General information
Unbiased independent critical evaluation is of essential importance in scholarly publishing, and PAJOLS adheres to the editorial principles of The Company of Biologists and to the guidelines established by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) for publishing impartial and unbiased scientific knowledge.
The rules of confidentiality and conflict of interest are applied
PAJOLS operates a system of cross-referee commenting. The aim of this is to help resolve differences between reviewers, identify unnecessary or unreasonable requests, or – conversely – highlight valid concerns raised by one reviewer but overlooked by others. The editor may also be in touch directly with specific questions that will help him/her to make a decision on the manuscript.
(1) The single most important criterion for publication in PAJOLS is the significant contribution to scientific knowledge. In general, this means that a manuscript should pose and test a significant hypothesis or answer an important question that is relevant in Life Sciences.
(2) The manuscript should be of general importance to the field of Life Sciences and be accessible to scientists with a general biological background.
(3) All Research Articles should be under 7000 words in length (excluding title page, summary, references, and figure captions), with up to 10 display items (figures and tables). If you feel that the manuscript can be reduced in length, please highlight this in your report. Any revisions you suggest should not increase the word count above the maximum limit.
(4) PAJOLS requests that authors limit the amount of supplementary information that they submit with a paper. When assessing supplementary information, please check if all of the data submitted are appropriate and essential for supporting the findings of a paper. We do not accept supplementary text files that contain: Materials and Methods, Results, or Discussions. Such information should be included in the manuscript itself.
Manuscripts receiving conflicting rankings are read by a third reviewer, after which an editorial decision is reached.
Short Communications
Short Communications are short, peer-reviewed articles focusing on a high-quality, hypothesis-driven, self-contained piece of original research and/or the proposal of a new theory or concept based on existing research. They should not be preliminary reports or contain purely incremental data and should be of significance and broad interest to the field of comparative physiology.
Please consider the following when reviewing a Short Communication article:
(1) Is the article of broad interest to the readership of PAJOLS?
(2) Does it make a significant and/or novel contribution to the field?
(3) For articles focusing on original research, is the research of high quality, and does it represent a complete, self-contained ‘publishable unit’, or are additional experiments required?
(4) For articles proposing a new theory, are opinions and facts distinguishable?
(5) Is the manuscript too long? PAJOLS has strict guidelines concerning manuscript length. All Short Communications should be under 2500 words in length (excluding title page, summary, references and figure captions), with up to 3 display items (figures and tables). If you feel that the manuscript can be reduced in length, please highlight this in your report. Any revisions you suggest should not increase the word count above the maximum limit.
Reviews
Reviews in PAJOLS are articles that aim to provide a timely, insightful, and accessible overview of a particular field or aspect of Life Sciences research. Longer Reviews of up to 7000 words (with up to 8 display items) provide a broad overview of a subject by bringing together data from different fields, whereas shorter ones of up to 4500 words (with up to 5 display items) can be more focused on a particular topic. Note that word counts exclude the title page, summary statement, abstract, references and boxes.
Although authors are free to express their opinions in a Review, they are asked to provide counterbalancing viewpoints where appropriate and to ensure that opinion and facts are clearly distinguishable.
There are a number of points that we would like you to keep in mind while considering Reviews:
- Do the title and Abstract clearly reflect the content of the article?
- Is the writing style accessible to a non-specialist reader?
- Are the author’s arguments logically and coherently made, with counterbalancing viewpoints acknowledged and discussed?
- Does the author provide new insight into the topic?
- Is the science (including that presented in figures, tables and boxes) accurately reported?
- Is the article adequately and appropriately referenced?
- Is the article too long? If you feel that the manuscript can be reduced in length, please highlight this in your report. Any revisions you suggest should not increase the word count above the maximum limit.
The Reviews
Editor will perform a detailed edit of the article after peer review. Please note that we may not reject submissions just because of lack of general enthusiasm for an article by a reviewer.We expect our reviewer to clearly specifytheir concerns or objections clearly in their report.