INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
Aims and Scope
The American Naturalist is a monthly journal devoted to furthering the objectives of the American Society of Naturalists (ASN): to advance our understanding of evolution, ecology, behavior, and other broad biological disciplines toward the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. Thus, the journal welcomes manuscripts that develop new conceptual syntheses, pose new and significant problems, introduce novel subjects to the readership, or change the way people think about a topic. Manuscripts are evaluated for their interest to the broad international readership of researchers in organismal biology.
Summary of Key Points
The following document provides a lengthy description of both requirements and suggestions for would-be authors to meet our standards and increase their chances of success. Here, we highlight several key points. Details are available from the linked headings.
Data Archiving Checklist: As a condition of publication, all data needed to recreate the results of a paper must be publicly accessible in usable format. We encourage authors to make their data and code available to reviewers upon first submission, and we require it for revisions and resubmissions.
Laboratory and Field Protocols: We encourage authors to archive detailed complete protocols on protocols.io or other archives.
Archiving Code for Analysis and Modelling: We encourage submission of code (e.g., for simulations or data analysis) or Mathematica notebooks, to detail all analytical steps for reproducibility.
Ethics: To qualify for publication, manuscripts must adhere to the highest ethical standards concerning the ethical treatment of animals, permits for sampling, and Institutional Review Board approval for human research, as applicable. Plagiarism and republication of redundant work are not tolerated. Preprints in noncommercial discipline-specific repositories such as BioRxiv are allowed. Data fabrication, alteration, misreporting of results, and theft of ideas or unpublished data are unacceptable, as are other forms of scientific misconduct.
Manuscript Writing Checklist: For initial submission, we require double-spaced text, line numbers, (Author, Year) in-text citations, and email addresses for every author. See Authorship. Methods should be described in sufficient detail before reporting results. We seek to minimize requirements for formatting for initial review, but authors should be aware that reviewers can be exacting when it comes to manuscript preparation (e.g., citation formatting).
Double-Blind Review: Authors are expected to format their manuscripts appropriately for double-blind review to obscure their identities from reviewers. However, authors may opt out and reveal their identities to reviewers. In either case, all author names, affiliations, and email addresses must be entered in Editorial Manager. See Authorship.
Article Types
In the following descriptions, the guidelines for word length, page length, and number of figures and tables are general rules of thumb. Longer manuscripts will be considered. Word limits exclude tables, figure captions, and the literature cited. The American Naturalist's policy is that papers should be as long as they need to be to make their case concisely and effectively.
All accepted manuscripts have been reviewed by external expert reviewers as well as by members of the editorial board. ASN Addresses and ASN Vice Presidential Symposium papers are reviewed by external expert reviewers, though the review is friendly. Editors may decline papers without external review if the paper seems unlikely to succeed or clearly outside of the Aims and Scope of the journal.
Major Articles contain new data, new theory, and/or new analysis of existing data. Papers proposing a novel method should address how the method advances understanding of a general conceptual issue, illustrate the application of the method to data, and discuss the potential for broader use of the approach. Major articles should be, on average, about 15 print pages long (e.g., about 21 double-spaced pages of text and 6 figures or tables). Additional supporting material can appear in the online edition (see details below). Because each article must stand on its own merits, we do not accept paired articles. Abstracts are no longer than 200 words.
Notes communicate concise points, using either data or theory. Like Major Articles, they present insights of broad general significance and interest. Notes, on average, should be no more than 3000 words of text (not including the literature cited) and have no more than three figures and/or tables in print. Abstracts are no longer than 150 words.
Syntheses and Perspectives analyze a significant body of work in the biological sciences, consolidate it in a way that derives new insights, and suggest future research directions to a broad readership. They should present and summarize recent research, but they are not traditional reviews. Rather, these articles should present a new, forward-looking, and synthetic perspective of a focal research area or question. While these papers are not editorials intended primarily to promote specific theories, methods, or interpretations, thoughtful and analytical perspectives are welcome. Advocacy is acceptable as long as alternative theories or interpretations are presented in a thorough and balanced way. Before writing a piece intended for the Syntheses and Perspectives section, authors should contact the editors via the journal office with a proposal for the article, including a detailed outline and a description of its novel goals and perspective. Interested authors are strongly encouraged to read recently published Syntheses to get a sense of how some authors have successfully achieved the stated goals. Authors of successful proposals will be invited to submit their manuscript, which will then proceed with normal peer review. Syntheses should be no longer than a normal article in the journal. Abstracts are no longer than 200 words.
Natural History Miscellany Notes are short contributions (similar to a Note in length) that enlighten our understanding of the natural history of a species in important ways and, because of their novelty, will be appreciated broadly. They should also have significance beyond the biology of the species by their relevance to important conceptual issues or to our understanding of biological diversity. Authors are encouraged to illustrate manuscripts with online photographs, sound files, videos, and other electronic media. Abstracts are no longer than 150 words. For more insight, see “Natural History Miscellany Explained.”
Historical Perspectives revisit older influential papers, key ideas, or overlooked and underappreciated studies to trace their influence in the history of our field and current status. These articles may focus on specific papers or trace an idea through a series of papers. Ideally, Historical Perspectives should connect older work to current research trends, and thus aim to clarify ideas, questions, or controversies of relevance to researchers today. The American Naturalist will publish a limited number of these articles so it is crucial that authors send a presubmission inquiry to the journal amnat@press.uchicago.edu before writing a planned article. Abstracts are no longer than 200 words.
E-Articles can be any of the above article types whose authors wish to have free color typesetting. They are, in all other respects, identical to papers published in print: they go through the same review process, they appear in the print and online table of contents (with page numbers beginning with an "E," e.g., pp. E7-E13), they are indexed by Medline, Web of Science, and the other abstracting services that index the journal, and they can be downloaded as a typeset PDF file, the appearance of which is indistinguishable from the PDFs of printed papers.
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