Revised January 2008
PDF of Information for Authors
| PURPOSE AND SCOPE |
| EDITORIAL POLICIES |
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PROCEDURES FOR SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS | |
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) publishes research reports, commentaries, perspectives, and colloquium papers. In accordance with the guiding principles established by George Ellery Hale in 1914, PNAS publishes brief first announcements of Academy members' and foreign associates' (hereafter referred to as members) more important contributions to research and of work that appears to a member to be of particular importance. PNAS is a general science journal with a broad scientific audience. All papers should be intelligible to this audience.
Feature Articles are in-depth research reports with exceptional breadth and are written at the invitation of the Editorial Board.
Commentaries call attention to papers of particular note and are written at the invitation of the Editorial Board.
Perspectives present a viewpoint on an important area of research and are written at the invitation of the Editorial Board. Perspectives focus on a specific field or subfield within a larger discipline and discuss current advances and future directions. Perspectives are of broad interest for nonspecialists and may add personal insight to a field.
Colloquium Papers are reports of scientific colloquia held under Academy auspices.
Letters are brief online-only comments that contribute to the discussion of a PNAS research article published within the last 3 months. Letters may not include requests to cite the letter writer’s work, accusations of misconduct, or personal comments to an author. Letters are limited to 250 words and no more than five references.
PNAS Submission Guidelines | Journal Policies
The standard mode of transmitting manuscripts is for authors to
submit them directly to PNAS. Authors must recommend three appropriate
Editorial Board members, three NAS members who are
expert in the paper’s scientific area, and five qualified referees. The
Board may choose someone who is or is not on that
list or may reject the paper without further review.
A directory of PNAS member editors and their research interests is
available at http://nrc88.nas.edu/pnas%5Fsearch. The editor may obtain reviews of the paper from at least two qualified referees,
each from a different institution and not from the authors’
institutions. For direct submission papers, the PNAS Office
will invite the referees, secure the reviews, and forward them to
the editor for a decision. The PNAS Office will also
secure any revisions and subsequent reviews.
The name of the editor, who may remain anonymous to the
author until the paper is accepted, will be published in PNAS as
editor of the article. Papers submitted directly are
published as ‘‘Edited by’’ the responsible editor and have an
additional identifying footnote.
Academy members who have told authors they are willing to oversee the review process have 48 hours from the time of submission to alert the PNAS Office to their request. During this period the PNAS Office will contact the member to confirm. Authors should coordinate submission to ensure the member is available. The Board cannot guarantee that the member will be assigned the manuscript or that it will be sent for review.
(i) Articles are considered provided they have not been Published Previously or concurrently submitted for publication elsewhere. Related manuscripts that are in press or submitted elsewhere must be included with your PNAS submission.
Figures or tables that have been published elsewhere must be identified, and permission of the copyright holder for both the print and the online editions of the journal must be provided (see www.pnas.org/misc/permissions_letter.rtf).
(ii) Authorship should be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work. The corresponding author must have obtained permission from all authors for the submission of each version of the paper and for any change in authorship.
All collaborators share some degree of responsibility for any paper they coauthor. Some coauthors have responsibility for the entire paper as an accurate, verifiable report of the research. These include coauthors who are accountable for the integrity of the data reported in the paper, carry out the analysis, write the manuscript, present major findings at conferences, or provide scientific leadership to junior colleagues. Coauthors who make specific, limited contributions to a paper are responsible for their contributions but may have only limited responsibility for other results. While not all coauthors may be familiar with all aspects of the research presented in their paper, all collaborators should have in place an appropriate process for reviewing the accuracy of the reported results.
Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published
work. This information will be published as a footnote to the paper.
Examples of designations include:
An author may list more than one contribution, and more than one author may have
contributed to the same aspect of the work.
(iii) All authors, members, referees, and editors must disclose any association that poses a Conflict of Interest in connection with the manuscript. Authors must acknowledge all funding sources supporting the work. Editors should follow NSF guidelines to avoid conflict of interest between referees and authors (www.nsf.gov/attachments/108276/public/Conflict_of_Interest_Information.pdf). Recent collaborators, defined as people who have coauthored a paper with the author or member within the past 48 months, should be excluded as referees. Please see www.pnas.org/misc/coi.shtml for details.
(iv) A completed form assigning Copyright to the National Academy of Sciences must be submitted to the PNAS office before the paper can be published. This and other forms are available at www.pnas.org.
(v) The Academy may distribute Embargoed copies of an accepted article to the press prior to publication. Embargoes expire at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on the Monday before publication. Authors may talk freely with the press about their work but should coordinate with the PNAS News Office so that reporters are aware of PNAS policy. If you plan on presenting your embargoed paper at a conference prior to publication, please contact the PNAS News Office immediately at 202-334-1310 or PNASnews{at}nas.edu.
(vi) Research involving Human and Animal Subjects must have been approved by the author’s institutional review board. Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments. For experiments involving human subjects, authors must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects. All experiments involving human subjects must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.
(vii) For research using Recombinant DNA, physical and biological containment must conform to National Institutes of Health guidelines or those of a corresponding agency.
(viii) Materials and Data Availability. To allow others to replicate
and build on work published in PNAS, authors must make
materials, data, and associated protocols available to readers.
Authors must disclose upon submission of the manuscript any
restrictions on the availability of materials or information.
Authors must
make Unique Materials (e.g., cloned DNAs; antibodies; bacterial, animal,
or plant cells; viruses; and computer programs) promptly
available on request by qualified researchers for their own use. Failure
to comply will preclude future publication in the journal. It is reasonable
for authors to charge a modest amount to cover the cost of preparing
and
shipping the requested material. Contact pnas{at}nas.edu
if you have difficulty obtaining materials.
Plasmids: Authors are encouraged to deposit plasmid constructs in a public repository such as Addgene (www.addgene.org). Databases: Before publication, authors must deposit large data sets (including microarray data, protein or nucleic acid sequences, and atomic coordinates for macromolecular structures) in an approved database and provide an accession number for inclusion in the published paper. When no public repository exists, authors must provide the data as Supporting Information online or, in special circumstances when this is not possible, on the author’s institutional web site, provided that a copy of the data is provided to PNAS.
Characterization of Chemical Compounds: Authors must provide sufficient information to establish the identity of a new compound and its purity. Sufficient experimental details must be included to allow other researchers to reproduce the synthesis. Characterization data and experimental details must be included either in the text or the Supporting Information.
Protein and Nucleic Acid Sequences: Authors must deposit data in a publicly available database such GenBank/EMBL/DNA Data Bank of Japan or Swiss-Prot.
Structural Studies: Authors of papers describing new structure determinations must submit to the Protein Data Bank at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics or its equivalent all structural data required to validate the discussion, including x-ray amplitudes, structure factor files, and the derived atomic coordinates. For nuclear magnetic resonance structures, data deposited should include resonance assignments and all restraints used in structure determination and the derived atomic coordinates for both an individual structure and a family of acceptable structures. Articles must include literature references for all coordinate data sets as well as data set identification. Authors must agree to release the coordinates when the article is published.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Studies: Authors should deposit data with the fMRI Data Center or other suitable public repositories.
Genomic and Proteomic Studies: Authors of papers that include genomic, proteomic, or other high-throughput data are required to submit their data to the NCBI gene expression and hybridization array data repository (GEO, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo) or equivalent publicly accessible database and must provide the accession number. Access to the information in the database must be available at the time of publication. Submitted data should follow the MIAME checklist (for more information, see www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame_checklist.html).
(ix) Figure Preparation: No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. The grouping or consolidation of images from multiple sources must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure and in the figure legend. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they are applied to the whole image and if they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds. Questions about images raised during image screening will be referred to the editors, who may request the original data from the authors for comparison with the prepared figures. If the original data cannot be produced, the manuscript may be rejected. Cases of deliberate misrepresentation of data will result in rejection of the paper and will be reported to the corresponding author's home institution or funding agency.
(x) Supporting Information: Supporting Information enhances papers in PNAS by providing additional substantive material, but the print version of the paper must stand on its own merits. Supporting Information is reviewed along with the paper and must be approved by the editors and referees. Instead of appearing in the printed version of the journal, Supporting Information is posted on the PNAS web site at the time of publication. Supporting Information is referred to in the text and cannot be altered by authors after acceptance.
Supporting Information may take the form of supplemental figures, tables, datasets, derivations, and videos. Authors should express their interest in their cover letter to include Supporting Information with their paper. In addition, editors may suggest that part of the submitted data could be more suitably presented online only to save journal space and to focus the article.
(xi) PNAS Early Edition: PNAS articles are published daily online before print at www.pnas.org in PNAS Early Edition. Papers may be published online 1 to 4 weeks before they appear in print. Authors who return proofs quickly and keep changes to a minimum get maximum publication speed. A paper in Early Edition is the publication of record. The official publication date is posted with the article online.
(xii) Errata: PNAS publishes corrections for errors, made by the journal or authors, of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall basic results or conclusions of a published article. PNAS publishes retractions for major errors that may call into question the source of the data or the validity of the results and conclusions of an article. Errata are published at the discretion of the editors and appear as formal printed and online notices in the journal.
PROCEDURES FOR SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS
Contact Information
PNAS, 500 Fifth Street, NW, NAS 340, Washington, DC 20001 USA. Phone 1-202-334-2679, fax 1-202-334-2739, e-mail pnas{at}nas.edu.
Courier or express mail: PNAS, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, NAS 340, Washington, DC 20418 USA.
Page charges
PNAS depends, in part, on the payment of page charges
for its operation. Payment of the page charge of $70 per printed page
will be assessed from all authors who have funds available for that purpose.
Authors will be charged for extensive alterations on proofs. Payment of $250 per article will be assessed for Supporting Information.
Authors of research articles may pay a surcharge of $1,200 to make their paper freely available
through the PNAS open access option. If your institution has a Site License,
the open access surcharge is $850. All articles are free online after
6 months. Articles are accepted or rejected for publication and published
solely on the basis of merit.
Payment by authors of the following additional costs is expected: $325 for each color figure or table; $150 for each replacement or deletion of a color figure or table. A single figure is defined as original art that can be processed as a unit and printed on one page without intervening type. Requests for waiver of charges should be submitted to pnas{at}nas.edu.
Prior to submission, authors who believe their manuscripts would benefit from professional editing are encouraged to use a language-editing service (see list at www.pnas.org/misc/language-editing.shtml). PNAS does not take responsibility for or endorse these services, and their use has no bearing on acceptance of a manuscript for publication.
Authors submitting via direct manuscript submission may submit Adobe Acrobat PDFs of their papers at www.PNAScentral.org. Source files are required for all other submissions, including revisions. Members communicating or contributing papers should also submit via the web. If you are unable to submit online, please contact the PNAS Office. Corresponding authors of communicated and contributed papers will be provided a URL for file submission after the member has initiated the process by providing his or her endorsement and copies of the reviews received. Supporting Information may also be submitted online.
Only TIFF, EPS, and high-resolution PDF for Macintosh or PC are allowed for figures that will appear in the print journal. (See Supporting Information below for online-only material.) Color images must be in RGB (red, green, blue) mode. Include the font files for any text. PC or Macintosh versions of Adobe PostScript fonts must be used (no system "bitmap" fonts). Images must be final size, preferably 1 column width (8.7 cm). Figures wider than 1 column should be between 10.5 and 18.0 cm wide. Numbers, letters, and symbols should be no smaller than 6 points (2 mm) and no larger than 12 points (6 mm) after reduction and must be consistent. Composite figures must be preassembled. Figures must be submitted as separate files, not embedded in manuscript text. See www.pnas.org/misc/digitalart.pdf or contact pnasdigart{at}cadmus.com.
Each table should have a brief title, be on a separate page, and be double-spaced.
The print version of the paper must stand on its own without the Supporting Information. Refer to Supporting Information in the manuscript at an appropriate point in the text. Number supporting figures and tables to follow all figures and tables in the main text.
Authors who place detailed materials and methods in Supporting Information must provide sufficient detail in the print edition methods to enable a reader to follow the logic of the procedures and results and also must reference the online methods. If a paper is fundamentally a study of a new method or technique, then the methods must be described completely in the print edition.
Use the following file formats for Supporting Information only:
- Text: Use Word, WordPerfect, or RTF files (PDFs are acceptable for LaTeX files).
- Figures: Provide a brief legend for each figure in a Word, WordPerfect, or RTF file. Provide figure images in JPEG, GIF, or PDF files; do not save figure numbers, legends, or author names as part of the image. File sizes should not exceed 5 MB. Images should not exceed 500 pixels per inch in width or height.
- Tables: Supply Word, Excel, HTML, or PDF files (one table per file). Include the table title and legend in the table file. Do not use tabs or spaces to separate columns in Word or WordPerfect tables.
- Movies: Supply QuickTime-formatted files (with a .mov file name extension) or MPEG files, and submit a brief legend for each movie in a Word, WordPerfect, or RTF file. All movies should be submitted at the desired reproduction size and length. To avoid excessive delays in downloading the files, movies should be no more than 10 MB in size.
As a publisher, PNAS must be able to archive the data essential to a published article.
Where such archiving is not possible, deposition of data in public databases, such as GenBank, ArrayExpress, Protein Data Bank, Unidata, and others outlined in the Information for Authors, is
acceptable.
Only links to web sites that are permanent public repositories, such as self-perpetuating online resources funded by government, academia, and industry, are permitted. Links to an author’s personal web page are not acceptable. The PNAS copyright policy allows authors to post their PNAS paper on their home page after the paper is published in PNAS.
Authors are invited to submit scientifically interesting and visually arresting cover images. To view examples of cover art, please visit the PNAS cover archive at www.pnas.org/coverarchive. Illustrations need not be reprinted in the article but should be representative of the work. Images should be original, and copyright will transfer to PNAS. Include a brief lay-language caption (50-60 words) and credit information (e.g., Photograph courtesy of...). Images should be 21.5 cm wide by 22.5 cm high. Files should be EPS or TIFF and should be in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) color mode. Cover figure files may be submitted online when the paper is submitted or may be sent by e-mail to PNAScovers{at}nas.edu. Send large files on CD-ROM by courier to the PNAS Office or contact PNAS for FTP instructions. Submissions provided outside the online submission system should include manuscript number, author name, phone, and e-mail. Illustrations will not be returned unless requested.
PNAS generally uses a two-column format averaging 67 characters, including spaces, per line. All manuscripts submitted for 2008 publication and beyond must include the full title for each cited article. The character count limit will increase from 47,000 to 49,000, and the page formatting will be modified slightly to accommodate this change. The maximum length of a research article remains six printed pages, including all text, spaces, and the number of characters displaced by figures, tables, and equations. The total number of characters equals:
- The number of characters including spaces in the text (include all parts except tables), plus
- The height in cm of each figure at desired printed size x 180 for a one-column figure or x 360 for a two-column figure, plus
- The height in number of lines of each table x 60 for a one-column table or x 120 for a two-column table, plus
- A 120-character allowance for the space above and below each single column of a figure, table, or equation, plus
- An additional 60 characters for each one-column line of equation.
- A table that has lines with more than 60 characters plus spaces or a figure that is wider than 8.7 cm takes up two columns in width.
Authors will be responsible for additional charges incurred due to shortening overlong papers in proof.
Manuscript Order | Nomenclature and Style | Abbreviations and Symbols
The standard order of sections in the manuscript file is: title page, abstract, introduction, results, discussion, materials and methods, acknowledgments, references, figure legends, and tables. Number all pages starting with the title page as page 1.
Title Page. Include the following information
on this page:
Abstract.
Provide an abstract of no more than 250 words on page 2 of the manuscript.
Abstracts should explain to the general reader the major contributions
of the article. References in the abstract must be cited in full within the abstract itself.
Text. Describe procedures in sufficient detail so that
the work can be repeated. Methods must be presented after Results and Discussion.
Follow the spelling and usage given in Webster's Third New International
Dictionary or the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.
Avoid laboratory jargon. Correct chemical names should be given, and
strains
of organisms should be specified. Trade names should be identified by
an initial capital letter with the remainder of the name lowercase.
Names
of suppliers of uncommon reagents or instruments should
be provided. Use Système International (SI) units and symbols
whenever possible.
Footnotes. Use symbols in the order *, 
,
, §, ¶, 
,
**, ,
,
§§, ¶¶.
Acknowledgments. List acknowledgments and
funding sources.
References. References must be in PNAS style. Only published
or in-press papers and books may be cited in the reference list. Unpublished abstracts
of papers presented at meetings are not permitted. References should be
cited in numerical order as they appear in text. Because tables and figures
will be inserted in the text where first cited, references in these sections
should be numbered accordingly. Manuscripts must include the full title for each cited article. Authors must translate foreign language titles into English, with a notation of the original language. All authors (unless there are more than five)
should be named in the citation. If there are more than five, list the first author's name
followed by et al. Provide inclusive page ranges for journal articles and book chapters. Databases
are cited in the text or as footnotes.
The corresponding
author must be prepared to provide a signed authorization for the citation
of unpublished data and personal communications.
Journal articles are cited as follows:
10. Neuhaus J-M, Sitcher L, Meins F, Jr, Boller
T (1991) A short C-terminal
sequence is necessary and sufficient for the targeting of chitinases
to the plant vacuole. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 88:10362-10366.
For correct abbreviations of journal titles, refer to Chemical Abstracts
Service Source Index (CASSI).
Articles or
chapters in books are cited as follows:
14. Hill AVS (1991) in Molecular Evolution
of the Major Histocompatibility
Complex, eds Klein J, Klein
D (Springer, Heidelberg), pp 403-420.
Figure Legends. Provide these separately from figures. For figures with multiple panels, the first sentence of the legend should be a brief overview of the entire figure.
International standards on nomenclature should be used. For recommended abbreviations and symbols, see www.pnas.org/misc/iforc.shtml#abbreviations.
Table 1.
Standard Abbreviations and Symbols
Table 2. Abbreviations for units of measurement and physical and chemical quantities