MRS Bulletin Practical Information for Guest Editors
Scientific Quality: MRS Bulletin is widely cited, and our readers expect scientific quality. Make sure that each article meets this expectation by containing substantive material based on previously published work. Scientific arguments and conclusions should be reasonable and logical. Information that contradicts common principles should be questioned.
Level of Presentation: Articles should be overviews and written for technical nonspecialists. A person unfamiliar with the subfield, while having a basic understanding of materials science, should be able to follow the article and find the content understandable. Symbols and equations should be used only when absolutely necessary and should always be adequately defined or explained.
Content Relevance: While “materials science” can be interpreted broadly, content that seems far outside the core of materials science and unrelated to the interests of our readers should be avoided. Nonscientific content such as marketing, corporate or product promotion, and economic forecasting should be cut. Technical articles should be factual, not opinionated or speculative.
Scope/Overlap: Theme topics should be representative of work in the field throughout the world but need not be comprehensive. The articles in a theme should have minimal overlap, and as a group, the articles should hold together to form a balanced picture of the topical area without large gaps in coverage. If important areas are not covered extensively in the individual articles, they can be addressed in your introductory article. Articles should address or acknowledge the scope of work beyond the authors’ own labs, institutions, or countries.
Theme Introduction: You should begin drafting your introduction, expanding on the scope of your approved theme proposal, as early as possible following the approval and scheduling of your theme topic. Your introduction should provide a tutorial introduction of the theme topic that will give intelligent readers enough background to understand the articles that follow it. It should work to pull the articles together coherently and cohesively. Avoid using jargon and clearly explain terms that would be unfamiliar to those outside of your technical specialty. As with all MRS Bulletin articles, your introduction should include a ~100–150 word abstract and should not include unpublished or unreviewed results.
Your authors will be asked to provide preliminary abstracts of their articles to assist you in including brief descriptions of the articles to follow. In turn, the editorial office will circulate a draft of your introduction to your authors to provide them with the “bigger picture” of the topic’s scope and coverage and further guide them in writing their articles.
Confirming Authors: Once your theme is scheduled for an issue by the Editor, you should begin formally inviting and confirming the contributing authors. While it is not unheard of for changes in authorship to happen between the proposal and the invited authors, please be sure to keep a good balance between academic/industrial/governmental labs as well as a good international balance. There should not be more than one article from any single institution. Once the authors are confirmed, complete the Confirmed Author Form, providing all of the requested information (including article lengths and deadlines; see below) and submit the form to the MRS Bulletin editorial office.
Article Lengths: The total length of the theme section of the Bulletin is approximately 25,000 words, including figures/tables at 250 words each, abstracts, keywords, references, and figure captions. Your introductory article should be approximately 3,000 words. This leaves 22,000 words to be divided up as you see fit among your topical articles. While many editors divide this word limit evenly among the articles, the lengths should be assigned based on expected content (in other words, you may feel that certain topics will require more room than others to adequately cover the area). This information is to be included in the invited author form submitted to the MRS Bulletin editorial office.
Deadlines: As mentioned above, you should begin drafting your introduction, expanding on the scope of your approved theme proposal, as early as possible. Similarly, your authors will be asked to submit preliminary abstracts for their articles with a deadline three to four weeks following the dissention of the author information letters. Using the abstracts and the following three to four weeks, you can further focus your introduction before submitting the draft to the editorial office for circulation among your authors.
It is up to you to assign a final article deadline for your authors according to your schedule; however, we strongly recommend a deadline set a minimum of six weeks before the final submission deadline to allow you time to review the articles, obtain necessary revisions, revise your introductory article, and gather all the required materials for submission. The Authors’ Deadline is to be included in the invited author form submitted to the MRS Bulletin editorial office.
Reviewing/Revising: In reviewing the articles and requesting revisions from the authors, you should keep in mind the Scientific Quality, Level of Presentation, Content Relevance, and Scope/Overlap as outlined above. Other items to keep in mind are:
- Accuracy: Math and chemical equations should be checked for appropriate balance (i.e., elements and charge balanced in chemical equations; units balanced in equations).
- Use of symbols should be minimized, and those used should be defined within the text. Symbols should be marked appropriately for roman, italic (scalars), or bold (vectors) type.
- Use of acronyms should be minimized, and those used should be spelled out when first mentioned (followed by the acronym in parentheses) and explained if the meaning is not obvious from the expanded description.
- Figures, captions, and discussion of figures in the text should be carefully checked to make sure they all match. This is a very common place for errors. Figures should add value and clarity beyond what can be achieved through words. Symbols should be defined, axes labeled, units indicated, size markers included in figures, and legends clear.
- Other mechanics: Be sure each article has a title, author names, an abstract, keywords, references, and figure captions. Check to make sure that the article is within its assigned length. Our editorial office will edit articles for proper American English and reformat the articles to conform to our house style.
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