What Journals Actually Require Before You Can Submit
Manuscript submission portals ask for more than just your paper — and discovering a missing required item mid-submission, after you've already filled in twenty fields, is one of the more frustrating parts of the process.
What most portals require
- Main manuscript file — often required as a specific format (Word or LaTeX, sometimes with figures embedded, sometimes separate)
- Individual figure files — usually at a minimum resolution (commonly 300 DPI), sometimes in a specific format (TIFF, EPS, high-res PNG)
- Cover letter
- Author declarations — conflict of interest statement, funding statement, author contribution statement
- Ethics approval documentation — for human or animal subject research
- Data availability statement — increasingly required, describing where underlying data can be accessed
- Suggested and/or excluded reviewers
- ORCID IDs for authors — required by a growing number of journals
⚠️ Check the author guidelines page before you start the submission form, not while filling it in. Portal sessions sometimes time out, and discovering a missing required document (like an ethics approval letter) partway through means starting over.
Details that vary by journal
Word count limits, reference formatting style, whether figures go in the main document or as separate files, and required statements all vary — sometimes significantly — even between journals from the same publisher. Always check the specific target journal's current guidelines rather than assuming based on a previous submission elsewhere.
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