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Author Guidelines
- Aims and Scope
- Submission and handling of manuscripts
- Types of articles
- Presentation of manuscripts
- Editorial Policies and Ethical Considerations
- Author Licensing
- Article Publication Charges
- Publication Process After Acceptance
- Post Publication
- Editorial Office Contact Details
Conservation Letters is a scientific journal publishing research with significant and direct implications for policies and practices that inform the conservation of biological diversity. Our aim at Conservation Letters is to publish science that is of direct relevance to policy and practice, and of broad interest. This is the case for all of the manuscript categories below. For a guide to how we interpret policy relevance at Conservation Letters see this editorial http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12207/full. The journal welcomes submissions across all sciences, including interdisciplinary submissions.
Submissions should be uploaded to our ScholarOne Manuscripts site: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/conl. Upon submission, we ask that you provide separate files for your text, tables, figures and supporting information. Please provide your text in an editable format, figures will need to be at least 300 DPI. More detailed information on the submission of electronic artwork can be found at http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/illustration.asp. Ideally, all Supporting Information should be one all-inclusive PDF file, uploaded directly into ScholarOne Manuscripts. All pages and lines should be numbered consecutively from beginning to end of the document.
Authors are requested to submit the names and emails of 3-5 potential referees working outside their home institution(s), with whom they have not recently collaborated. Authors may also indicate referees they would prefer not to review the manuscript. Such suggestions will be regarded as a guide only and the Editor is under no obligation to follow them. Authors must suggest the Editor they believe is best placed to handle the manuscript, however, the Editor-in-Chief or Senior Associate Editor will select the most appropriate Editor to manage the review of each manuscript.
A covering letter to the Editor-in-Chief should succinctly describe why the submitted work is novel, of direct and broad relevance to conservation policy or practice, and of general interest to the wide readership of Conservation Letters. The covering letter must indicate that the enclosed work has not been published or accepted for publication, and is not under consideration for publication, in another journal or book, that its submission for publication has been approved by all relevant authors and institutions, and that all persons entitled to authorship have been so named. The submitting author must indicate in the cover letter that all authors have seen and agreed to the submitted version of the manuscript. Please address your covering letter to Editor-in-Chief, Edward T. Game.
Conservation Letters employs a plagiarism detection system. By submitting your manuscript, you accept that it may be screened for similarity against previously published works.
Prior to being included in an issue of Conservation Letters, accepted manuscripts will be published online both as an Accepted Article and as Early View, unless otherwise requested by the authors. Accepted Article publication means that the accepted version of your article will be posted online within 48 hours of acceptance. For this reason, if you will be publicising your article in a way that requires an embargoed release, we request that you ask for your article to be held from Accepted Articles by contacting the Managing Editor (conservationletters@wiley.com). Please do so immediately upon acceptance of your article.
Data Protection
By submitting a manuscript to or reviewing for this publication, your name, email address, and affiliation, and other contact details the publication might require, will be used for the regular operations of the publication, including, when necessary, sharing with the publisher (Wiley) and partners for production and publication. The publication and the publisher recognize the importance of protecting the personal information collected from users in the operation of these services, and have practices in place to ensure that steps are taken to maintain the security, integrity, and privacy of the personal data collected and processed. You can learn more at: https://authorservices.wiley.com/statements/data-protection-policy.html
Letters detail novel findings of cutting-edge research covering topics of global importance with high and direct relevance for conservation practice and/or policy. The relevance to policy or practice of these studies should be clearly identified and discussed. Inter- and transdisciplinary studies are particularly encouraged. Letters should be no more than 3000 words in length (excluding references, table and figure legends, and online Supporting Information) and contain no more than 6 figures and/or tables and 40 references.
Policy Perspectives provide a forum for authors to discuss recent developments or ideas with broad and significant policy relevance to conservation. They should be forward looking and written with a view to informing non-specialist readers (thus should be presented using straightforward prose and avoiding jargon). Policy Perspectives may be up to 3000 words in length and should contain no more than 5 figures and/or tables, and fewer than 30 references.
Reviews provide synthetic overviews of emerging subjects that merit urgent attention or succinct syntheses of important topics that are rarely encountered in mainstream literature. Reviews may be up to 5000 words in length and may contain up to 80 references. Themes should be of global importance, and present findings and conclusions relevant to policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of conservation.
Correspondence articles provide readers an opportunity to raise substantive issues related to articles previously published in the journal. The issues raised should be of general interest to a broad readership. Correspondence articles should be submitted within six months of the Early View publication of the article receiving comment. Correspondence articles should comprise no more than 500 words, no abstract, and no more than 6 cited references. Figures and tables will not be published, but can be included as online Supporting Information.
Viewpoint articles are typically invited by the Editor-in-Chief, and aim to raise awareness and stimulate debate. They offer personal perspectives and insights into topical or emerging issues of broad interest that are potentially important for advancing thinking around and/or improving the effectiveness of policy, practice and research relevant to conservation. Viewpoint articles are limited to 1000 words, no abstract, and are typically single authored with very few or no references, figures or tables.
Conservation Letters places great emphasis on its prompt and accurate reviews of submitted manuscripts. This requires that manuscripts be concise and carefully prepared: they must be complete, with all reporting of methods, results and citations fully checked and in final form. Figures and tables must be clear and well presented. Manuscripts judged to be too hastily or poorly prepared will be returned to authors for resubmission. The correct presentation of manuscripts is detailed below. Manuscripts should be written in clear, concise and grammatically correct English.
Title page
The title page contains the article title, full name(s) of all author(s), affiliation(s), e-mail address(es) of all author(s), a short running title (abbreviated form of title) of less than 45 characters including spaces, up to 10 keywords listed alphabetically for indexing purposes, the type of article, the number of words in the abstract and in the manuscript as a whole (from the Abstract through Acknowledgements and excluding the Reference List), the number of references, the number of figures and tables, and the name and complete mailing address (including telephone and e-mail address) of the person to whom correspondence should be sent. It is essential that the keywords be chosen carefully to assist in the choice of appropriate editors and referees.
The majority of readers now find articles through online search engines such as Google Scholar. To help make your manuscript as visible as possible to these search engines, please see Wiley’s Search Engine Optimization guidance https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/Prepare/writing-for-seo.html for how to craft titles, abstracts, and key words that optimize search results for your manuscript.
Abstract page
The abstract page should contain a short abstract summarising the paper not exceeding 150 words for Letters or 200 words for Reviews and Policy Perspectives. Viewpoints and Correspondence do not require an abstract.
Main text
Recognizing that different presentation formats will work best for different content, Conservation Letters allows some flexibility in how content within manuscripts is organized. However, the following sections provide a guide to the content that must be included in each manuscript.
(1) Introduction. The Introduction should summarize briefly the background and aims, and end with a brief statement of what has been achieved by the work.
(2) Methods. This section should contain sufficient detail so that all procedures can be clearly understood by the reader. Further technical details can be given in Supporting Information, which should be detailed enough that all procedures can be repeated (in conjunction with cited references).
(3) Results. The Results section should present the evidence that supports the conclusions to be drawn in the Discussion. The Results section should conform to a high standard of rigour. Extended lines of inference, arguments or speculations should not be placed in the Results.
(4) Discussion. The Discussion section should be separate from the Results section. It allows authors to propose their interpretation of the results, and to suggest what they mean in a wider context. It should end with a clear statement of the main conclusions of the research, and a clear explanation of their importance for conservation policy or practice.
(5) Acknowledgements and Data. Acknowledgements of financial or institutional support should be brief (100 words maximum). In this section, authors are also expected to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise, that a reasonable person could construe as possibly influencing the objectivity of the report. The absence of any statement is presumed to mean that there is nothing to disclose. Authors must provide a data accessibility statement, including a link to the repository they have used to archive their data (see policy on Data Sharing and Accessibility). They should also (where relevant) provide a statement of the ethics review process that was adhered to in gathering the data.
(6) References. References should be prepared according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition). This means in text citations should follow the author-date method whereby the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998). The complete reference list should appear alphabetically by name at the end of the paper.
A sample of the most common entries in reference lists appears below. Please note that a DOI should be provided for all references where available. For more information about APA referencing style, please refer to the APA FAQ. Please note that for journal articles, issue numbers are not included unless each issue in the volume begins with page one.
Journal article
Example of reference with 2 to 7 authors
Beers, S. R. , & De Bellis, M. D. (2002). Neuropsychological function in children with maltreatment-related posttraumatic stress disorder. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 483–486. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.159.3.483
Ramus, F., Rosen, S., Dakin, S. C., Day, B. L., Castellote, J. M., White, S., & Frith, U. (2003). Theories of developmental dyslexia: Insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults. Brain, 126(4), 841–865. doi: 10.1093/brain/awg076
Example of reference with more than 7 authors
Rutter, M., Caspi, A., Fergusson, D., Horwood, L. J., Goodman, R., Maughan, B., … Carroll, J. (2004). Sex differences in developmental reading disability: New findings from 4 epidemiological studies. Journal of the American Medical Association, 291(16), 2007–2012. doi: 10.1001/jama.291.16.2007
Book edition
Bradley-Johnson, S. (1994). Psychoeducational assessment of students who are visually impaired or blind: Infancy through high school (2nd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-ed.
Supporting Information
Supporting Information can be a useful way for an author to include important but ancillary information with the online version of an article. Examples of Supporting Information include additional tables, data sets, figures, nonessential methodological detail, and related nonessential multimedia files. Supporting Information should be cited within the article text, and a descriptive legend should be included. Figure and Tables in the Supporting Information should be numbered sequentially as Figure S1, Table S1, etc. Supporting Information is published as supplied by the author, and a proof is not made available prior to publication; for these reasons, authors should provide any Supporting Information in the desired final format.
Click here for Wiley’s FAQs on supporting information.
Note: if data, scripts, or other artefacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper are available via a publicly available data repository, authors should include a reference to the location of the material within their paper.
Units and symbols
Authors are requested to use the International System of Units (S.I.) where possible for all measurements (see Quantities, Units and Symbols, 2nd edn, 1975, The Royal Society, London). Note that mathematical expressions should contain symbols, not abbreviations. If the paper contains many symbols, it is recommended that they should be defined as early in the text as possible, or within a subsection of the Methods section.
Statistics
Any article reporting p-values must also report 95% Confidence Intervals (CIs) in the text and in figures. All figures that include data used in statistical analyses must show error bars on the figure, either in the main text or Supporting Information. Where possible, these error bars should show 95% CIs, but in all cases authors must be explicit about what the error bars show.
Tweetable abstract and image
To help our manuscripts reach a broad audience, Conservation Letters is committed to promoting manuscripts via the journal’s social media channels (Twitter and Facebook). To assist with this, please provide 140 characters or less that describe the key finding or message of your manuscript. This character limit leaves enough room for us to include a link to your article.
Tweets with images (photos, figures, infographics) generate far more engagement than tweets with no images (our own Twitter analytics indicate that tweets with images have up to 60% higher engagement rates than tweets without images). Please provide an image that can be used to promote your article on the journal’s social media channels. The image may be:
- A figure from your paper.
- A stand-alone infographic.
- A photograph relevant to the article. Please ensure you have permission to use this image, and provide details on who to credit the image to.
Please use the following file naming system for submitted tweetable images:
- Article lead author_image credit_image subject.jpg (for example, Edward Game_Emma Ladoucer_Sumatran tiger.jpg)
Cover photos
Authors are encouraged to submit cover photos related to their manuscript when their paper is accepted for publication. Initially, these can be sent to the Editorial Office as low to medium resolution JPG files, but if selected, a high-resolution file (300 d.p.i. at reproduction size) is required, preferably in CMYK color. Authors should provide a short legend and a photo credit, indicating which paper the photograph relates to.
Review Process
All manuscripts are assessed initially by a Senior Editor (the Editor-in-Chief or a Senior Associate Editor). If the Senior Editor determines the manuscript topic is appropriate for the journal and meets standards of content and presentation, then they assign the manuscript to an Associate Editor with expertise in the manuscript’s topic. If the Associate Editor deems the manuscript is of sufficient quality and novelty, she or he will request reviews. The number of reviews required is at the discretion of the Associate Editor but is typically 2-3. Once reviews have been received, the Associate Editor summarizes reviewer points, provides an assessment, and makes a recommendation (acceptance, some degree of revision, or rejection) to the Senior Editor. Revised and resubmitted papers will generally be assigned to the same Senior Editor as handled the original submission. Depending on the degree of revision required, and at their discretion, the Senior Editor will generally send the paper back to the same Associate Editor for assessment, who may then initiate another round of reviews. The reviewers selected may be the same or different reviewers to those used for the previous submission.
If you have any concerns or wish to communicate about your paper during the review or publication process, please email the Editorial Office (conservationletters@wiley.com) rather than an individual editor. They will transmit your email to the correct person.
Decision times
We aim to make all editorial decisions within 8 weeks of manuscript receipt. Please note that the above decision times apply to manuscripts once all the required material (text, figures, cover letter, novelty statement, manuscripts submitted or ’in press’) has been received by the Editorial Office.
Appeals
Peer review is not perfect; sometimes we will make mistakes. If you believe that a serious error has been made in reaching a decision on your manuscript, you can send an appeal to conservationletters@wiley.com. Appeals should include a detailed justification of why you believe an error has been made in reaching a decision on your manuscript, AND how you can adequately address any other specific criticisms raised by members of the editorial team or the reviewers. For decisions originally made by a Senior Associate Editor, all appeals will be handled by the Editor-in-Chief, Edward T Game. For decisions originally made by the Editor-in-Chief, appeals will be handled by a Senior Associate Editor. Appeals are given lower priority than manuscripts still under consideration but the Editor handling your appeal will endeavour to contact you within 2 weeks to advise on whether the manuscript will be reconsidered.
Transparency and Openness
Conservation Letters is a signatory to the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines.
Data Sharing and Data Accessibility
Conservation Letters expects that data supporting the results in the paper will be archived in an appropriate public repository. This must be done before the paper is published online as an Accepted Article. Whenever possible, the scripts and other artefacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper should also be publicly archived. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species. Authors must, in the Acknowledgements and Data section at the end of their manuscript, provide a data accessibility statement including a link to the repository they have used.
Authors can consult the global registry of research data repositories re3data.org to help them identify registered and certified repositories appropriate for their data.
Registration of sequences
DNA sequences published in Conservation Letters should be deposited in the EMBL/GenBank/DDJB Nucleotide Sequence Databases. An accession number for each sequence must be included in the manuscript before publication.
Data Citation
In recognition of the significance of data as an output of research effort, Conservation Letters supports the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles. All data and program code that support the results of the paper should be recognized as original intellectual contributions and afforded recognition through citation as part of the paper’s reference list. References for data sets and program code should include a persistent identifier, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Persistent identifiers ensure future access to unique published digital objects, such as a text or data set. Persistent identifiers are assigned to data sets by digital archives. We recommend the citations format proposed by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles:
Authors; Year; Dataset title; Data repository or archive; Version (if any); Persistent identifier (e.g. DOI).
Conflict of Interest
The journal requires that all authors disclose any potential sources of conflict of interest. Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. Potential sources of conflict of interest include, but are not limited to: patent or stock ownership, membership of a company board of directors, membership of an advisory board or committee for a company, and consultancy for or receipt of speaker's fees from a company. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this at submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose with the submission ALL pertinent commercial and other relationships.
Funding
Authors should list all funding sources in the Acknowledgments section. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct nomenclature: https://www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/
Authorship
The list of authors should accurately illustrate who contributed to the work and how. All those listed as authors should qualify for authorship according to the following criteria:
- Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and
- Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
- Given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; and
- Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section (for example, to recognize contributions from people who provided technical help, collation of data, writing assistance, acquisition of funding, or a department chairperson who provided general support). Prior to submitting the article all authors should agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript.
Additional Authorship Options. Joint first or senior authorship: In the case of joint first authorship, a footnote should be added to the author listing, e.g. ‘X and Y should be considered joint first author’ or ‘X and Y should be considered joint senior author.’
Publication Ethics
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Note this journal uses iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Read Wiley’s Top 10 Publishing Ethics Tips for Authors here. Wiley’s Publication Ethics Guidelines can be found here.
ORCID
As part of the journal’s commitment to supporting authors at every step of the publishing process, the journal encourages the submitting author (only) to provide an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. This takes around 2 minutes to complete. Find more information here.
Open Access Agreement
Conservation Letters is an Open Access journal: all papers are published under a Creative Commons license. With Creative Commons licenses, the author retains copyright and the public is allowed to reuse the content. The author grants Wiley a license to publish the article and identify as the original publisher.
If a paper is accepted for publication, the author identified as the formal corresponding author will receive an email prompting them to login to Author Services, where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS), they will be able to complete the license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.
To find out which Created Commons Licenses are available for the journal, click here. To learn more about Creative Commons Licenses and to preview terms and conditions of the agreements, please click here. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used; to check this, please click here.
Preprints and preprint servers
Conservation Letters will consider for review articles previously available as preprints on non-commercial servers such as ArXiv, bioRxiv, psyArXiv, SocArXiv, engrXiv, etc. Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article. Authors may also post the final published version of the article immediately after publication.
Conservation Letters is a fully open access journal. You or your funder will be required to pay an article publication charge of $1,850 / £1,160 / €1,375 on acceptance. Not sure if payment for your article could be covered by your institution or funding agency? Use our Institute/Funder Policy Finder tool to check: http://exchanges.wiley.com/authors/oa-policies-by-funder_272.html.
Members of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) receive a 20% discount to publish in Conservation Letters. Please email membership@conbio.org for the discount code.
Editorial Waivers
It is Conservation Letters policy that ability to pay the Article Publication Charge (APC) should not be a barrier to the publication of important science. Authors without research grants or access to APC funding may request an editorial waiver to be granted at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. To request an editorial waiver, please contact conservationletters@wiley.com. Waiver requests must be submitted via email at the time of submission, prior to peer-review.
Geographical Waivers
Waivers will automatically be granted to corresponding authors from the Wiley Open Access Waiver Country List http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/13707a1ddf6/Waivers-and-Discounts-on-Article-Publication-Charges.html. No further information is required.
PubMed Central (PMC)
PubMed Central (PMC) is created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is a digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. It is a full text database, which gives readers free access to the full text version of articles. Wiley Open Access journals will deposit all articles into PMC upon publication of an online issue, usually on a monthly basis. The final published versions of the articles are sent to PMC.
Early View publication
Articles in Conservation Letters will be published individually online ahead of issue compilation. Early View articles consist of full text that has been reviewed, revised and edited for publication, with the author’s final corrections incorporated. Because articles are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. Early View articles are citable by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI); following the articles incorporation into an issue, the DOI remains valid and can continue to be used to cite and access the article.
Proofs
Once the paper is typeset, the author will receive an email notification with full instructions on how to provide proof corrections.
Please note that the author is responsible for all statements made in their work, including changes made during the editorial process – authors should check proofs carefully. Note that proofs should be returned within 48 hours from receipt of first proof.
Citing this Article: eLocators
This journal now uses eLocators. eLocators are unique identifies for an article that service the same function page numbers have traditionally served in the print world. When citing this article, please insert the eLocator in place of the page number. For more information, please visit the Author Services eLocator page here.
Promoting the Article
For tips on how to promote an article, click here.
Measuring the Impact of an Article
Wiley helps authors measure the impact of their research through specialist partnerships with Kudos and Altmetric.
Shayna Holmes, Managing Editor; Lyra Cauman, Editorial Assistant
Email: conservationletters@wiley.com
Author Guidelines updated March 2018
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