Manuscript Composition
Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English and be intelligible to a broad readership. Jargon should be avoided as much as possible and authors are encouraged to propose schemes and figures to convey their views.
Articles should strive to represent fairly all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. Hypotheses, research designs, data, uncertainties and interpretations should be clearly stated and separated from each other. We encourage authors to discuss biases, study limitations and potential confounding factors. The pages of a manuscript or article should be placed in the following order: title page, abstract, table of contents, text, appendices, acknowledgements, references, tables, figures and figure legends. All pages should be numbered consecutively.
Authors are encouraged to prepare and submit their manuscript using LaTeX. To prepare your manuscript in a format compatible with MS WORD 2000 (DOC or RTF), please use the template files example.doc 
or example.rtf and consider the Generic Manuscript Style.
- Title Page: Title (short, informative and without abbreviations), author initials and last names, full institutional addresses of all authors, correspondence email for proofs. Key Words: Authors should suggest appropriate key words for the disciplines covered by the manuscript. A running title of no more than 50 characters including spaces. For anonymous review, the names and affiliations should be removed from the title page and the rest of the manuscript should be duly stripped of any information that could reveal the identity of the authors.
- Abstract (Surveys, Perspectives, Analyses): The abstract (150-300 words) should be intelligible to the general reader without reference to the text. After a brief introduction of the topic, the summary presents the key points of the article and provides future directions where research could focus on in the near future. Reference citations and non-standard abbreviations should not be included in this section.
- Table of Contents (For Surveys and Analyses): The headings of all sections are numbered and the table of contents present the headings and subheadings in the body of the manuscript up to three levels of sectioning, e.g. 3.1.1.
- Methodology (Surveys, Perspectives, Analyses): SAPIENS encourages explicit descriptions of methodology, all the more so in technical disciplines. When applicable, this section should contain sufficient detail so that methodological frameworks and experimental procedures can be understood by non-specialist readers, in conjunction with cited references.
- Statistics: Statistical methods should be described with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, findings should be quantified and presented with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Articles dealing with statistical analyses may receive a statistical review.
- Sections: The headings of all sections, including introduction, results, discussions or summary must be numbered. Three levels of sectioning are allowed, e.g. 3, 3.1 and 3.1.1.
- Footnotes should be avoided as these tend to disrupt the flow of the text. If absolutely necessary, they should be numbered consecutively. Footnotes to tables should be marked by lowercase letters.
- Glossary: To avoid ambiguity and insure an interdisciplinary understanding, a precise and duly referenced definition should be given for concepts central to the paper. The glossary may be fleshed out upon reviewers and editors request. e.g: Quality of Life: the extent to which objective human needs are fulfilled in relation to personal or group perceptions of subjective well-being (Costanza et al, 08).
- Appendices should be labelled with capital letters: Appendix A, Appendix B etc. Equations, figures and tables should be numbered as (A1), Fig B5 or Table C6, respectively.
- Acknowledgements: Personal acknowledgements should precede those of institutions or agencies.
- Figures should be labelled in consecutive Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3,) and submitted as separate files in *.pdf, *.ps, *.eps, *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, or *.gif format with a resolution of not less than 150-300 dpi. Composite figures containing multiple panels must be collected into one file before submission. Photographs and images must be saved in *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, or *.gif format, ideally converted into high-quality *.pdf, with a resolution of not less than 150-300 dpi. Visual cues should appear on the figure itself, rather than verbal explanations in the legend (e.g. "dashed line" or "open green circles").
- Figure Legends: Each illustration should have a concise but descriptive legend. All symbols and abbreviations used in the figure must be defined, unless they are common abbreviations or have already been defined in the text. Figure legends should be included in the text file and not in the figure files.
- Tables should appear on separate sheets after the references and numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals. Tables should be self-explanatory and include a brief descriptive title. Horizontal lines should normally only appear above and below the table, and as a separator between the head and the main body of the table. Vertical lines must be avoided.
- Supplementary Material: Authors have the opportunity to submit supplementary material with their manuscript such as data sets, movies, animations, etc. These files will be published online along with the article as *.zip archive (or single *.pdf file).
References
Works accepted for publication or published already should be listed alphabetically at the end of the paper under the first author's name. Works "submitted to" or "in preparation" or "in review" or only available as preprint should not be included in the reference list; they must be listed in a footnote directly in the text.
Please supply the full author list with last name and initial(s). After the list of authors the complete reference title has to be named. Thereby, journal names are abbreviated according to the ISI Journal Title Abbreviations Index 
, followed by the volume number, the complete page numbers (first and last page) and the publication year. If the abbreviation of a journal name is not known, please use the full title. In addition to journal articles, all reference types are summarized together with examples in the Copernicus Publications Reference Types list. Cited websites should be permanently archived using webcitation.org to ensure that the cited material will still be available to readers in the future. Please see an example article and the corresponding entry on webcitation.org.
If there is more than one work by the same author or team of authors, they are listed chronologically, beginning with the oldest. If there is more than one work by the same author or team of authors but in the same year, a, b, c etc. is added to the year both in the text and in the list of references. If there is more than one work by the same first author but by different co-authors, these works are listed alphabetically according to the co-author(s). Within these different teams of authors, the works are then listed chronologically including a, b, c etc. in case of the same year.
Please do not use bold or italic writing in the reference list or in citations in the text. Up to ten key papers can be highlighted from the references. These should appear in red and their importance should be introduced by a short comment.
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Textual and Visual Conventions
- Mathematical Symbols and Equations: In general, mathematical symbols are typeset in italics. The most notable exceptions are function names (e.g. sin, cos), chemical formulas and physical units, which are all typeset with the normal (upright) font. Matrices are printed in bold face, and Vectors in bold face italics. A range of numbers should be specified as "a to b" or "a...b". The expression "a-b" is only acceptable in cases where no confusion with "a minus b" is possible.
- Equations should be numbered sequentially with arabic numerals in parentheses on the right hand side, i.e. (1), (2), etc. If too long, split them accordingly. If there are chemical formulae included, i.e. reactions, please number them (R1), (R2), etc. When using WORD, the equation editor and not the graphic mode should be used under all circumstances.
- Units: The metric system is mandatory and, wherever, possible, SI units should be used (see SI Units and Units accepted for use with SI ).
- Date and Time: 25 July 2007 (dd month yyyy), 15:17:02 (hh:mm:ss). Often it is necessary to specify the time if referring to local time or Universal Time Coordinated. This can be done by adding "LT" or "UTC", respectively.
- Abbreviations and Acronyms: Equations should be referred to by the abbreviation "Eq." and the respective number in parentheses, e.g. "Eq. (14)". However, when the reference comes at the beginning of a sentence, the unabbreviated word "Equation" should be used, e.g.: "Equation (14) is very important for the results. However, Eq. (15) makes it clear that..." The abbreviations "Sect." and "Fig." should be used when they appear in running text followed by a number unless they come at the beginning of a sentence, e.g.: "The results are depicted in Fig. 5. Figure 9 reveals that..." If acronyms or abbreviations are used throughout the article, they should be defined at first occurrence, e.g.: Quality of Life (QoL), National Research Foundation (NRF). If these names or concepts are also mentioned in the abstract, they should be defined there as well.
- Capitalization: In addition to proper nouns, capitalization of the first letter is applied for titles, section headings, figure and table legends but only for the first word. Abbreviations and expressions in the text such as Chap(s)., Fig(s)., Table(s), Eq(s)., Sect(s)., Paper, Theorem, etc. should always be capitalized when used with numbers, e.g., Fig. 3, Table 1, Paper III, Sect 2. The words figure(s), table(s), equation(s), theorem(s) in the text should not be capitalized when used without an accompanying number.
- Non-English Words and Phrases: Foreign words that have not come into general use are italicized. Words, syntagms and abbreviations referenced in the Webster's are not italicized. For example, "et al., cf., e.g., a priori, in situ, bremsstrahlung, eigenvalues", should not be italicized.
- Colour Usage: Use of colour in figures is strongly encouraged to differentiate and group elements in complex illustrations. The colour usage across multiple illustrations should be consistent. Colours may also be used in the text. For quotation for instance, different colours can be used to discriminate between quoted text and authors' personal contribution.
