. Submission must include ITEMS I, III as required, IV, and V. All sources for tables and figures must be stated in the legends.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS as given in the Manuscript Template

Instructions for authors provided below are also available HERE: https://www.serbiosoc.org.rs/NewUploads/Uploads/Arch.Biol.Sci_Instructions%20for%20Authors.pdf

• PAPER DESCRIPTION - HIGHLIGHTS
  

  The manuscript's FIRST PAGE is the PAPER DESCRIPTION in not more than 100 words.
  The purpose of the paper description is to provide an overview of your work, introduce it, show your interest in it, present it to a reading audience, draw attention to it, and motivate readers to engage with it. The paper description is the first contact you have with a potential reader. When published, the paper description will also be posted on Facebook.
  The paper description must be written as FOUR bullet points presented as focused answers to the questions below. Do not use any unexplained terms - abbreviations, or acronyms.
  
  >  What is already known about the topic of your submission? Avoid statements about 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 your 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. Abbreviations should be avoided. The title must be straightforward; avoid a title that is too general, avoid a title phrased as a question.
Authors must be listed in the following order: first full name, middle name initials (if applicable), and full family name.
Author affiliations: Each author must list an associated department, university, organizational affiliation, address, city, and country. ORCiD links must only be provided in the 'Contributors' part of the online system.
Corresponding author: One 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 that the corresponding author has not submitted will be rejected before the review stage.

• ABSTRACT

The abstract is one paragraph, without headings, and must not exceed 200 words. The abstract should state the hypothesis and avoid statements that a process is poorly understood; do not use words that do not make sense and are difficult to test (novelty claims). Set out the study's aims, the experimental approach, the main results, and the conclusion. The last sentence of the abstract should include a meaningful summary of the study. Unclear 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 uncommon 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 or acronym in parentheses; the acronym should be used consistently.

• INTRODUCTION

The introduction should provide a clear and balanced, concise but sufficiently informative review of selected recent literature relevant to the manuscript topic, a description of the problem addressed in the manuscript and its significance, and controversial and divergent hypotheses if any. State the contribution, and conclude with the goal and whether it has been achieved.
Note that references are numbered in the order in which they appear and are identified by a number or numbers in square brackets: [1], [2,3], [4-6].

• MATERIALS AND METHODS

The section must be divided into appropriate subheadings.
Experimental groups must not be presented as a bulleted list but in one paragraph.
Ethics statement
The ethics statement must be declared under the first subheading of the Materials and Methods section. Any manuscript submitted without a suitable ethics statement will not be considered until an appropriate and explicit statement is presented.
STUDIES INVOLVING ANIMALS (LIVE VERTEBRATES) must be performed strictly with internationally accepted standards and regulations. Authors must refer to the approval from their 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 by local statutory requirements. Authors must present an Institutional Review Board (IRB) statement. Authors must identify the committee approving the experiments and include with their submission a statement confirming that Informed Consent was obtained from all subjects.
Formatting
Scientific notation must be strictly applied.
- 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 second 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, see http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/frank/kiss/kiss6.htm. Gene symbols should be italicized, gene names written out in full are not italicized, and protein products of loci are not italicized.
- Units of measurement format
The International System of Units (SI) rules and style conventions and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) rules for naming organic and inorganic compounds should be followed.
The parts-per notation (e.g. parts-per-million (ppm, 10⁻⁶)) is a set of pseudo-units used to describe small values of various dimensionless quantities such as mole fraction or mass fraction that is not part of the SI system and its meaning is not unique. While the expression of values as ppm can be useful in studies related to environmental monitoring and human health, we generally recommend that SI-compliant expressions are used as an alternative.
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”, and days are written as “days” not “d”.
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 separator is a dot/period (.), 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…”, “...4th group”, etc.).
Information related to the MATERIALS AND METHODS, such as a list of primers, specialized methods, calculations, and maps of sites and localities, must be either incorporated in the appropriate section in the text - not as an inserted table - or presented in the SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL (see below).

• RESULTS

Results should not be combined with discussion in a results and discussion section.
The results section should be divided into subheadings that convey information about the results. We suggest that the subheadings of the results section be reused in the figure legends to provide context.
The results section should begin with a reiteration of the research purpose to help readers focus on the article.
A section should end with a short paragraph summarizing the main findings.
Each table and illustration must be considered and analyzed appropriately.
Related results must be presented in a figure consisting of multiple sub-figures labeled A, B, C, etc., and described under a figure legend.

• DISCUSSION

The discussion should provide an interpretation of the results. It should not be overloaded with excessive citations and lengthy reinterpretations of related literature and data or conclusions for which sufficient experimental evidence is not provided, but focus on the presented findings. Numbered tables or figures mentioned in the results should not be referred to.

• CONCLUSION

This section is optional. The conclusion should include a summary of the presented results and the limitations of the study, it must not be perfunctory, and repetitive. 

• Funding: All funding sources must be fully acknowledged and grant support details provided. If funding was not received, it should be stated that the author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
  
  
• Acknowledgments: You can acknowledge any support not covered by the author’s contribution or funding sections. This may include 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 that specify the contribution of every author. 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: Authors should describe any potential conflicts of interest.
  
  
• Data availability statement: see above 
  
  

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 but 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, and manuscripts that have been submitted but have not yet been accepted. Avoid the use of expressions such as “manuscript submitted”, “unpublished work", as well as “data not shown”. An article submitted to a journal and publicly available as a 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 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, or Zotero to avoid typing mistakes and duplicated references.  If Mendeley is used, copy this URL: https://csl.mendeley.com/styles/90452301/ABS, and paste it into your reference manager to use it.
Include the digital object identifier (DOI) for all references where available.

TABLES and FIGURES

The results presented in tables and figures (and figure legends) are the focal point of a submission and play a critical role in defining its quality.
TABLES AND FIGURES MUST ONLY CONTAIN NOVEL RESEARCH FINDINGS MADE THROUGH YOUR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.

Information supplementing the main content should be presented in the optional SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL section embedded at the end of the manuscript. Information that is auxiliary to the article's main content, such as supplementary information to the materials and methods and results sections such as maps of sites, list of primers, details of methods, explanations of experiments, a flowchart of the experimental setup, calculations, structural formulae of chemical compounds, must be presented under the optional section designated SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL. Every supplemental table and figure must be properly labeled and referenced in the manuscript, starting with Supplementary Table S1/ Supplementary Fig. S1.

A paper should not contain more than 8 DEFINITIVE tables and complete figures.

TABLES
Tables should have a clear, self-explanatory title and a short description or legend, making the table understandable without referring to the text. Provide editable tables written in WORD. Use the table feature of Microsoft Word to create tables. Do not use tabs or spaces to create a table, format tables using Word's table feature. Tables should be black and white; rows and columns should not be shaded. Table fonts are in Unicode Times New Roman, font size 10 pt, single line spacing. A table should have a clear, self-explanatory title and a brief description explaining the table without reference to the text above the table; below the table is the table caption, which must include (i) definitions of abbreviations and (ii) information on the statistical procedures used.

FIGURES
Figures should have a clear, self-explanatory title and a short description or legend, making the figure understandable without referring to the text. Results must be presented concisely. Avoid multiple redundant figure legends. Combine diagrams that share a common legend into a single figure. When a composite figure consists of several panels labeled A, B, C, etc., it must be presented in the manuscript as ONE COMPLETE FIGURE and as ONE TIFF file, containing several panels, rather than as one figure consisting of smaller independent panels. The number of the figure should be referred to in the Word document as "Fig. ..." and numbered in the order in which it is mentioned in the results.

> Figures when they are LINE DRAWINGS
Provide charts as Excel graphics copied into the manuscript or as WORD charts. Charts should not be supplied as graphic files. The data presented in the charts must include error bars. The chart should be 2D in white and black, or bars striped horizontally or diagonally. Ensure the labeling of variables on the X and Y axes in the graphs, and that it conforms to the used unit format. Ensure consistency between the text and details in the figures (abbreviations, group names, treatment names, units of measurement).

> Figures when they are IMAGES or contain images in composite figures
Figure illustrations must be embedded in the manuscript according to the list of figure legends. If a composite figure consists of panels labeled A, B, etc. consisting of micrographs, it must be uploaded as ONE TIFF file.

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Detailed Author Guidelines are also available HERE: https://www.serbiosoc.org.rs/NewUploads/Uploads/Arch.Biol.Sci_Instructions%20for%20Authors.pdf