Submissions

Author Guidelines

Registration with Pan-Africa Science Journal

Please note that the corresponding/submitting author MUST register with the Pan-Africa Science Journal before submitting an article. You must be logged in to your personal Pan-Africa Science Journal Account to submit an article.

 

Manuscript Requirements and Style Guide

General standards

Please, download and use the Journals Word template in preparing your manuscript.

Submission checklist

You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check all the relevant section.

Ensure that the following items are present:

One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

• E-mail address
• Full postal address

Manuscript Length

Pan-Africa Science encourages its authors to closely follow the article word count lengths given in the Summary Table. The manuscript length includes only the main body of the text, footnotes and all citations within it, and excludes abstract, section titles, figure and table captions, funding statements, acknowledgements and references in the bibliography. Please indicate the number of words and the number of figures included in your manuscript on the first page.

 

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

Before publication, each accepted manuscript will be charged $200 Article processing charges (100% WAIVED UNTILL DECEMBER 2023)

 

Language Editing

Pan-Africa Science requires manuscripts submitted to meet international standards for the English language to be considered for publication.

For authors who would like their manuscript to receive language editing or proofing to improve the clarity of the manuscript and help highlight their research, please get in touch with the associate editors and they will promptly recommend approved external partners,

Note that sending your manuscript for language editing does not imply or guarantee that it will be accepted for publication by Pan-Africa Science Journal. Editorial decisions on the scientific content of a manuscript are independent of whether it has received language editing or proofing by the partner services, or other services.

 

Preparing Your Paper

1. Article types

Original Article

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list)
• Should be no more than 7,000 words, inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, footnotes.
• Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
• Should contain between 5 and 8 keywords. 
• A complete, comprehensive report of original research. An Article usually has a fairly complex narrative that is based on multiple techniques and/or approaches. It should contain no more than 8 display items and cite no more than 60 references.

Review Article

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; introduction; main text; acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list
• Should be no more than 8,000 words, inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, footnotes.
• Should contain a structured abstract of 250 words.
• Should contain between 5 and 8 keywords.
• Review Articles cover a focused area on the current status of emerging infectious diseases and provide a balanced view of historical and updated information that can be understood by researchers outside that speciality. They should be succinctly written. Reviews do not require 'Materials and Methods', 'Results' or 'Discussion' sections but can be structured using short topical headings. It should contain no more than 8 display items, and cite no more than 80 references.

Correspondence

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; keywords; main text; acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list).
• Should be no more than 1,500 words, inclusive of tables, references, figure captions, footnotes.
• Correspondences present preliminary reports of unusual urgency, significance and interest, whose subjects may be republished in expanded form. It should contain no more than 1 display items, and cite no more than 15 references.

Commentary

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; keywords; main text; acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list.
• Should be no more than 1,500 words, inclusive of tables, references, figure captions, footnotes.
• Comments are an analysis of recently published papers of particular interest. This is a commission-only section. It should contain no more than 2 display items and cite no more than 15 references.

 

General Article lay-out

Headings and Sub-headings

You may insert up to 5 heading levels into your manuscript.

Abstract

As a primary goal, the abstract should render the general significance and conceptual advance of the work clearly accessible to a broad readership. In the abstract, minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references.

For Clinical Trial article types, please include the Unique Identifier and the URL of the publicly accessible website on which the trial is registered.

Keywords

All article types: you may provide up to 8 keywords; at least 5 are mandatory.

Text

The entire document should be single-spaced and must contain page and line numbers in order to facilitate the review process. Your manuscript should be written using the MS-Word template provided by the Journal.

Templates are available (see above)

Introduction

Succinct, with no subheadings.

Materials and Methods

This section may be divided by subheadings. This section should contain sufficient detail so that when read in conjunction with cited references, all procedures can be repeated. For experiments reporting results on animal or human subject research, an ethics approval statement should be included in this section.

Results

This section may be divided by subheadings. Footnotes should not be used and have to be transferred into the main text.

Discussion

This section may be divided by subheadings. Discussions should cover the key findings of the study: discuss any prior art related to the subject so as to place the novelty of the discovery in the appropriate context; discuss the potential shortcomings and limitations on their interpretations; discuss their integration into the current understanding of the problem and how this advances the current views; speculate on the future direction of the research and freely postulate theories that could be tested in the future.

Acknowledgements

This is a short text to acknowledge the contributions of specific colleagues, institutions, or agencies that aided the efforts of the authors.

Author Contributions Statement

The Author Contributions Statement is mandatory and should represent all the authors. It can be up to several sentences long and should briefly describe the tasks of individual authors. Please list only 2 initials for each author, without full stops, but separated by commas (e.g. JC, JS). In the case of two authors with the same initials, please use their middle initial to differentiate between them (e.g. REW, RSW). The Author Contributions Statement should be included at the end of the manuscript before the References.

Conflict of Interest Statement

A Conflict of Interest Statement needs to be included at the end of the manuscript before the references. Here, the authors need to declare whether or not the submitted work was carried out in the presence of any personal, professional or financial relationships that could potentially be construed as a conflict of interest.

References

Please use the APA Style when preparing your paper.

Disclaimer

Any necessary disclaimers which must be included in the published article should be clearly indicated in the manuscript.

Supplementary Material

Pan-Africa Science journal does not support pushing important results and information into supplementary sections. However, data that are not of primary importance to the text, or which cannot be included in the article because it is too large or the current format does not permit it (such as movies, raw data traces, power point presentations, etc.) can be uploaded during the submission procedure and will be displayed along with the published article.

 

1. Figure and Table Guidelines

CC-BY Licence

All figures, tables, and images will be published under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence and permission must be obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including re-published/adapted/modified/partial figures and images from the internet). It is the responsibility of the authors to acquire the licenses, to follow any citation instructions requested by third-party rights holders, and cover any supplementary charges.

 

General Style Guidelines for Figures

The maximum number of figures and tables for all article types are subject to approval by the Editor. Pan-Africa Science journal requires figures to be submitted individually, in the same order as they are referred to in the manuscript, the figures will then be automatically embedded at the end of the submitted manuscript. Kindly ensure that each table and figure is mentioned in the text and in numerical order.

For graphs, there must be a self-explanatory label (including units) along each axis. For figures with more than one panel, panels should be clearly indicated using labels (A), (B), (C), (D), etc. However, do not embed the part labels over any part of the image, these labels will be added during typesetting according to Frontiers journal style. Please note that figures which are not according to the guidelines will cause substantial delay during the production process.

Permissions may be necessary for the following scenarios:

• Republishing
• Modifying/adapting
• Partial Figures

It is the responsibility of the authors to acquire the licenses, to follow any citation instructions requested by third-party rights holders, and cover any supplementary charges.

 

General Style Guidelines for Tables

Tables should be inserted at the end of the manuscript. If you use a word processor, build your table in word.

Please note that large tables covering several pages cannot be included in the final PDF for formatting reasons. These tables will be published as supplementary material on the online article abstract page at the time of acceptance. The author will be notified during the typesetting of the final article if this is the case. A link in the final PDF will direct to the online material.

Image Size

Figure images should be prepared with the PDF layout in mind, individual figures should not be longer than one page and with a width that corresponds to 1 column or 2 columns.

Format

The following formats are accepted:

• TIFF (.tif) TIFF files should be saved using LZW compression or any other non-lossy compression method.
• JPEG (.jpg)
• EPS (.eps) EPS files can be uploaded upon acceptance

Colour Image Mode

Images must be submitted in the colour mode RGB.

Resolution Requirements

All images must be uploaded separately in the submission procedure and have a resolution of >300 dpi at the final size. Check the resolution of your figure by enlarging it to 150%. If the resolution is too low, the image will appear blurry, jagged or have a stair-stepped effect.

Please note saving a figure directly as an image file (JPEG, TIF) can greatly affect the resolution of your image. To avoid this, one option is to export the file as PDF, then convert it into TIFF or EPS using graphics software. EPS files can be uploaded upon acceptance.