Manuscript format

Contributions are required of a concise, focused account of the findings and reliable essential data. They should be well organized and written clearly and simply, avoiding exhaustive tables and figures. Authors are advised to use internationally agreed nomenclature, express all measurements in SI units, and quote all the relevant references.

Title: Titles must be limited to no more than 20 words, and should be concise, indexable, and informative for a broad scientific audience. Authors should avoid using colons, questions, nonstandard abbreviations, etc., in titles.

Author(s): Authorship should be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work.

The order of the authors listed should be agreed by all the coauthors, and every author should have the responsibility for the published content.

Family names are written in upper case. The email address of the corresponding author is required.

Author affiliation: The affiliation should be the institution where the work was done. Complete addresses are required with post codes.

Abstract: An abstract is a summary of the content of the manuscript. It should briefly describe the research purpose, method, result and conclusion. The extremely professional terms, special signals, figures, tables, chemical structural formula, and equations should be avoided here, and citation of references is not allowed.

Keywords: A list of three to eight keywords should follow the abstract. The chosen keywords are required to reflect the theme of a manuscript.

Financial support: Financial support appears on the bottom of the title page, with grant number(s) following. The full title of each fund is required.  For example: National Natural Science Foundation of China; National High-Tech Research  & Development Program of China; National Basic Research Program of China.

Text: A paper should begin with a brief introduction of the significance of the author’s research. Nomenclature, signal, and abbreviation should be defined at their initial appearance. All the figures and tables should be numbered in numerical order.

Introduction: Being the most important part of an article, the introduction introduces the relevant research background and the progress in 2 or 3 years, with references cited in numerical order, then presents the problem to be solved in this article, and finally briefly describes the method adopted in this work. Before the end, the aim of the research should be mentioned. Subtitle is forbidden in this part, and introduction of the article structure is considered unnecessary.

Materials and method: This part introduces the materials, method and experimental procedure of the author’s work, so as to allow others to repeat the work published based on this clear description.

Discussion and conclusions: Conclusions should be derived from the observation and experimental results, and comparison with other relevant results is considered helpful to further proving the results. Repeated data should be 

avoided, and conclusions and suggestions are required to be clearly expressed. New hypotheses and recommendations may be proposed when warranted.

Figures and tables: Figures and tables should be numerically numbered, inserted in the text, and cited in order within the text. The figures should have resolution not lower than 600 dpi and clear lines of 5 px, with signals and letters in Times New Roman at8 pt. A space should always be maintained between the variable and the unit.

Equations: An equation is numerically numbered (Arabic numeral), and has the number put on its right side.

Acknowledgements: The author expresses his/her thanks to the people helping with this work, and acknowledges the valuable suggestions from the peer reviewers.

References: Reference citation is regarded as an important indicator of the paper quality. If the relevant references, especially the results published in 2 to 3 years are not cited in the paper, or most citations are from the author’s publications, the editor will consider this paper unattractive. References should be numerically numbered and cited in order within the text, with the numbers expressed in square brackets. The author should carefully check the author names, article title, journal title, year, volume and issue number of references, and create the listing according to the format of Sci China Ser E-Tech Sci.

Reference format

1. For an author’s name, full spelling of family name appears before abbreviation of given name, with a spacing in the middle.

2. If there are more than 3 authors, the first 3 names are followed by et al.

3. The article title should be identified by an initial capital letter with the remainder of the title in lower case.

4. For correct abbreviations of journal titles, refer to ISO, e.g., Chin Sci Bull for Chinese Science Bulletin, Sci China Ser C-Life Sci for Science in China Series C-Life Sciences.

5. For books and proceedings, the initial letter is capitalized for all the notional words and for function words with more than 4 letters.

6. Do not forget to list the editor names of the proceedings, the publisher, the publishing address, and the beginning and terminating pages.

7. Accepted but unpublished papers should be followed by “in press”.

8. Websites or homepages cannot be cited as references.