Biogeographia – The Journal of Integrative Biogeographybiogeographia.info@gmail.com.

Manuscripts should present original scientific research or reviews on specific topics. All manuscripts should be written concisely and must distinguish introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections, unless clearly justified otherwise. All manuscripts deemed suitable by the editorial board will go through a process of peer review.

Manuscript preparation and submission

When preparing a manuscript for Biogeographia, please follow the instructions on manuscript format provided below. Use SI units, avoid over-use of abbreviations and define all uncommon abbreviations and acronyms within the text. Please keep the text clear and concise, avoiding long, complex sentences and long verbal constructions.

Manuscripts should be submitted in MS Word or other compatible formats. Line numbers must be provided. Figures and tables should be numbered in order of appearance in the text, preferably with the captions embedded within the main text, in the position desired in the final publication. The illustrations should be cited as, e.g., “Table 1”, “Fig. 2”; number figures and tables as 1, 2, etc. and panels within figures as a, b, etc. Provide concise but informative captions for figures and tables, which allow the illustration to be understandable without reference to the main text. Figures may be embedded within the document submitted in a MS PowerPoint file or sent in a common format such as emf, wmf, png for vector graphs and maps, and jpeg, tiff or gif for pictures and drawings. Colour figures and pictures are welcome and incur no charge.

No publication fees

Biogeographia is an online Open Access journal. Publication costs are at the moment totally waived and all publishing costs are sustained by eScholarship and by the Italian Society of Biogeography (SIB).

Manuscript format

Both American and UK English will be accepted provided that the chosen type is used consistently within the article. We prefer the active to the passive voice. Typically, the full length of the text of a manuscript should not exceed 5,000 words, but this limit can be easily exceed for datapapers and reviews.

The first page should provide title, authors and affiliations. The title name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s) should be provided after the title, and must include department, institution, country and postal address, plus e-mail for at least the corresponding author.

The second page should include an abstract andkeywords.

The main text should be divided into Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. An Acknowledgements section could be added after the Discussion and before the References. Important contributions of non-authors should be acknowledged, as well as funding sources, and relevant permit numbers. The contributions of each author to project design, execution, and manuscript preparation could be listed, in a separate paragraph called Author contributions, following the acknowledgements.

Citations within the text should provide the author's name and the year of publication, as in this example: “this is likely (Heaney and Lomolino 2009) but Koch (2010) argued that it is not always true”. When referring to past works the past tense should be used as a standard. References of three or more authors should be cited using “et al.” and avoiding italics: (Roy et al. 2004). Papers by the same author and year should be cited as a, b, c, etc. after the year of publication: (Iverson and Prasad 1998a,b). When citing a list of references, place them in date order and alphabetically when within a year, separated by commas, as follows: (Elton 1927, Iverson and Prasad 1998b, Roy et al. 2004, Vrba and DeGusta 2004, Soberón and Peterson 2005, Davies et al. 2008, Heaney and Lomolino 2009). In general, citations should reflect the frequency, importance, and relevance of the available literature. Unpublished data and works either in preparation or not yet accepted for publication may be cited only within the text, but not in the reference list, as follows: (J.A.F. Diniz-Filho, P. De Marco Jr and L.M. Bini unpublished). Personal communications may be quoted in the text, with permission from the colleague, and should be cited as follows: (J. Soberón, University of Kansas, personal communication). Webpages should be cited as footnotes including their full URL and date of access, except when the resource they host can be cited as a book or article (e.g. a data paper), as follows: “Taxonomic identifications follow Schoolmeesters (2010) and the most recent updates in the Scarabaeinae lifedesk1.” Footnote: “1. http://scarabaeinae.lifedesks.org/, last accessed 30/12/2011.” Different URLs can be included in the same footnote. Footnotes should be numbered by first appearance in the text, and their use for anything other than websites limited.

The reference list should be sorted alphabetically by first author, then by number of authors (one, two, three or more), and then chronologically within each one of these three categories. Multi-authored works with more than 10 authors could list only the first three authors followed by et al. Titles of journals should be given in full. DOI should always be included, when available. References should be formatted following the examples below:

Davies, T.J., Fritz, S.A., Grenyer, R., et al. (2008) Phylogenetic trees and the future of mammalian biodiversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 105, 11556–11563. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0801917105

Elton, C.S. (1927) Animal ecology. Sidwick and Jackson, London.

Roy, K., Jablonski, D. & Valentine, J.W. (2004) Beyond species richness: biogeographic patterns and biodiversity dynamics using other metrics of diversity. In: Frontiers of biogeography – New directions in the geography of nature (ed. by M.V. Lomolino and L.R. Heaney), pp. 151–170. Sinauer Associates, Inc., Sunderland, MA.

Schoolmeesters, P. (2010) Scarabs: World Scarabaeidae database (version Jul 2010). In Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life 2011 Annual Checklist. (ed. by F.A. Bisby, Y.R. Roskov, T. Orrell, D. Nicolson, L. Paglinawan, N. Bailly, P.M. Kirk, T. Bourgoin, G. Baillargeon and D. Ouvrard). Species 2000, Reading, UK. Digital resource available at http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2011/.

Soberón, J. & Peterson, A.T. (2005) Interpretation of models of fundamental ecological niches and species' distribution areas. Biodiversity Informatics, 2, 1–10. DOI: 10.17161/bi.v2i0.4

Articles that are accepted and available online from the publisher as a pre-print should be cited as above, providing the DOI. Articles that are accepted but not yet available online from the publisher as a pre-print should be cited as above but substituting “in press” for the year. Articles that are submitted but not yet accepted should not be cited. All such references will need to be updated to the appropriate format during editing of galley proofs. Any work that is not accepted at the time your study enters the galley proofs stage at Biogeographia must then be referred to only in the body of the text as unpublished material, using all authors’ names and initials (or three authors plus et al. if 5 or more authors).

Illustrations, such as graphs, preferably should be in vector format, or minimum 600 dpi. Pictures or raster images may be sent as tiff or jpeg formats, and preferably at 400 dpi or higher resolution. All figures should be explained fully in the accompanying caption (with legend if needed).

Species binomials:  Species names should be italicised, nomenclature and species authorship should follow the relevant codes for zoology, botany, or procaryotes.

Latin words, such as in situ, should be italicised.

Additional Information

Data access

We encourage, but do not require, authors to make novel datasets publicly and freely accessible, for example as online supplementary documentation or by deposition in a permanent open institutional or public repository. We are working to make a direct link with databases deposited in LifeWatch Italy (www.lifewatch.eu).