You’ve done your research – now it’s time to share it with the world!
A manuscript is a written report of a research project. It describes what researchers studied, how they performed research, what they found, and what their data and results mean. Manuscripts are one of the main ways scientists share their research.
Please follow these steps to prepare your manuscript for submission to eiRxiv. To make things easier, we’ve also provided a downloadable submission checklist (link to PDF) and manuscript template (link to PDF).
As a reminder, manuscripts that aren’t on our template or don’t meet our formatting guidelines will not pass prereview.
We have strict requirements regarding your manuscript font, layout, and structure. Please use our manuscript template to ensure you meet all of these requirements:
**The best way to ensure you keep this formatting is to type directly into our template. Don’t copy/paste into it!**
Once you have finalized your manuscript, you will need to convert it to a PDF in order to submit. For more information, see Exporting a Word document to a PDF. Or, if you’re using our Word Document template within Google Docs, How to Download a Google Doc as a PDF.
Your manuscript should begin with a title, your names and schools. This includes:
A short paragraph (150-250 words) that summarizes and highlights the importance of your research. You can include:
Background information to help readers understand your research, including:
Describe and show what you found. Please keep in mind:
Explain what your results mean. You can also interpret your results from different angles:
Note: The discussion should make up a large portion of your manuscript, because it is where you explain your results and what they mean, link them to previous research, and provide ideas for the future.
This section is like a “recipe” for your science, where you clearly describe how you did your experiments so others could repeat and learn from them. Your materials and methods should include:
Unlike a recipe, please do not write a separate list of materials like an “ingredients” section, and do not write your methods as a bulleted or numbered list. Instead, write in full sentences and paragraphs and describe your materials as part of your method. For example, “We measured bean growth by placing seeds in small pots filled with potting soil. Each pot was watered with 10 ml of tap water every day and kept under either red, blue, or green light for two weeks.”
For more on references, see this section.
For more on figures, see this section.
For more on acknowledgements, see this section.
For more on appendices, see this section.
As a scientist, choosing and referencing reliable sources shows everyone:
When any scientist shares their work, any fact they state in their manuscript must be properly cited. In fact, not citing your sources correctly is considered plagiarism and can have serious negative consequences for a scientist’s career.
At eiRxiv and JEI, manuscripts that have not properly cited their sources will be sent back to the authors and – in severe cases – may be rejected. Please review JEI’s Academic Honesty page for more information on when you need to cite sources, how you should cite them, and how to avoid unintentional plagiarism.
Choosing good, trustworthy sources of scientific information provides a solid foundation for your research. If your research is based on faulty or biased information, your conclusions may not be accurate, other scientists may not trust your results, or your work could mislead readers.
Good sources should be:
Scientific journal articles are the best place to find your information, but textbooks, science magazines / news articles, preprints, and encyclopedias can also be useful. We don’t recommend citing Wikipedia, blogs, social media, etc. as sources of scientific information, though they may be able to point you toward other, more scientific resources as you investigate.
The following sites can help you access scientific journal articles:
PubMed: research articles on a variety of subjects, mostly biomedical
PubMed Central: like PubMed, but excludes research articles that have paywalls
Google Scholar: research articles on all scientific topics
Directory of Open Access Journals: additional subject-specific journals that don’t require a subscription.
You should also check with your school or local library to see what services and search engines they provide for scientific resources (e.g. EBSCO, Elsevier, etc.).
After planning, it’s time to do the experiment! You collect data carefully, making sure to accurately document everything you observe. To make sure your data are reliable, you need to repeat your experiment several times. A good rule of thumb is at least 3 trials for each condition (called replicates). More trials are even better if you have time and resources.
Once you have collected your data, you can organize your data into tables or graphs so it’s easier to see patterns or differences. You can also use statistics (link to guide) to determine whether your results happened by chance, or because you’re observing a consistent pattern.
Once you analyze your data, you can think about what your results mean. You can ask yourself questions like: Did the results match what I thought would happen? Did anything surprise me? If your experiment didn’t work as planned, that’s okay! That’s normal in science. What matters most is what you learned from your project. You can suggest ways to improve the experiment or come up with new questions to explore. That’s how professional scientists make discoveries: by learning from both expected and unexpected data. Every experiment is a chance to discover something new, even if the results aren’t what you expected.
Decide who you want to share your research with, and how you want to communicate your idea with them. Sharing your science can take many forms: conversations, presentations, social media, posters, scientific journal articles, preprints, and more!
Figures (graphs or pictures) and tables (grids of numbers) help your readers understand your results by providing visual representations of your research. You can have up to a total of 8 Figures or Tables in your eiRxiv manuscript.
Rather than putting titles on figures and tables, eiRxiv asks authors to instead use captions: a short explanation that goes under your figure. A caption tells your reader what your figure is about so they can understand your results without reading your entire manuscript. Your caption can include:
For full details on how to format your figures and tables, add captions, and reference your figures/tables in your text, please see JEI’s Figure/Table Formatting Guide. We recommend reading this before you create your figures or tables.
This is where you can thank people who helped you with your research project or manuscript.
Who to thank here:
Who Not to thank here:
*Please make sure you get written permission from anyone you name in your acknowledgements to include them before you submit your manuscript. The easiest way to do this is to email them and ask, and then save that email. That way you have a permanent record that they agreed to be in your acknowledgements.
eiRxiv allows appendices (an extra section in your manuscript for supplemental information) on a case-by-case basis.
We do accept the following for appendices:
An appendix is NOT a place to simply add more information to your manuscript, or a way to get around the 10-page limit. If your appendix doesn’t fit the two situations above, you can still submit it, but you must also include a statement explaining to the editors why the material belongs in the appendix instead of in the main text of the manuscript.
We understand this is a very new way of writing for most student authors, with many detailed requirements.
Before you begin writing, we recommend reading JEI’s Common Mistakes guide – it identifies many of the common structural, grammatical, formatting, and content mistakes student authors make. Because eiRxiv preprints do not go through a formal peer review and revision process, you should check for all of these mistakes before you submit your manuscript.
