Molecular Life digital image guidelines

Before submitting your manuscript to our journal, please review the following guidelines for creating high-quality figures and images and make sure that yours meet our requirements.

Please, note that if an image has no copyright, you should indicate the precise details of where you obtained it and who gave you permission to use it in our journal. If images come from your colleagues, you will need to seek their written permission and check whether the photographs have been published previously in other books and journals. If you are using line drawings or tables that have been taken/adapted from published papers, then you are responsible for getting the publisher’s permission to re-publish or adapt them. We would then publish such an image with a legend saying something like “Adapted with permission from…[ref]” or “Reproduced with permission of… from … et al [ref]”.

Figures

  • Figures should be submitted as separate files
  • For initial submission, we prefer TIFF or PDF figure formats, but JPEG or EPS files are also accepted. PDF file size should be less than 3 MB
  • For color figures, the resolution should be 300 dpi ???
  • For black and white figures, the resolution should be 500 dpi ???
  • For line-art figures, the resolution should be 1,000 dpi ???
  • Line weights should range from 0.35 to 1.5 pt ???
  • A scale bar, rather than magnification, must be provided for any micrographs.

File types

The preferred file types are TIFF and PDF. TIFF is the recommended file format for grayscale and color images; it supports good compression schemes, ensuring that file sizes are kept to a minimum to aid easy file transfer. EPS and JPEG formats are also acceptable. Other formats should be converted to one of these accepted file types. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Canvas, ChemDraw, CorelDraw, SigmaPlot, and others can save files in PDF format (this option can normally be found under the “Save As” or “Export” commands in the “File” menu).

File sizes for newly submitted or under review manuscripts

For newly submitted or still under review manuscripts, figure files should be kept as small as possible (1–2 MB), so that editors and reviewers can more easily work with them. If your article is accepted for publication, higher-quality production figure files may be requested if necessary.

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