Doc guidelines

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Review and Perspectives

Nature publishes two kinds of review, Review and Perspective articles.

Most articles are commissioned, but authors wishing to submit an unsolicited Review or Perspective must do so through our online submission system.

The synopsis should outline the basic structure of the article; list the material to be covered with an indication of the proposed depth of coverage; and indicate how the material will be logically arranged.
The synopsis should be accompanied by a 300-500 word outline of the background to the topic which summarizes the progress made to date and should also make the case succinctly for publication in a topical, interdisciplinary journal.
Synopses prepared at this level of detail enable Nature's editors to provide editorial input before they commission the article, and can reduce the need for substantial editorial revisions at a later stage.
The synopsis should include any very recent, key publications in the area.

Perspectives
Perspective articles are intended to provide a forum for authors to discuss models and ideas from a personal viewpoint. They are more forward looking and/or speculative than Reviews and may take a narrower field of view. They may be opinionated but should remain balanced and are intended to stimulate discussion and new experimental approaches.

Perspectives follow the same formatting guidelines as Reviews. Both are peer-reviewed and edited substantially by Nature's editors in consultation with the author.

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Perspectives

Perspective is a format for scholarly reviews and discussions of the primary research literature that do not meet the criteria for a Review-either because the scope is too narrow, or because the author is advocating a controversial position or a speculative hypothesis or discussing work primarily from one group. Perspectives can also accommodate two side-by-side reviews advocating opposite sides of a research controversy. The text should not normally exceed 3,000 words and may be much shorter. As a guideline, Perspectives allow up to 50 references.

The related format Historical Perspective is a more technical account of a particular scientific development. Like other Perspectives, and in contrast to Historical Commentary, Historical Perspectives are scholarly reviews, including citation of key references, aiming to present a balanced account of the historical events, not merely personal opinions or reminiscences.

Perspectives include received/accepted dates and are always peer reviewed.

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• aimed at a large, interdisciplinary audience and places a strong emphasis on the practical value of the work presented.
• the perspective will focus on ML strategies and their applications in basic research of rare diseases (rather than more clinical aspects such as diagnosis and treatment).

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Formatting of Figures:

Figures
Figures should be numbered separately with Arabic numerals in the order of occurrence in the text of the manuscript. One- or two-column format figures are preferred. When appropriate, figures should include error bars. A description of the statistical treatment of error analysis should be included in the figure or scheme legend.

Figure lettering should be in a clear, sans-serif typeface (for example, Helvetica); if possible, the same typeface in approximately the same font size should be used for all figures in a paper. Use symbol font for Greek letters. All display items should be on a white background, and should avoid excessive boxing, unnecessary colour, spurious decorative effects (such as three-dimensional 'skyscraper' histograms) and highly pixelated computer drawings. The vertical axis of histograms should not be truncated to exaggerate small differences. Labelling must be of sufficient size and contrast to be readable, even after appropriate reduction. The thinnest lines in the final figure should be no smaller than one point wide. Reasonable requests to enlarge figures will be considered, but editors will make the final decision on figure size. Authors will see a proof of figures.

Figures divided into parts should be labelled with a lower-case bold a, b, and so on, in the same type size as used elsewhere in the figure. Lettering in figures should be in lower-case type, with only the first letter of each label capitalized. Units should have a single space between the number and the unit, and follow SI nomenclature (for example, ms rather than msec) or the nomenclature common to a particular field. Thousands should be separated by commas (1,000). Unusual units or abbreviations should be spelled out in full or defined in the legend. Scale bars should be used rather than magnification factors, with the length of the bar defined in the legend rather than on the bar itself. In legends, please use visual cues rather than verbal explanations, such as "open red triangles".

Authors are encouraged to consider the needs of colorblind readers (a substantial minority of the male population) when choosing colors for figures. Many colorblind readers cannot interpret visuals that rely on discrimination of green and red, for example. Thus, we ask authors to recolor green-and-red heatmaps, graphs and schematics for which colors are chosen arbitrarily. Recoloring primary data, such as fluorescence or rainbow pseudo-colored images, to color-safe combinations such as green and magenta, turquoise and red, yellow and blue or other accessible color palettes is strongly encouraged.

Unnecessary figures should be avoided: data presented in small tables or histograms, for instance, can generally be stated briefly in the text instead. Figures should not contain more than one panel unless the parts are logically connected; each panel of a multipart figure should be sized so that the whole figure can be reduced by the same amount and reproduced on the printed page at the smallest size at which essential details are visible.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication, we will ask for high-resolution figure files, possibly in a different electronic format. This information will be included in the acceptance letter. See below for details of digital image production and submission.

Figure files should be submitted as web-ready files through Nature Methods online submission system.
With the exception of spreadsheet, audio and video files, please submit the supplementary information as a single combined PDF, if possible. If necessary, we can accept any of these formats:

.txt | Plain ASCII text
.gif | GIF image
.htm, .html | HTML document
.doc, .docx | MS Word document
.jpg | JPEG image
.swf | Flash movie
.xls, .xlsx | MS Excel spreadsheet
.pdf | Adobe Acrobat file
.mov | QuickTime movie
.ppt, .pptx | MS Power Point slide
.wav | Audio file
Compressed Archive File (.zip),
Encapsulated Postcript (.eps),
MPEG animation (.mpg),
PostScript (.ps),
Rich Text Format (.rtf),
Systems Biology Markup Language (.sbml, .xml, .owl),
TAR archive file (.tar),
TIFF image (.tif),
WordPerfect document (.wpd).
File sizes should be as small as possible, with a maximum size of 30 MB, so that they can be downloaded quickly. The combined total size of all files must not exceed 150 MB. The combined total size of all files must not exceed 150 MB. Video files should use a frame size no larger than 320 x 240 pixels.

All panels of a figure or table (for example, Fig. 1a, b and c) should be combined into one file; please do not send as separate files. Image files should be just large enough to view when the screen resolution is set to 640 x 480 pixels. Remember to include a brief title and legend (preferably incorporated into the image file to appear near the image) as part of every electronic figure submitted, and a title as part of every table.

Audio and video files should use a frame size no larger than 320 x 240 pixels. The file size of each should not exceed 30 MB.

Further queries about submission and preparation of supplementary information should be directed to methods@us.nature.com.