Submission guidelines

Planetary Research strives to make the publication process as painless as possible, not only for our authors, but also for our editors, reviewers, and journal staff. For this reason, the journal performs a rigorous quality control on new manuscripts, and when submissions do not respect the journal's guidelines, they will be declined without review.

Authors should experience few problems if they respect the following requirements:

  1. All manuscripts must be formatted using the journal's docx/odt or latex templates.
  2. Manuscripts must be submitted as PDFs during the peer review process.
  3. Submissions can contain at most two PDF files, one for the manuscript and another for the supplementary materials.
  4. Manuscripts must contain an article summary, abstract, author contributions statement, data and code availability statement, and a competing interests statement.
  5. All authors must have an ORCID iD.
  6. Figures must respect the journal's resolution requirements (see below).
  7. References must be formatted using the style of the American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition.
  8. All references must contain a digital object identifier (or another persistent identifier) when one is available.
  9. All code and datasets must be made available to the reviewers as described in the journal's Open Science policies.

In addition to the above guidelines, authors should be familiar with the following journal policies: Authorship, Code of conduct, Plagiarism, Prior publication and self archiving, and Use of artificial intelligence.

The above requirements must be satisfied at the time of submission, without exception. Additional details are provided in the sections below.

Templates

The journal provides the following manuscript templates:

  • Latex
  • docx / odt

These templates are designed to be used with our automated production tools, and authors should not modify any of the formatting within these files (such as numbering, font size and weight, line spacing, margins, reference style, table formatting, and the order of the article components).

Our custom latex class loads the following packages: geometry, fancyhdr, lineno, authblk, orcidlink, hyperref, setspace, amsmath, and graphicx. If authors require additional classes, we encourage them to contact out technical team to see if they are compatible with our production pipeline.

Article components

Summary

All submissions must contain an article summary that is 350 or fewer characters in length. This short summary will appear before the manuscript abstract and will also appear in the issue's table of contents. Summaries should in general be written in full sentences, though other formats may be considered when they respect the character limit.

Abstract

Abstracts must contain 250 or fewer words. All acronyms used in the abstract must be defined at the time they are first used. Abstracts should not contain paragraph breaks and should avoid citing other work whenever possible.

Figures

Following the acceptance of an article, the journal will ask for original versions of each figure. The journal accepts the following file formats: jpg, png, tiff, pdf, and svg. Each figure should consist of a single file, and if the figure is composed of several components, it is the author's responsibility to combine these into a single file.

Figures must be sized to fit in the PDF version of the manuscript. Images will appear with widths between 10 and 15 cm, and have a maximum permissible height of 22 cm. The minimum permissible dpi (dots per inch) is 150. In terms of pixels, these dimensions correspond to 590-890 × 1300.

Each figure must contain a caption. If the figure was published previously, the original source must be acknowledged. Furthermore, written permission to reuse the figure must be provided to the journal from the copyright holder if the figure is not distributed under a license permitting reuse.

Tables

Each table must contain a caption. The maximum width of a table can not exceed the width of the PDF page: The journal does not support landscape mode for large tables, and the font size used for tables in the manuscript can not be modified.

Author contributions

Each manuscript must contain an Author contributions statement that describes the role of each author in the study. Author roles use the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) as described in the journal's Authorship policies. The manuscript templates list each possible role, and those roles that are not applicable to the study should be removed.

Data and code availability

Each manuscript must contain a Data and code availability statement. This statement should mention all datasets and numerical codes that were used or generated by the study and how they can be accessed (see the journal's Open Science policies). When possible, datasets should be cited and listed in the References section.

Competing Interests

All manuscripts must contain a Competing interests declaration that describes any real or perceived conflicts of interest.

References

References and in-text citations must follow the formatting guidelines of the 7th edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) style guide.

Supplemental materials

Each manuscript may contain at most a single PDF of supplemental materials. This file must be formatted using the journal's template and will not be reformatted by the journal. Supplemental materials may include text, figures, tables, and references. Supplemental references should include only those works that are cited within the supplemental materials. Supplemental references are unlikely to be indexed by citation databases.

Letters

Letters are manuscripts that are formatted in a similar manner to articles, but that have strict restrictions on their length. Letters must contain fewer than 4500 words in the combined abstract, main text, and captions (which excludes the title, authors, author affiliations, acknowledgements, references, and other declarations). Letters may contain a maximum of three figures or tables. In contrast to articles, letters do not contain appendices, but instead include a methods section that follows the main text and that is no more than 3000 words in length (excluding references). Letters may contain a single PDF of supplemental figures, tables and references, but not supplemental text.

Funding sources

Sources of financial support, if any, must be clearly disclosed in the Acknowledgements section.

Measurement units and numerical values

Measurements and numerical values should be reported using the International System (SI) of Units.

Color maps

Figures that use color must use a perceptually uniform color map that can be interpreted by those with common forms of human color-vision deficiency. "Rainbow" and "jet"-like color scales should be used only when the purpose is to demonstrate how these color maps distort scientific data (see Crameri et al., 2020).

Acronyms

Acronyms should be employed in the text only when their use improves the readability of the text. All acronyms must be defined when they are first used. If an acronym appears in the abstract, it must be defined both in the abstract and in the subsequent article text.