EASE Quick-Check Table for Submissions

For authors, preparing a scientific manuscript for submission to a journal can often be a time-consuming task.  Adjusting formatting and style to comply with journal’s specific preferences creates additional work, and adds a non-scientific element to the review process which can influence acceptance.

For editorial offices and editors, it can also be a difficult task to develop journal websites, set standards and create instructions for submission to journals.

To help address both these difficulties, and take steps towards standardising instructions, Sylwia Ufnalska and Alison Terry developed a simple table for journals to include at the start of their instructions for authors, which clearly displays the most essential information, e.g. word count, number of keywords, format of tables and figures.

The format of the table is such that it is flexible enough to accommodate the range of standards and expectations between academic disciplines, but suitably structured to support consistency across all domains.

With this initiative, we hope to provide the academic community with a resource that improves clarity of presentation and greater consistency between journals, resulting in submitted articles being more likely to meet the basic requirements. This initiative is intended to save time for both authors and editors involved in scientific publishing.

The latest edition of the Quick Check Table was created in April 2023. This edition is currently available in English only.

The table was first officially published in April 2020, in EASE journal European Science Editing. In 2022 it was republished in Medical Writing (journal of the European Medical Writers Association, EMWA).

Templates, examples and translations to download:
Download the blank table template as a Word file or PDF.
Download the complete table with example entries in English here.

Translated Example Tables of the 2020 version are available in the following languages:

Bosnian (bos), Croatian (hr), Dutch (nl), Estonian (ee), German (ger),
Japanese (ja), Korean (kr), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru), Slovenian (si),
Spanish (sp), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (ua), Vietnamese (vn)

Volunteers who would like to translate the English version into their native languages should contact the EASE Secretary

Reference:

Ufnalska S, Terry A (2020) Proposed universal framework for more user-friendly author instructions. European Science Editing 46: e53477. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2020.e53477

Below: Excerpt from ESE article submission table, showing the title and first rows