Submissions

Author Guidelines

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

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


The manuscript must be prepared in accordance with the journal’s Manuscript Template (ITEM I).
A submission must include ITEMS I, II, IV, V, and III only for micrographs, and ORCID links for every author to publicly accessible, complete profiles entered in the List of Contributors in the submission system.

ITEM I - The Manuscript presented in clear, grammatically correct English with accurate spelling and scientific punctuation, formatted strictly in accordance with the journal’s template ABS Manuscript Template
Deviation from the prescribed structure, formatting, or presentation requirements is considered noncompliant and results in immediate rejection.

ITEM II - Cover Letter summarising the submission's contribution to scientific literature
Potential reviewers with email and ORCiD may be included.

ITEM III - TIFF files, only for micrographs

ITEM IV - License Agreement completed by the corresponding author and signed by every coauthor

ITEM V - Research Raw Dataset
The Serbian Biological Society requires authors to share the research raw dataset supporting their findings, thereby enhancing the article's credibility and impact. The dataset should be deposited in a FAIRsharing registry or in an institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose repository, with an open persistent link provided in the paper. Alternatively, the dataset may be submitted with the manuscript and, if published, will be made available by the journal via a persistent link. Exceptions to open data sharing may be granted where data cannot be publicly released for ethical reasons; authors must request an exception at submission and specify the restrictions in the Data Availability Statement. Once patient data has been fully anonymised in accordance with ethical and legal standards, the data must be organised in a clear, well-documented format, and each data point should be traceable to an anonymised subject identifier with sufficient metadata to ensure reproducibility and support accurate analysis and interpretation.
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Details are provided below:

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

PAPER DESCRIPTION
The paper description provides an overview of the work, introduces it, presents it to a reading audience, and motivates readers to engage with it. The paper description is the first contact you have with a potential reader. The manuscript's first page contains the Paper Description in 100 words in 4 bullet points. Abbreviations and acronyms must not be used.

• 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
• Describe specific results, what is new/has not been reported
• Indicate the work’s broader significance and what it adds to the existing body of knowledge

COVER PAGE
Title: must not exceed 200 characters with spaces and must be straightforward, not phrased as a question; avoid abbreviations.
Authors must be listed in the following order: full first name, middle name initials (if applicable), full family name.
Author affiliations: Each author must list an associated department, university, organisational affiliation, address, city, and country.

ORCiD links leading to fully presented profiles, including personal information and institutional affiliation, are mandatory for every author. ORCiDs must only be provided in the 'Contributors' section in the online system.  

Corresponding author: The author must provide an email address. Note that the submitting author is automatically designated as the corresponding author in the submission system.

Preprint, if applicable, please state the following: The preprint version of this article was previously published [name of pre-print server] with this DOI [https://doi.org/….]

ABSTRACT
The abstract is one paragraph, without headings, not exceeding 200 words. It should present the hypothesis, avoiding statements difficult to verify, such as novelty claims. Lay out the study's objectives, experimental approach, major results, and a summary statement.
Keywords: Provide 5 keywords after the abstract.
Abbreviations: Avoid unexplained abbreviations and acronyms in the manuscript title, the abstract, and paper description. The full name must be given on first use in full and only once, with the abbreviation/acronym in parentheses, which should be used consistently thereafter.

INTRODUCTION
The introduction should provide a balanced, concise yet sufficiently informative overview of recent literature relevant to the manuscript's topic, a description of the problem addressed and diverging hypotheses. State the contribution, conclude with the aim of the work and whether it was achieved.

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; a manuscript without a suitable ethics statement will be returned to the authors.
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, present an Institutional Review Board (IRB) statement, identify the committee that approved the experiments and, when applicable, a statement confirming that Informed Consent was obtained from all subjects.
Nomenclature
Scientific names of plant and animal species are written in italics. 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 capitalised but not italicised. For more information, please refer to [http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/frank/kiss/kiss6.htm]
Gene symbols should be italicised; gene names written out in full are not italicised; protein products of loci are not italicised.
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Do not present experimental groups as a bulleted list.
Apply SI Unit rules and style conventions. Adhere to the International System of Units (SI) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) for naming organic and inorganic compounds. 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; there is no hyphen between “P” and “value”. 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, and localities, 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 with subheadings used in the figure legends to clarify relationships. A subheading section should begin by restating the aim and conclude with a summary of the key outcome. Every table/figure must be considered and appropriately analysed. Related findings should be presented in one figure comprised of sub-figures, labelled A, B, C, etc., and described in the legend.

DISCUSSION
The discussion section must not include subheadings. The discussion should provide an interpretation of the results. Avoid overloading this section with excessive (outdated) citations and lengthy reinterpretations of related literature and focus on your findings. 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, state that the authors received no specific funding for this work.
  
  
• Acknowledgements: Support not covered by the authors' contributions or funding sections can be expressed, including administrative and technical support, or donations in kind, such as materials used for experiments.
  
  
• Author contributions: Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work reported. It 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.
  
  
• Conflict of interest disclosure: Describe any potential conflicts of interest.
  
  
• Data availability: The Serbian Biological Society requires that authors render all data supporting their published findings openly available to enhance transparency, credibility, and impact of the scientific work, aligning it with the principle of as open as possible, as closed as necessary. All manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement linking to publicly deposited data. For more information, please read the Research Data Policy. Exceptions to open data sharing may be granted where data cannot be publicly released for legal or ethical reasons; authors must request an exception at submission and specify the restrictions. All exceptions are subject to the journal’s discretion.
  
  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 presented in strict accordance with the journal’s data-formatting instructions and not submitted as partially processed numerical material. A comprehensive data report must be provided, containing complete quantitative values that underpin statistical analyses, full experimental replicate datasets, and associated mathematical calculations, all in a single file. This file should comprise clearly structured tables, beginning with Raw Table S1, each accompanied by an explicit title and caption. Every table must be described and linked via its legend to the corresponding final tables and/or figures in the manuscript. Full sets of experimental replicates must be included as figures, starting with Raw Fig. S1, which should provide essential background information. Every raw table/figure must be clearly labelled, appropriately formatted, and accompanied by legends that make them fully interpretable as standalone items. E.g., Western blots, electrophoretic profiles, and other images (e.g., micrographs) must display entire membranes or profiles, complete with size markers and staining. Gel images must be labelled to indicate 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 analyse all images in the data report.

  NOTE: The Supplementary Material is an optional section that must not be confused with the research dataset (ITEM V), which is subject to separate data-sharing requirements; this section must not contain primary data and replace the dataset. The Supplementary Material section is intended for non-essential supporting content that complements the main article with extended methods, additional figures or tables, maps, validation analyses, and ancillary results. All supplementary material must be embedded at the end of the manuscript.
  
  
• 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 has been fully anonymised in accordance with ethical and legal standards, the data must be organised in a clear, well-documented format. Each data point should be traceable to an anonymised subject identifier, and the dataset must include sufficient metadata to ensure reproducibility and support accurate analysis and interpretation.
  
  

REFERENCES
The inclusion of more than 60 references must be avoided. References are listed at the end of the manuscript and numbered in the order they appear in the text. The journal uses the Vancouver Citation Style outlined in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) sample references available in: Citing Medicine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.TOC&depth=2
Formatting
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 be written as [1-3], etc. Use an En Dash between page numbers “120-130”, not an Em Dash, “120—130." In the text, avoid writing the name(s) of the author(s) followed by the reference number, and 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 not 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.

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DATA – Tables and Figures
The article should not contain more than a combination of 8 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 may be presented under the optional section designated SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL.
Tables and figures must be clearly labelled, appropriately formatted, and accompanied by complete legends so they are fully interpretable as standalone items, without requiring reference to the main text.

Tables
Authors must provide editable tables in Microsoft Word (use the Table function). 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 (abbreviations, group names, treatment names, units of measurement) and the raw dataset. THE DECIMAL MARK IS A DOT (.), NOT A DECIMAL COMMA. Tables should have a clear, self-explanatory title and a description explaining the table. The table title and description must be above the table; below the table is the table caption, which should provide definitions of the abbreviations and information on the applied statistical procedures.

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 labelled A, B, C, etc., it must be presented as ONE COMPLETE FIGURE that contains different plates. The figure should be referred to as “Fig. ...”, numbered consecutively in the order in which they are presented 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 variables in X- and Y-axes comply with the unit format. Ensure font consistency: all label fonts in graphs must be legible, in the same font type and size, depending on the location in the graph. Ensure consistency between the text and abbreviations, group names, treatment names, and measurement units. Figure fonts are in Unicode Times New Roman, 10 pts, single-spaced. Note that 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 contains micrographs labelled A, B, etc., it must be uploaded as one TIFF file per complete figure. Every image must contain clear labels, size indicators, and pointers to major structural compartments. The lettering in the illustrations should allow for size reduction; do not include the figure number, title, or caption in the figure TIFF file.
  
  
• Supplementary Material
  In accordance with COPE principles on research transparency and data availability, the optional Supplementary Material section may include supporting content that complements but is not essential to the main article (e.g. extended methods, additional figures or tables, sensitivity or validation analyses, maps of localities, etc.). All supplementary material must be embedded at the end of the manuscript. This section must not be used to present primary data, results critical to the conclusions, or to circumvent data-sharing obligations, i.e. the Research/Raw Dataset (ITEM V), which is distinct and subject to separate data-availability requirements.

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You may also refer to the Instructions for Authors: Arch.Biol.Sci.Author.Instructions