Abstracts
No abstract is required for Bioscience Explained articles. However, a short descriptive title of no more than 150 characters (including spaces) is required. This will not appear in the article, but will be used in a 'Description' Meta tag of a corresponding Web page, and will thus be the text recovered by Internet search engines.

Keywords
Authors are encouraged to submit a list of keywords; up to 950 characters (including spaces) may be used. Like the short description, they will not appear in the article, but will be used in the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file and corresponding Web page(s). The keywords may be edited by the Bioscience Explained editorial staff.

Footnotes
The use of footnotes is discouraged; all relevant material should be included in the main body of the text.

Glossaries
Glossaries should not be used. If an article uses technical terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers, they should be defined and explained in the article, in context. However, where an English article is not translated into Swedish, Bioscience Explained editorial staff may compile word lists to help Swedish readers.

References
Up to 20 sources of additional information may be referred to. References to relevant Web sites are encouraged. These should be listed alongside the other references. In the body of the text, please insert numbers in square brackets to denote a reference. References should then be listed in numerical order in the references section (Bioscience Explained staff will insert hyperlinks and adjust the page layout as necessary). The following styles should be adopted for references:

Journals

Jones, K.L. and Strömberg, E. (1987) How to remove the stones from fresh olives. Culinary Review 10 (5) 125-127.

i.e., the full title of the paper and journal must be given.

Books

Jones, K.L. (1999) First aid for olive de-stoners. Athens: Kalamata Press. ISBN: 0 123 4567 0 Z.

Strömberg, E. (2000) The breakdown of olive stones on rubbish tips. In Oleaceous Research, (Second edition) ed. Jones, K.L. pp. 174-182. Athens: Kalamata Press.
ISBN: 0 123 4567 1 4.

i.e., the edition of the publication should be mentioned where the work is not the first edition, and ISBNs should be included.

Web sites

Olive-lovers' News
www.olive.org.gr

i.e., the title of the Web site should be given. Where URLs are likely to change frequently, the main (home) page of the site should be referred to.

Units, symbols and nomenclature

The International System of Units (SI) should generally be used throughout. Volume, however, presents particular problems. Although cm3 and dm3 are sometimes preferred in schools, these should not be used in Bioscience Explained. The units millilitre and litre are preferred, using the abbreviations ml and l. Similarly, µl should be used.

Please note: as the symbol µ often defaults to m in electronic documents, authors may wish to spell out units in words or use, for example, cm3, where confusion may arise between ml and µl. These will be replaced by the appropriate abbreviations in the published document.

Full stops (periods) should not be used after unit symbols.

Where units are referred to in the text with no specific quantity attached they should be spelt out in words e.g., nanograms.

Abbreviations
Uncommon abbreviations must be defined when first used, with the abbreviation in parenthesis e.g., Association for Science Education (ASE).

Chemical names
For chemical names the rules of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) should be followed. Please note that these often require that American English spelling should be used e.g., sulfur; aluminum.

If desired, the common current name may be included in parentheses after the recommended name e.g., ethanal (acetaldehyde).

Enzymes
To avoid confusion, Enzyme Commission codes may be used when appropriate, together with the name of the enzyme e.g., Endo-polygalacturonase (EC 3.2.1.15).

As the SI unit for enzyme activity (the katal) is seldom used, authors may use other units, but they must ensure that these are adequately defined.

Decimals and thousands
The point (.) should be used to denote decimals, not the comma. For thousands, a space should be left e.g., 3 000.