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Author guidelines


Manuscripts must be submitted in English, preferably British. Please note that publication of poorly written manuscripts that are difficult to understand will be refused without even entering the review process. We strongly recommend that authors have their manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. Submit manuscripts electronically. Files processed by a popular text editor, such as Word, are accepted. The texts must be written using a single font, for example Times New Roman, 12 pt, single spacing. No hyphenation, tabs and extra rows/intervals should be used.

Title: Should be in lower case. Only scientific, geographic or person names should be with a first capital letter. Avoid abbreviations.

Authors and affiliations: The authors are given with a complete first and last name. The full postal, e-mail address and ORCID iD of the author(s) should follow.

To recognise an individual author’s contribution within a publication, during manuscript submission, the submitting author is encouraged to indicate the contributor role for each of the co-authors (see examples at CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy)). Include this as a free text at the end of the manuscript file.

Abstract and keywords: The abstract should presents the essence of the article in a synthesised form; the length varies — up to 20 lines. After the abstract, up to 6 keywords must be written.

Body text: Тhe use of bold, underline and capitalisations in the text is not acceptable. Use italics for generic and species group taxa names only. Abbreviations should be followed by ‘.’ (full stop; for instance: cf., e.g., etc.). Note that you shouldn’t add a full stop at the end of abbreviated words if the last letter of the abbreviation is the same as the last letter of the full word (for example, you should abbreviate ‘Dr’, ‘Mr’ without full stop at the end). Use en-dash to link spans (numerals, sizes, dates and page numbers; e.g., 1981–1992; figs 1–6; pp. 31–42). Use the International System of Units (SI) for measurements. The subtitles (Introduction, Study area, Methods, Results and discussion, Conclusions, etc.) need to be on a separate line.

Citations and references: Bibliographic sources (at least 4) in the text must be cited in one of the following ways: Josifov (1980); (Josifov, 1981, 1998, 2000); Josifov & Kerzhner (1995); (Josifov & Kerzhner, 1995); Golemansky et al. (1998); (Golemansky et al., 1998); (Beschovski, 1995, 2000; Golemansky, 2002; Mitov et al., 2012). In case of 3 or more authors use ‘et al.’ after the first one. The bibliographic list includes only published sources cited in the text of the article and arranged in alphabetical order. Include the DOI wherever possible. If a source is written in Cyrillic, use the abstract’s title. If there is no abstract, the title should be transliterated. The source in which the cited article is published should be given transliterated if it does not have a title in Roman script. Journal names should be quoted without abbreviations. Here some samples:

Papers in journals
Georgieva M., Georgiev G., Mirchev P., Belilov S. 2023 First records of Sirococcus conigenus causing shoot blight on Pinus peuce in Bulgaria. Historia naturalis bulgarica 45 (6): 163–168. https://doi.org/10.48027/hnb.45.072
Joakimov D. 1909 Po faunata na Hemiptera v Bulgaria. Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniya, nauka i knizhnina 25: 1–34. (In Bulgarian)

Electronic journal articles
Bekchiev R. 2013 A new species of Tychobythinus Ganglbauer, 1896 (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Pselaphinae) from Turkey. Biodiversity Data Journal 1: e963. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.1.e963

Book chapters
Josifov M. 1997 Heteroptera. In: Sakalian V. (ed.) Endemic and Relict Insects in the Pirin National Park, Bulgaria. Pensoft Publishers, Sofia—Moscow, 31–42.

Books
Larsen T.B. 1991 The butterflies of Kenya and their natural history. Oxford University Press, New York, 490 pp.

Figures and tables

Figures must be submitted electronically as a separate file(s). Mark their place in the manuscript and give headings and explanations to them (these are placed under the figures). These must be: (1) raster (or bitmap) images (preferably TIFF) — minimum width: page — 174 mm, column — 83 mm; 300 dpi [colour photos]; 600 dpi [black and white line drawings] or (2) vector images (preferably EPS). All figures should be referenced in the manuscript.

Reproduction of figures that have previously been published elsewhere is not acceptable.

The tables should not exceed 30 lines. The table headings and their explanations should be placed on the top. Include the tables in the text file, but after the bibliographic list. Mark their place in the manuscript and give the headings and explanations to them. Lengthy datasets in ‘table’ format (spreadsheets *.XLS, comma separated values files *.CSV) can be published separately as supplementary files.

Еach supplementary material must be accompanied by a textual description in a separate document; one sentence will do.

— Please also read our About and editorial policies and Publication ethics and malpractice statement.

Last updated: 21 January 2024