Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
- The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
- Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
- The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
- The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
Author Guidelines
Author Guidelines
Manuscript Submission Instructions
General Information
Manuscripts submitted to Tropical Diversity should be original and not being considered for publication elsewhere. Submission should be done in a single file through the website: http://tropicaldiversity.org/. Manuscripts should be submitted in Portuguese, English, or Spanish, and an abstract in English, Portuguese, or Spanish must also be included. We strongly recommend that authors whose native language is not English have their manuscript checked by an English-speaking colleague or professional services prior to submission.
With the exception of invited review papers, submissions must include a Cover Letter containing the basic information and stating that the manuscript is based on previously unpublished original research and has not been submitted to another journal for publication.
When the manuscript concerns the use of animals or specimens in research, a statement to the effect that the author(s) has adhered to the legal requirements
of the country in which the work was carried out or to any institutional guidelines must be included.
Authors are encouraged to provide the names and e-mail addresses of 2-3 possible reviewers.
There are three categories of contributions to Tropical Diversity:
1. Primary research papers, generally comprising up to 25 printed pages (including tables, figures and references).
2. Short research notes, 4-8 printed pages, presenting concise information on timely topics. Abstract (English and Portuguese or Spanish), keywords (English and Portuguese or Spanish), and references are required; the remainder is presented as continuous text.
3. Review articles, covering subjects within the scope of the journal which are of active current interest for general readers. They may be submitted or invited and have no page limits.
Text
The following order must be followed. First page: title (in bold type), authors’ full name, affiliation, postal and email addresses of all authors. All the authors should be identified by a superscript number. Second page: Abstract (in English, Portuguese or Spanish) and keywords. Third and following pages: text of the article (Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References). The following information should accompany all species cited in the text: a) for zoology, author name and the publication date of the original description should be given the first time that species is cited in the article; and b) for botany, only the name of the author who made the description should be given the first time that species is cited in the article.
Abstract
A free format concise abstract (250-300 words) should be supplied, including the following topics: aim, methods, major results, and conclusions. Four to five keywords should be included and should be distinct from those used in the title.
Tables and Figures
Tables and figures should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals (Table 1, 2, 3 etc. and Figure 1, 2, 3, etc.). Tables and figures should be inserted in the text as they are cited. Figures should be in high resolution (300 DPI or more). Photographs and figures in color can be included without charge. All tables and figures should be cited in the text.
Units, Symbols
Use the International System Units (SI), separating the units from the value with a space, except in the case of percentages; use abbreviations whenever possible.
References
Citation from dissertations, theses, undergraduate monographs, technical reports or abstracts for congresses should be avoided as much as possible. For citing references in the text, use the name and year system: for more than two authors use “et al.”; Santos-Silva (2008), (Kricher, 1989); (Darwich et al., 2005). All references cited in the text should be listed alphabetically and in uppercase letters according to the first authors and chronologically according to year of publication.
Examples:
Journal:
Santos-Silva, E.N. 2008. Calanoid of the families Diaptomidae, Pseudodiaptomidae, and Centropagidae from Brasil. Biologia Geral e Experimental 8(1): 3-67.
Book Chapter:
Darwich, A.J., Aprile, F.M. & Robertson, B.A 2005. Variáveis limnológicas: contribuição ao estudo espaço-temporal de águas pretas amazônicas. In: Santos-Silva, E.N., Scudeller, V.V. & Melo, S. (eds.) Biotupé: Meio Físico, Diversidade Biológica e Sociocultural do Baixo Rio Negro, Amazônia Central. Manaus: Editora INPA, pp. 19-33.
Book:
Kricher, J.C. 1989. A Neotropical Companion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
For convenience, we provide here templates to help authors to prepare and submit articles. All articles should be submitted using this template.
Tropical Diversity Article Template English.dotx
Tropical Diversity Modelo de Artigo Portugues.dotx
Tropical Diversity Modelo de Articulo Espanol.dotx
Cover Letter
A cover letter is required for all manuscripts submitted to Tropical Diversity, with the exception of invited review papers.
The cover letter must include:
1) Why the manuscript is suitable for publication in Tropical Diversity, with a short summary of the basic findings of the paper.
2) A statement that the manuscript has not been sent to other journals for consideration at the same time.
3) Two or three possible reviewers, each with the following information: Name of reviewer; Affiliation of the reviewer; Email of the reviewer; Research area of the reviewer.
4) Optionally the cover letter may also include the nomination of the Associate Editor (from Tropical Diversity editorial board).
A template for cover letters is provided here for convenience. All cover letters should be prepared following this template.
Tropical Diversity Cover Letter Template English.dotx
Tropical Diversity Modelo de Carta de Apresentação Portugues.dotx
Tropical Diversity Modelo de Carta de Presentación Español.dotx
Data Archiving
Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. The editors of Tropical Diversity thus require, as a condition for publication, that all data supporting the results in papers published in this journal will be archived in appropriate public archives, such as GenBank, Treebase, Dryad, figshare or another archive of the author's choice that provides comparable access and guarantee of preservation. Authors may elect to have the data made publicly available at time of publication or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period of up to a year after publication.
Reproducible Research
The editors of Tropical Diversity are committed to the concept of reproducible research - the ability to recompute results of scientific experiments and data analyses which is at the very foundation of modern science. This involves not only the scientific paper itself, but also the data and computational environment used to generate the reported results, so that they can be reproduced and used as the basis to create new work. In order to encourage the practice of making research published in this journal reproducible by others, authors are strongly encouraged to: (i) to adopt, for all data analysis and graphics, software tools which are themselves conducive to reproducible research; and (ii) to publish all the source code used in their analysis in public respositories as GitHub, Dryad, or figshare; these can organised around R Markdown source documents or Jupyter notebooks. While considering reproducibility to be a desirable goal, the editors of TD emphasise that the journal policy is to encourage authors to consider this as an opportunity that they may wish to take, rather than as a requirement that is imposed upon them. All submissions to the journal will continue to be reviewed using the normal process; the issue of reproducibility will be considered only when a paper had been accepted for publication on the basis of its scientific merit as judged by our peer-review process.
The editors of Tropical Diversity are committed to the concept of reproducible research - the ability to recompute results of scientific experiments and data analyses which is at the very foundation of modern science. This involves not only the scientific paper itself, but also the data and computational environment used to generate the reported results, so that they can be reproduced and used as the basis to create new work. In order to encourage the practice of making research published in this journal reproducible by others, authors are strongly encouraged to: (i) to adopt, for all data analysis and graphics, software tools which are themselves conducive to reproducible research; and (ii) to publish all the source code used in their analysis in public respositories as GitHub, Dryad, or figshare; these can organised around R Markdown source documents or Jupyter notebooks. While considering reproducibility to be a desirable goal, the editors of TD emphasise that the journal policy is to encourage authors to consider this as an opportunity that they may wish to take, rather than as a requirement that is imposed upon them. All submissions to the journal will continue to be reviewed using the normal process; the issue of reproducibility will be considered only when a paper had been accepted for publication on the basis of its scientific merit as judged by our peer-review process.
Copyright Notice
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. All articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.
Author Fees
Publication in this journal is free of Article Processing Charges and does not impose any costs on the authors.
Privacy Statement
The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.
