When you first access our tracking system, you will be taken to your 'Home' page, where different categories of 'tasks' are listed. If you are required to perform a task, there will be a red arrow next to a 'Manuscript' link.
If there are no red arrows visible on your 'Home' page, then you have no outstanding tasks to complete.
Summary of the Editorial and Review Process
The author submits a manuscript and it receives a tracking number.
An editor is assigned to the manuscript.
The editorial team decides whether to send the manuscript out to review. If the decision is not to send the manuscript for review, the editor contacts the author with the decision.
The editor assigns potential reviewers to the manuscript and the author is notified.
Reviewers agree to review the manuscript.
Reviewers submit their reports to the editor.
The editorial team discusses the reports and the editor makes the final decision.
The editor contacts the author with the decision.
If the decision is negative the author is given the opportunity to transfer their manuscript to another journal. If the manuscript was peer reviewed the referee comments are also transferred. Please see our Manuscript Transfer FAQ for more information about this service.
Presubmission Inquiries
Researchers may request informal feedback from the editors on whether a potential manuscript may be appropriate for the journal. Presubmission inquiries are optional and should not be used to submit a full manuscript. If your manuscript is already written please proceed with a full formal submission. For a presubmission inquiry you may either submit summary files or enter pertinent information in the "Abstract" and "Manuscript Comment" text boxes. To expedite the process, it is not necessary to provide details of contributing authors. If you are invited to submit a full manuscript, the e-mail conveying our invitation will contain a link that will allow you to submit the manuscript files and other required information under the same tracking number.
Preparing Files for Submission
We strongly encourage all authors to read our brief guide to submission before submitting their manuscript. For initial submissions and most revisions, authors should submit the following files for consideration by the editorial team and the referees (if the paper is sent for external review):
Cover letter (this is optional and will not be accessible to the reviewers).
If the manuscript is a revision, a separate ‘response to referees’ letter that addresses the referees’ and editors comments in a point-by-point manner, and a revised reporting summary will be required.
The Nature journals are flexible with regard to the format of initial submissions. Within reason, style and length will not influence consideration of a manuscript. To facilitate the review process we strongly encourage you to incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single pdf or Microsoft Word file. Suitably high resolution figures may be inserted within the text at appropriate positions or grouped at the end. Each figure legend should be presented on the same page as its figure. The reference list should include article titles. If providing a pdf, please number all lines. If you upload a Word document the system will number the lines for you. We can accept LaTeX files at the acceptance stage, but before then please supply compiled PDFs.
For life sciences manuscripts reporting original research results, please complete and upload a reporting summary and an editorial policy checklist. Failure to provide these forms at submission may delay handling of the submission. These forms will be provided to reviewers if the paper is sent for peer-review. More information about this can be found here.
Image data should be provided at sufficient resolution for reviewers to properly assess the data. If this is not possible in a combined manuscript file, authors should either submit separate high resolution figure files or (preferably) deposit image data in a suitable repository (e.g. figshare) and use their option to provide a private sharing link for the referees to access it.
Authors submitting revised manuscripts or who prefer to format their initial submission according to the journal’s style requirements for publication should see our manuscript formatting guide.
Supplementary information files, including copies of any related manuscripts under consideration at other journals.
This should be limited to material that is essential background (for example, large data sets and calculations), but which is too large, impractical or specialized to justify inclusion in the printed version of the paper. Any figures or small tables should be supplied as Extended Data, not Supplementary Information. Please see the Extended Data section of the brief guide to submission for more information.
Tables larger than one page (in general, >50 rows or >10 columns) should be provided as tabular data files rather than a PDF.
For optimal quality video files please use H.264 encoding, the standard aspect ratio of 16:9 (4:3 is second best) and do not compress the video. Videos should be submitted as avi, mov, mp4 or mpg files and will be rendered using the Brightcove video platform; for additional information please refer to this page.
The submission of supplementary data sets relating to the characterization of chemical compounds is strongly encouraged.
Please keep individual file sizes below 100 MB unless a file must be larger.
Figures
Production-quality figures are not required at initial submission, but to avoid potential substantial revisions at later stages you may wish to note some of the guidelines below even at the initial submission stage.
It is recommended that you convert all your figures to JPEG before generating PDFs or uploading individual files. This will reduce the file sizes and the amount of time it takes the files to upload to our submission site and will also give you a closer approximation to the way your figures will appear on our site. If you choose to submit your files in PowerPoint format, please do not make a JPEG of these within PowerPoint. The conversion is more successful when a raw PowerPoint file is submitted.
General Figure Guidelines
Use distinct colors with comparable visibility and consider colorblind individuals by avoiding the use of red and green for contrast. Recoloring primary data, such as fluorescence images, to color-safe combinations such as green and magenta, turquoise and red, yellow and blue or other accessible color palettes is strongly encouraged. Use of the rainbow color scale should be avoided.
Use solid color for filling objects and avoid hatch patterns.
Avoid background shading.
Figures divided into parts should be labeled with a lower-case, boldface 'a', 'b', etc in the top left-hand corner. Labeling of axes, keys and so on should be in 'sentence case' (first word capitalized only) with no full stop. Units must have a space between the number and the unit, and follow the nomenclature common to your field.
Commas should be used to separate thousands.
Unusual units or abbreviations should be spelled out in full, or defined in the legend.
Final Figure Submission Guidelines
Should your manuscript be accepted, you will receive more extensive instructions for final submission of display items. However, a summary of our guidelines for final figure preparation are included here.
Images should be saved in RGB color mode at 300 dpi or higher resolution.
Use the same typeface (Arial, Helvetica or Times New Roman) for all figures. Use symbol font for Greek letters.
We prefer vector files with editable layers. Acceptable formats are: .ai, .eps, .pdf, .ps, .svg for fully editable vector-based art; layered .psd or .tiff for editable layered art; .psd, .tif, .jpeg or .png for bitmap images; .ppt if fully editable and without styling effects; ChemDraw (.cdx) for chemical structures.
Figures are best prepared at the size you would expect them to appear in print. At this size, the optimum font size is 8pt and no lines should be thinner than 0.25 pt (0.09 mm).
Display items that contain chemical structures should be produced using ChemDraw or a similar program. Our Style Guide describes our preferred formatting. Authors using ChemDraw should use our ChemDraw Template and submit the final files at 100% as .cdx files. All chemical compounds must be assigned a bold, Arabic numeral in the order in which the compounds are presented in the manuscript text.
Starting the Process
To start the manuscript submission process, click on the 'Submit Manuscript' link on the ‘Home’ page. Authors may submit a manuscript in one of our standard formats.
Checking Your Manuscript Status
After submission you will receive an acknowledgement email. You can check the status of your manuscript at any time in the review process by:
Accessing the system with your password or link sent to you in the acknowledgement email.
Clicking on the link represented by your manuscript tracking number and abbreviated title.
Clicking on the "Check Status" link at the bottom of the displayed page
This procedure will display detailed tracking information about where your manuscript is in the submission/peer-review process.
