Submissions

Author Guidelines

S  U  B  M  I  T  T  I  N  G      A      P  A  P  E  R
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Key points

A submission must include ITEMS I, II, IV, and V. ITEM III is required only for micrographs.

ORCiDs must be provided for all authors.

ITEM I
Authors must adhere to the journal's Manuscript Template WORD document, which provides step-by-step instructions for presenting a scientific paper: Arch.Biol.Sci. Manuscript Template

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

ITEM III
TIFF file per micrograph

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

ITEM V
Data Availability Statement* linking to deposited data
The Serbian Biological Society strongly encourages authors to share research data that support their published findings. Making data openly available enhances the credibility and impact of a manuscript and aligns with our commitment to the principle as open as possible, and as closed as necessary. Exceptions to data openness include sensitive data, confidentiality obligations, security concerns, protection of personal data, and other legitimate constraints. If full open access cannot be granted, authors must provide restricted access to the data to the extent their legal and ethical obligations allow. If the data are not openly available, the statement must explain why. Exceptions will be made at the discretion of the Journal. Please notify the editorial office when submitting your manuscript if you wish to request an exception. If an exception is granted, a Data Availability statement must still be included in the paper specifying what cannot be shared and explaining why.
The Research Data Policy of the Archives of Biological Sciences is available here: About the Journal | Archives of Biological Sciences

*For details, please see the Instructions for Authors below.

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 considered valid only if it is authored by a verified expert and supported by self-citations of original research.
The review must adhere to the Manuscript Template WORD document, with some sections omitted.
The submission must include ITEMS I, II, III (as required), IV, and V. All information presented in tables and figures must be accompanied by appropriate sources cited in corresponding legends.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS [also available here: ABS Instructions for Authors]

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. The Paper Description will also be posted on the journal’s social media.
  The paper description must be written as FOUR bullet points and 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: The title must be straightforward and not exceed 200 characters with spaces. Avoid abbreviations. Avoid a title that is too general or 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 are mandatory for every author and a prerequisite for manuscript consideration. They must lead to fully presented profiles of the researcher. Do not provide ORCiD links on the Cover Page but in the 'Contributors' section of the online system.
Corresponding author:  The author(s), designated as the corresponding author(s) 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.
Preprint (if applicable): Please state that 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 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 disclosure: Authors should describe any potential conflicts of interest.
  
  
• *Data availability statement: The Serbian Biological Society strongly encourages authors to share the research data that support their published findings. Making data openly available enhances the credibility and impact of a manuscript and aligns with our commitment to the principle as open as possible, and as closed as necessary. Exceptions to data openness include sensitive data, confidentiality obligations, security concerns, protection of personal data, and other legitimate constraints. If full open access cannot be granted, authors must provide restricted access to the data to the extent their legal and ethical obligations allow. Authors must include a Data Availability Statement linking to deposited data. If the data is not openly available, the statement must explain why.
  If the data is not available in a publicly accessible repository, a raw dataset must be provided for inclusion in the journal’s online supplementary material. 

Suggested *Data Availability Statements

For data 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 raw dataset:
“The raw data underlying this article are available in the online supplementary material: [persistent link in the article]”

For data that cannot be shared for ethical/privacy reasons:
“The data underlying this article cannot be shared publicly due to [describe why the data cannot be shared, e.g. for the privacy of individuals that participated in the study]. The data will be shared at a reasonable request to the corresponding author.”

For a Review Article when no new data are associated with the article:
“No new data were generated or analyzed supporting this research”.

For more information, please read the Research Data Policy
A research dataset should be deposited in a FAIR-compliant repository—institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose, and a persistent link will be included in the article.
To find a suitable repository, please search the FAIRsharing Databases Registry.

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
Authors can provide graphs as an Excel graphic copied in the manuscript or 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 and patterned horizontally or diagonally 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, check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible.

> 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 and uploaded as TIFF files.
When a complex figure comprises different plates, labeled A, B, etc. (e.g., a composite figure comprised of micrographs), it must also be uploaded as ONE figure file containing the different plates. Every image must contain clear labels: size indicators, pointers to major structural compartments, etc. The lettering in the illustrations should be of sufficient size to allow for size reduction. Do not include the figure number, title, or caption in the figure TIFF file.

• SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

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.

A RESEARCH DATASET should be deposited in a FAIR-compliant repository—institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose, and a persistent link will be included in the paper.
To find a suitable repository, search the FAIRsharing Databases Registry.

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