Use only standard abbreviations. Avoid abbreviations in the title of the manuscript. The spelled-out abbreviation followed by the abbreviation in parentheses should be used on first mention unless the abbreviation is a standard unit of measurement. Use abbreviations only for items that are used repeatedly in your manuscript.

Always use SI units. Results in other units may be added in parentheses.

Tables and figures should be commented upon in the text and their position marked at the appropriate point.

Tables should be provided with captions, numbered consecutively and each reproduced on a separate page of the manuscript. The editor, on accepting a paper, may recommend that additional tables containing important backup data too extensive to publish be published on the SMW website. In that event an appropriate statement will be added to the text. Submit such tables for consideration with the paper. Lengthy tables should be included only if absolutely necessary; extensive tables and datasets (e.g. sequencing results) may be archived by SMW as supplementary materials and will be linked to the respective article.

Figures should each be submitted with a legend. Captions should be formulated so as to allow the figure to be understood without reference to the text. All abbreviations employed should be explained in the caption if not already included in the list of abbreviations.

Please group logically related panels into multipanel figures, and adjust the size of each panel such that all graphs are approximately the same size within the same figure. For labels, use sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial) of a uniform and easily readable size. A resolution of at least 300 dpi at publication size is required. Figures exported from screen presentation files (e.g. Powerpoint) are not of sufficient quality. Figures should be prepared in a graphics program (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator). Gimp and Inkscape are acceptable, royalty-free alternatives to commercial graphics programs.

If you have included in your article figures or tables from other publications, you must obtain permission from the rights holder to use them before submission of the manuscript. If you are including figures or tables that have been adapted from published papers, then you are also responsible for obtaining the publisher’s permission to adapt them. Please submit a copy of this permission with your article.

References must be numbered sequentially and inserted in the text with numbers in square brackets (inserted before punctuation). Where more than one reference is cited, they should be separated by a comma. For sequences of consecutive numbers, the first and last number of the sequence should be separated by a hyphen.

References should follow the standards summarized in the NLM's Sample References webpage.