Other Beilstein-Institut Open Science Activities
1 General Information
2 File Formats
3 Style and Language
4 Article Types
5 Organization of Full Research Papers
(shortcut to reference list formatting)
6 Graphics and Tables
7 Supporting Information
8 Cover Letter
9 Obtaining Permission for Reuse of Third-party Material
When submitting an article to the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry authors are not charged any publication fee. All publication costs for the journal are covered completely by the Beilstein-Institut. Authors are required to submit new manuscripts via the Beilstein Publishing System. The document Help for Authors serves as a guide to navigating the Beilstein Publishing System. The journal does not accept mailed hardcopy manuscripts or manuscripts submitted by email. A Submission Checklist is available to help authors to ensure they have collected all relevant data and information. Authors can interrupt the submission process at any time. When returning to the Beilstein Publishing System, authors may select the manuscript concerned and continue where they stopped.
Prior to manuscript submission, we expressly encourage authors to read the Editorial Policy and Workflow page of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry.
The main manuscript must be provided as Microsoft Word (version 8 (Word 97) to version 16 (Word 2016)) document.
Note that figures, schemes and tables should be included in the manuscript after the paragraph where they are first referenced. Chemical structures should preferably be embedded in their original chemical structure drawing file format (e.g. CDX for ChemDraw).
Every manuscript submitted to the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry has to be assigned by the authors to one of the following types of article:
Please read the descriptions of each of the article types and choose which is appropriate before writing the article. Your article should be structured in accordance with the guidelines of the article types. If you are in doubt about the article type, your manuscript should be classified as Full Research Paper, the guidelines of which are described below.
Manuscripts for Full Research Paper articles submitted to the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry should be divided into the following sections:
The title of an article should be clear, concise and comprehensible to all readers with the purpose of quickly identifying the focus of the reported work. It should be brief and contain the most important keywords to optimize electronic retrieval. The use of capitals should be restricted to the first word and proper nouns. As far as possible abbreviations should be avoided.
For all persons who fulfill all requirements of authorship, their first name, middle initial(s) and last (family) name must be provided. More details regarding authorship requirements and author responsibilities can be found on our Editorial Policy and Workflow webpage in the section "6 Roles and Responsibilities of the Authors, Referees and Editors". Below this information the institutional address should be written in a separate line in the following format: department, organization, street/P.O. box, city/town and zip code/postal code, country. If several affiliations need to be mentioned, consecutive Arabic numerals should precede the address and these numerals must also be placed as superscript after the respective author's name. At least one author must be designated with an asterisk as the person to whom correspondence should be addressed. The full name and the email address of the corresponding author(s) separated by a hyphen should be given in a new paragraph following the affiliation. Finally, the meaning of the asterisk must be explained. We also highly encourage all authors to link their ORCID record to their manuscript. During the submission process, the submitting author will now be asked to link their existing ORCID record to their manuscript, or create an ORCID record, if they do not already have one. All co-authors will also be provided a link where they too can amend this information. It is not necessary to include the ORCID iD directly in the manuscript, only in the online submission system.
The abstract should summarize the context and purpose of the study, the main findings and provide a brief summary and potential implications. Abbreviations should be used sparingly in the abstract. Citations and references should not be given in abstracts. Only standard characters and those that can be included using the font type “symbol” are allowed.
Five keywords in alphabetical order describing the main topics of the paper should appear below the abstract for indexing purpose. They should be separated by a semicolon.
The introduction section should be written from the standpoint of researchers without specialist knowledge in that area. It should clearly state the background of the research, as well as its purposes and significance, and should include a brief statement of what is being reported in the article.
The results and discussion section should contain a description of the experimental results that substantiates the conclusions of the work. A comprehensible discussion which links the results to related investigations and to existing knowledge in the relevant field should follow. The sections may also be separated. The presentation of experimental details in this section should be kept to a minimum. Information already obvious in tables, figures or schemes should not be reiterated in the text if it is unnecessary for any important discussion.
This section should emphasize the major interpretations and conclusions of the paper as well as their significance. The preparation of this section is optional.
This section, together with the supplementary material provided in the supporting information files, should describe the experimental methods used in the work in sufficient detail to allow repetition of the work by others. An experimental section should only be included in the main manuscript if up to 5 compounds with their preparation and characterization data are given. If more than 5 compounds are described the experimental section should be given as supporting information.
General experimental methods should be mentioned at the beginning of the experimental part. If the same procedure is used several times one detailed representative example should be given. All new compounds should be fully characterized and sufficient evidence must be provided to establish the identity and the degree of purity of each compound. Elemental analysis should be added whenever possible. Each description of an individual synthesis experiment should start with the systematic chemical name and the structure label of the reaction product, followed by an exact experimental description including details of the workup procedure. Authors are encouraged to use common abbreviations or molecular formulas for solvents or reagents and to reference other chemical structures by using the structure label instead of a chemical name. Yields of isolated and purified products are preferred to yields determined spectroscopically or chromatographically. Attention should be drawn to hazardous materials or procedures by adding the word “Caution” followed by a brief description.
Ethical approval for any human or animal experimentation must be provided by the responsible author’s institutional committee and a statement that all experiments were performed in compliance with the relevant laws and institutional guidelines must be included in the Experimental section of the manuscript. In addition, for any experimentation involving human subjects a statement that informed consent was obtained must be provided in the Experimental section.
Literature references must be provided for all already known compounds. If the method of preparation is already known, the description should start with “In a manner analogous to [literature reference]” or “In a manner similar to [literature reference]”. Previously published characterization data should be republished only if useful for comparison to new data, such as literature melting points or literature values for optical rotation. All other published characterization data or published spectra should not be repeated, but appropriate literature references should be given instead.
Copies of spectra used in the characterization of compounds may be reproduced as figures in the supporting information. Nucleic acid sequences and protein sequences should be deposited in an appropriate database in time for any relevant accession numbers to be included in the published data. When reporting a new X-ray structure of a small molecule a CIF file (as supporting information) and a structural drawing with probability ellipsoids (ORTEP plot) should be given. A table containing the essential crystal-related data should be provided in a human readable format in the supporting information file. X-ray crystallographic data for small molecules should be deposited at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), CSD: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/deposit. The accession number should be included in the manuscript.
If supporting information files are provided, each should be described in this section of the manuscript, providing the following information:
Additionally, supporting information files may be referenced within the body of the article to allow the creation of a hyperlink in the full text version. For example "(see Supporting Information File 1 for full experimental data)" could be embedded at an appropriate place in the section "Results and Discussion" or "Experimental".
In this section, persons who are not manuscript authors, however have contributed to the work, should be acknowledged with their permission for the contributions they have made, such as technical assistance, providing materials or advice. This section may also include a dedication of the article to a scientist of outstanding merit. Should a manuscript contain extensive text parts from a thesis or dissertation written by one of the manuscript authors, this should also be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section.
In this section the authors can acknowledge the source(s) of financial support for the research reported in their article by naming the financially supporting body(s) followed by associated grant number(s) (if applicable). It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to provide the relevant funding information from all authors.
In general authors are obliged to perform literature searches and to cite original publications describing closely related work.
A complete list of all references should be provided at the end of the article with an individual reference number for each reference. All references must be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals, in the order in which they are first cited in the text. The references should be inserted at the appropriate location in the text by writing the reference number in square brackets. Multiple citations should be separated by commas within the square brackets. In case of more than two sequential references, ranges should be given. In general a reference should appear before a punctuation mark and not after. Reference citations should not appear in titles, headings or the abstract. Unnecessarily long lists of references are not desirable. Authors are requested to constrict the reference list to the most important or most recent references relating to a specific topic. However, all previous publications in which portions of the present article have appeared must be referenced. If references refer to a supporting information file, they should be listed at the end of that file.
The references should be presented in a style consistent with the ACS Style Guide and should not contain any form of note or comment. If automatic numbering systems are used, the reference numbers must be finalized and the bibliography must be fully formatted before submission. Web links and URLs should be included in the reference list. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL.
Examples of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry reference style are shown below. Please take care to follow the reference style precisely; references not in the correct style must be retyped, necessitating tedious proofreading.
Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry Reference Style
Article within a journal
Article within a journal with non-continuous (i.e. issue-based) pagination
Article within a journal with article number
Article within a journal supplement
Article within a journal with two separate editions or with translations
Article within a journal with additional Chemical Abstracts reference
In press article
Patent
Article within conference proceedings
Whole issue of a journal
Whole conference proceedings
Complete book
Book edition
Book chapter or article within a book
Book chapter or article within a multi-volume book
Chapter of a book in a series
Book with institutional author
Thesis
Link/URL
Software
Data from a repository or database
All figures and schemes must be embedded in the manuscript text after the paragraph where they are first mentioned. After the peer review process authors may be asked to upload individual graphic files separately. All diagrams, graphs, spectra, micrographs or other types of illustrations should be presented in the manuscript as a figure. The designation scheme should be used primarily for reaction schemes. It is the authors' responsibility to provide figures at a sufficiently high resolution to ensure high quality reproduction in the final article. The following guidelines must be considered when preparing figures and schemes:
The following file formats can be accepted:
A raster image (e.g. GIF, TIFF JPEG or BMP) consists of pixels. If a raster image is enlarged it will become fuzzy. To ensure that such images will be of high quality in the web and in the printed article a minimum of 300 dpi (colored graphic) or 600 dpi (black and white graphic) is required.
By contrast, a vector image (e.g. SVG, CDX, EMF or WMF) is a mathematically defined geometric shape which can be enlarged without a loss of quality of the depiction. All lines of the image are sharp at any zoom.
Chemical Structures should be prepared according to the guidelines given below. The parameters are benchmarks which should be used to prepare chemical structures with chemical structure editors such as ChemDraw, etc.
| chain angle | 120 degree |
| bond spacing | 18 % of width |
| fixed length | 0.406 cm (11.5 pt) |
| bold width | 0.056 cm (1.6 pt) |
| line width | 0.018 cm (0.5 pt) |
| margin width | 0.046 cm (1.3 pt) |
| hash spacing | 0.071 cm (2 pt) |
| scale | 100 % |
| font | Arial |
| size | 8 pt |
All tables must be inserted in the manuscript text after the paragraph where they are first mentioned. Large datasets can be uploaded separately as supporting information file. The following guidelines must be considered when preparing tables:
Tabular data provided as supporting information files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls), Word document (.doc) or comma separated values (.csv). As with all files, the standard file extensions should be used.
A graphical abstract must be supplied as a separate file and not embedded in the main manuscript. Together with the article title, the graphical abstract should provide the reader a quick visual description of the type of chemistry covered in the article. Colors should be used judiciously in graphical abstracts. The graphical abstract will be scaled to fill a nominal space of 15 by 5 cm, and should be prepared accordingly. Preferably, any graphic included within the manuscript should not be duplicated.
Authors are encouraged to provide extensive supplementary material to support and enhance the scientific research described in the main manuscript. Supporting information files can be uploaded separately during the submission process with a maximum file size of 100 MB for each file. All supplementary files will be virus-scanned on submission. They will be subject to peer review and published online alongside the final article. Many types of supplementary data and thus a wide range of technical formats are allowed and supported as detailed experimental procedures including characterization data, spectra, graphs, photos, X-ray crystallographic data, physical data, biochemical data, large tables, rotatable molecular models, animations or movie files. Unlike the main article any supporting information should address the interest of specialists rather than the interest of general readers.
All pages in a supporting information file containing text, for example, the description of experimental methods, should be numbered consecutively (exception: CIF files). In such cases the first page must be a title page listing the manuscript title, the full name of all authors and the affiliation data as given in the main manuscript to emphasize the relationship between supplementary material and the corresponding article. If appropriate a detailed table of content may follow.
If possible, spectra or other graphics should be combined to a single file rather than to provide numerous individual files each containing a single image. All spectra or graphics should be marked with the corresponding structure label. Crystallographic information files (CIF) must be supplied separately from other file types.
Ideally, file formats for supporting information files should not be platform-specific, and should be viewable using free or widely available tools. The following are examples of suitable formats.
Additional documentation
Animations
Movies
Tabular data
Files should be given the standard file extensions. This is especially important for Macintosh users, since the Mac OS does not enforce the use of standard extensions. Please also make sure that supporting information files are not linked to each other.
If you wish to use/reuse material (figures, images, tables, etc.) you may or may not need permission to do so.
When you request these permissions, please note that we are both a non-profit publisher and an “STM Publisher”.
When requesting permission for reuse, with some publishers, it may be advantageous to use the fact that we are Signatories of the STM Permissions Guidelines. The following points are especially important to take note of if you choose to reuse content under these Guidelines:
Hints for using the CCC RightsLink or CCC Marketplace application to obtain permissions (either under STM Guidelines or in other cases):
After you have obtained all necessary permissions, these must be uploaded as review-only material during submission. Your article cannot be accepted until proper permissions have been obtained. It is advised to begin collecting permissions for reuse during the writing phase of manuscript preparation, but at the latest, before submission. If no permission is necessary because you are the original creator of the content, then please upload a statement as review-only material that the content is created by you and not held under copyright.
Proper acknowledgement and attribution for reuse of third-party content includes the following:
The Permissions Worksheet may assist you in keeping track with these permissions. For more complicated cases where a manuscript requires many permissions, we may require this worksheet to be completed. You may download the Permissions Worksheet as an Excel file here:
We accept submissions in all areas of organic chemistry on a continuous basis in addition to these open thematic issues