Instructions for Authors

Bioscience Education is an online, bi-annual electronic journal, owned and published by the UK Centre for Bioscience. The journal welcomes submissions on tertiary-level bioscience education and offers a range of article types.

How to submit manuscripts

Submissions will be accepted at any time. To be considered for publication in the next issue, work must be accepted in final form at least one month prior to the publication dates at the end of June and the end of December.

Authors are required to submit manuscripts electronically via an email to the UK Centre for Bioscience at beej@leeds.ac.uk and this must be accompanied by a completed submission form (filled out online).

Authors should submit the manuscript as a MS-Word document and following the presentation guidelines outlined below. Any photographs should be attached as a separate jpg format file. Paper copies will not be accepted.

Via the submission form, authors are invited to suggest potential reviewers (please include complete email addresses) although the manuscript will initially be sent to a member of the Editorial Board.

On receipt of the manuscript and completed submission form, authors will receive an email acknowledgement and the manuscript will enter the review process.

General

Submitted manuscripts must be original and not have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Submission of an article implies its publication is approved by all authors.

The text should be clear, concise and use grammatical English. Problems caused by poor English usage generally lead to substantial delays in the reviewing and publication process. Arguments should be substantiated with well-reasoned supportive evidence with objectives stated and terms defined. Citations to relevant published work are essential. Any tables and illustrations should be valuable, relevant, visually attractive and convey the information effectively.

UK and not US spelling is used e.g. colour not color; centre not center and [he] practises not practices. Likewise punctuation should follow UK convention.

Numbers in text should follow the following forms: 500, 5000 and 50 000. For decimals use 0.05 (not .05). Spell out numbers under 10 unless used with a unit of measure e.g. three students and 3 mm.

Presentation of the Manuscript

Please consult recent published volumes for examples of format.

The manuscript should include:

1. Cover page

  • Title of the manuscript - concise and informative as titles are often used on information retrieval systems
  • List of authors and their affiliations and contact addresses - where the surname may be ambiguous (e.g. a double name), please indicate this clearly
  • Type of article suggesting the category (e.g. research article, book review, essay, review, etc.) into which the manuscript best fits.
  • Meaningful, non repetitive keywords; no more than five which should be selected from the text of the article.
  • Number of words in the manuscript.
  • Running title (not to exceed 42 characters and spaces).
  • Name of the corresponding author: please give complete postal and email addresses, telephone and fax numbers.

2. Abstract

Page 2 should contain a concise and factual abstract of not more than 200 words summarising the important points made in the manuscript. An abstract is often presented separate from the article so it must be able to stand alone.

3. Manuscript text

On page 3, the text of the paper should begin.

General

A format of introduction, methods, results, discussion and references is encouraged, but other formats may be more appropriate for some topics.

Abbreviations

Define abbreviations that are not standard at their first occurrence in the main text. Journal convention is to use UK not U.K.; USA not U.S.A.

Units, symbols and nomenclature

The International System of units (SI) must be used throughout and all symbols defined. Biological taxonomy and classification nomenclature should follow the recommendations by IOB (1997). Organisms at all levels should be followed by their full Latin names on first occurrence and thereafter the genus may be shortened. For chemical nomenclature, follow the Rules of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Capitalise trade names and give manufacturers' names and addresses.

Tables and figures

Tables and figures should be cited within the text, and are discussed below, but these should not be included within the body of the manuscript as layout requirements often make it necessary to relocate these. An indication of the preferred location for such figures/images is helpful. Note that location of too many graphics and tables within a short space can make it difficult to associate the relevant text close to the item. You may find it helpful to locate your diagrams and tables in your own copy to discover any problems with the flow of the content.

Acknowledgment(s)

Sources of financial support and / or affiliations must be acknowledged. This should be as a separate headed section at the end of the manuscript.

Embedded hyperlinks

Hyperlinks pointing to third-party servers should be cited as a web reference; a live hyperlink will usually be included in the references, not within the body of the text in the web version. This is to prevent broken links from appearing in the body of the work.

Reference list

Place the reference list immediately following the manuscript text (on a separate page). The author is responsible for the accuracy of the references. Please check these again if the manuscript is returned for any revisions.

References should be provided using the 'Harvard style' as illustrated in the examples below. References should be cited in the text by name and date and not by number (Jones et al., 1987 or Jones and Weyers, 1989). Use the journal style format et al. in the text where there are more than two authors in a citation.

Only articles published, or in press, should be cited and listed in the Reference section. Please include DOI numbers if these are available. References should contain complete titles and inclusive page numbers and should be listed in alphabetical and date order.

Citations to online web sites are acceptable as reference links: in the text, include the name of the author for the cited web site whenever possible. The citation in the references should include the information given in the exemplars below.

Names of journals should be listed in full. Unpublished results, including personal communications and submitted manuscripts, should be cited as such in parenthesis in the text. If there are no references, explain why no citations are appropriate.

References at the end of the manuscript should be listed alphabetically using the following formats (should the reference type not be listed here then please refer to Anglia Ruskin University's excellent referencing page for the guidance on the necessary information):

Book
Davies, M., Cook, A. and Rushton, B.S. (2007) How to get your kids through university. Accent Press Ltd.

Section in Edited Book
Overton, T. (2003) Key aspects of teaching and learning in experimental sciences and engineering. In A Handbook for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education : enhancing academic practice, eds Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. and Marshall, S., pp255–277. London, UK: Kogan Page

Conference proceedings
Rayne, R.C. and Baggott, G.K. (2004) Computer-based and computer-assisted tests to assess procedural and conceptual knowledge. In Proceedings of the 8th International Computer-Assisted Assessment Conference, 2004, Loughborough University, eds Ashby, M. and Wilson, R., pp. 307–309

Journal paper
Smith, D. (2004) Issues and trends in higher education biology fieldwork. Journal of Biological Education, 39 (1), 6–10

Web site
Cann, A.J. (2007) MicrobiologyBytes. www.microbiologybytes.com/index.html (accessed 27 March 2008)

(Please note that the title of a web page/web site is not necessarily the title which appears at the top of the first page. See explanation. If 'www' is not present in the url then include http:// at the start of the address)

WWW article in Electronic Journal
Todd, P.A. (2007) Experience(s) in creating distance learning texts. Bioscience Education, 10-3 available at www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol10/beej-10-3.aspx (accessed 27 March 2008)
doi:10.3108/beej.10.3

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
DOIs may be used to cite and link to electronic documents. For a given document the assigned DOI should never change. The recognised format is

doi:10.3108/beej.10.1

Newspaper/Magazine
Attwood, R. (2008) LSE puts £2m in teaching to grant parity with research. Times Higher Education, 17 July 2008, p4

Television programme
Yes, Prime Minister. Episode 1: The Ministerial broadcast (1986) [TV programme] BBC,
BBC2, 16 January 1986; 20.30

4. Tables

All tables must be cited in the text of the manuscript. The formatted tables should be contained within the manuscript file but placed one per 'page', in portrait layout using 11pt text and after the Reference List. Table legends normally appear above the table.

5. Graphics

These must be compressed to .GIF (for graphics) or .JPEG (for photographs) for publication online from the original diagrams supplied by the author, or in any common application format e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Graphs and charts (particularly Excel) should be accompanied by the original data if possible as some artwork may need to be re-drawn for layout purposes.

A separate copy of each graphic greater than 1Mb should be sent in an uncompressed file format e.g. TIFF, BMP, PNG, PSD, etc. if possible: note that such uncompressed graphics can be compressed as a zip archive for email purposes. Web presentation requires alternative 'ALT text' for the accessibility requirements of visually impaired for graphics and this will be based on the figure legend if this is not supplied by the author.

Photographs must be of good quality. If possible they should be reproducible in black and white. The insertion of a scale is preferable to a statement of magnification in the caption. Figures and illustrations should be produced to a resolution of at least 300dpi at 10 cm x 10 cm.

Authors are encouraged to take advantage of the online nature of Bioscience Education in the potential for use of video, audio, databases, images, animations and other electronic resources, subject to copyright limitations, that can be incorporated or provided as supporting appendices.

6. Figure legends

Figure legends should be placed at the end of the text file, on a separate page and should indicate the associated file names.

7. Authorisation

Permission for the use of non-original graphics must be obtained by the authors (see copyright declaration.)

A document template for Bioscience Education e-Journal articles is available illustrating the preferred styles with additional tips on layout in its text.

Reviews of books, educational software and web sites

Reviews should be a concise, critical overview of an educational resource and represent the reviewer's personal opinion. All reviews will be subject to editorial review process.

Book reviews

Book reviews should include the complete book title, publisher information, author details, ISBN number and, if possible, the retail price. The reviewer should suggest an informative title for the review.

Software and web site reviews

Such reviews should include the resource title and, where appropriate, developer/producer, version, URL, and the retail price. The reviewer should suggest an informative title for the review.

Sources of Information

IOB (1997) Biological Nomenclature: recommendations on terms, units and symbols. London, UK: The Institute of Biology content

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