Author Guidelines

Submission guidelines: no word limits are defined for the main text (excluding title, authors, abstract, references and figure legends) of reviews, articles and registered reports.

Commentary: 2000 words. The review of commentaries will be conducted by the Editorial Board.

Reviews, Articles, Registered Reports: abstract: 250 words.

The manuscripts must be submitted in English (American or British, but not both), in a single ODT, DOCX, RTF or PDF file; preferentially in single column, Times New Roman font, 11.

Articles and Registered Reports

• Title: approximately 140 characters
• Abstract: approximately 250 words, clearly stating the main findings of the study;
• Introduction: clearly stating the main findings of the original study when applicable. For Registered Reports, clearly state the hypothesis to be tested.
• Methods: clear description of the reagents, equipments, apparatus and procedures. For Registered Reports, please estimate and justify the number of biological units.
• Results: inclusion of n (exact/estimated number of cases per group), F, t, df, and p values is mandatory, as well as number of replications (minimum of 2 attempts) of each independent experiment (if necessary add this information to the figure legend), randomization and exclusion criteria. Inclusion of species and strain, age, weight, sex, as well as ethics committee approval (when applicable) is also mandatory for Articles.
• Discussion: clearly comparing the findings with those from the original study.

Upon acceptance, the authors will be instructed to format the manuscript according to the journal’s template.

Figures and tables: not limited but figures should fit half-page each, must be inserted at the end of the first submisstion file, above the respective legend. For the final submission, figures can be uploaded in PDF, TIFF, JPG, SVG or PNG format in high resolution (600 x 600). Illustrations should be accessible to color-blind readers; thus green and red combination should be avoided (we suggest magenta and green instead). We recommend that authors proof the images in “color blind mode” by changing the coloring of the image to simulate common forms of color blindness. In ImageJ software, that can be done in: Image > Color > Dichromacy, or Image > Color > Simulate Color Blindness. In Adobe Photoshop CC 2019, go to View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness. Redundant coding, such as different symbols or textures in addition to the color code, is also appreciated.

Citations: must be numbered as they appear, and references follow the Vancouver style (output styles for Zotero and Endnote).

Data availability: all data/code used in the manuscript must be available in open repositories (we suggest Zenodo or FigShare) and in open format (TSV, CSV, JASP, R or python, for example) from the initial submission under CC-BY 4.0 license.

Conflict of Interest: state all relevant conflict of interests from any of the authors in the manuscript. Inform the names of suggested and outlisted referees in the 'Comments for the Editor' box.

Keywords: add the keywords in the submission system and press 'Enter' to register them.

Pre-registration of attempts and reporting guidelines: we are committed to good practices in the scientific publication, therefore we recommend the pre-registration of attempts in OSF or any other platform. For reporting experiments using animals, we also suggest to authors to follow the ARRIVE guidelines, please find the PDF form here.

Preprints: manuscripts previously deposited as preprints are welcomed to be submitted. Please inform the preprint DOI/reference in the 'Comments for the Editor' box during submission.

Peer review: articles and reviews will be submitted to single-blind peer review by default. However, if the authors request double-blind peer review, please remove or redact the names and affiliations in the submission file, and avoid explicit mentions of previously published material in the main text.

Plagiarism: accepted articles can be checked for plagiarism using Urkund.