Submissions

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• I, the submitting author, warrant that I am authorised by any co-authors to submit this version of the manuscript and to be their spokesperson during the review process and beyond.
  
  All authors qualify as authors, as defined in the authorship guidelines, and have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper.
• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it under consideration by another journal (or, if either of the above apply, an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  
  If the manuscript has been published as a preprint, in a different language or in some other shape or form, this should be clearly stated in the cover letter for the Editor to consider.
• All third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission has been obtained from the copyright holder. Authors acknowledge their responsibility to gain all permissions prior to submission.
  
  All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa. References are in accordance with journal style and DOI numbers have been included where available. URLs to online references are provided and ready to click.
• The text is 1,5-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines. Every effort has been made to ensure that the submission is ready for peer review according to the journal's review policy (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).
• In case the manuscript contains tables, these are all cited in the main text and are included within the text document.
• Figures and images are uploaded as supplementary files. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
• The study follows legislation for research ethics with regards to informed consent in the country or countries where it has been conducted. Any research participants have, when relevant for the study, given their informed consent to be part of the study. Information that may risk the research participants’ safety or integrity has been adequately removed.
• If required by legislation in relevant country or countries, the research has been approved by an appropriate ethics committee, with the name of the committee and reference number of approvals included within the submitted file. Otherwise, a statement that ethics approval was not required has been added to the file.
• The corresponding author has submitted an ORCID identifier in their author data and co-authors have also been recommended to provide an ORCID.