Contribute
Showcase your research or story in Physiology News. It is published online three times a year and members have exclusive access to the latest issue using our member area on our website.
We aim to keep our readership appraised of the latest developments in physiology research, policy and education of physiology and its allied disciplines.
We welcome pitches for all article types listed below. Please submit a preliminary title, a sentence or two summarising the focus of the article, and a brief list of a bullet points listing the various sections, like a short outline to magazine@physoc.org.
The Physiology News Advisory Group reserve the right to edit submitted article where they feel it necessary to improve clarity or brevity and we cannot guarantee publication. We will be pleased to provide assistance to contributors whose first language is not English. We will aim to send proofs to authors in time for small corrections. Excessive corrections can inflate our production costs and take time from the production process, so please be mindful of this.
To appeal to our entire membership, articles can be pitched at a range of levels, from a level comprehensible to undergraduates through to a level of interest to senior scientists. Please consider whether some of the images or figures in your article might be suitable for the cover, and send images that are as high resolution as possible (minimum 300 dpi).
Opinions expressed in articles and letters submitted by, or commissioned from, Members or outside bodies are not necessarily those of The Physiological Society. Physiology News is a member magazine and therefore is not subject to peer review and authors are advised to not include unpublished hard scientific data.
Rights and Reuse
The permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) prefix of Physiology News is: 10.36866. For the suffix, we are using the following: https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.issue#.page# (with a,b,c) being used as necessary after page number with multiple articles on the same page. We are currently in the process of uploading the archive of issues, so not all articles will have DOI numbers at present. Please check the relevant issue to see which article has its own webpage, and thus a DOI link at the top.
Please note that starting from the April 2020 issue, Physiology News will be published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). In other words, except where otherwise noted, content is licenced under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, which permits reuse, redistribution and reproduction, as well as remixing, transformation, and building upon the material for any purpose, in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For more info, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
We encourage all contributions written in English, regardless of the author’s native language. The decision to commission and publish articles is made on the merits of the content and the interests of our readership. Our editors are here to support authors and are happy to assist non-native English speakers improve the readability and comprehensibility of their articles, without altering the original intended meaning or the author’s voice.
Accessibility
It is our policy that all figures and images, where feasible and practical to do so, should be colourblind friendly (e.g. red-green fluorescent micrographs can be pseudo-coloured magenta-green). We are happy to advise contributors on how to improve the accessibility of their articles, so feel free to email us at magazine@physoc.org . Alternatively, contributors can find more information about the resources available to design colourblind friendly figures here.
Diversity
Our Advisory Group endeavours to recruit a broad array of articles, but we also aim to reflect the diversity of physiologists themselves and the work they do. Therefore we actively encourage contributions from typically underrepresented communities (i.e. based on sex/gender, ethnicity/race, age, LGBTQI+, Disability, etc) within physiology, both to enhance minority visibility and shine an equitable share of the spotlight on issues important to those communities. Read more about The Society’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion here.
Author checklist
- Body text of article
- Title of article: Approx 4-10 words. These should catch the reader’s attention.
- Subtitle of article: for Feature articles only
- Your name and affiliation: Preferably please include one institution of affiliation.
- Author bio: Please provide a short summary of up to 50 words of biographical information you want to highlight to the readership.
- Your photo (for feature articles only): Please provide a high resolution (minimum 300 dpi) headshot of yourself.
- Images and captions: Please include images as separate files. These images should be the highest resolution possible (minimum 300 dpi). If the images are not your own, please provide appropriate credit, as well as proof that you own the copyright or that the images are copyright free. In the instance that there are images that need to be purchased, we might be able to accommodate this on a case-by-case basis. Provide a list of captions/figure legends for the images/figures within the text document of your article.
- Data: please do not include any unpublished data in your articles.
- References: Preferably do not include more than 10 references for features, 3 or fewer for shorter articles. Please include references in Harvard style, to be cited in the text as (Hodgkin & Huxley, 1952) and formatted in the reference list as in the following example for a journal article:
- Hodgkin AL, Huxley AF (1952). A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve. The Journal of Physiology 117(4), 500 – 544. https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.1952.sp004764
- Please include DOIs for all articles that have them. We need to include these to comply with CrossRef guidelines, which also enable us to create DOIs for articles in Physiology News.
- Use ‘et al.’ after two authors i.e. double author papers have a complete reference, and anything with three or more authors lists ‘First author et al.’.
- Online content should adopt the following format:
Cox L (2015). Tips for designing scientific figures for color blind readers. [Online] Somersault18:24. Available at: somersault1824.com/tips-for-designing-scientific-figures-for-color-blind-readers/ [Accessed 30 May 2019] - Footnotes: Please only include footnotes when absolutely necessary, and do not include more than five footnotes.
Feature articles: 1000–2000 words
The first paragraph will be printed as a standfirst and should be used to introduce the piece and draw in the reader. Even if the rest of your article is pitched to more senior scientists, this first paragraph should be comprehensible to undergraduates. Please divide the rest of your article into subsections, and include subheadings for each of these. If you’re using a lot of terminology that would be unfamiliar to readers, include a box explaining that terminology. We encourage articles that bring scientific research to life by telling the stories behind the research. Here is one example that uses diary entries interspersed with scientific explanations.
Letters to the Editor: up to 700 words
We invite comments and questions sparked by articles you’ve read in Physiology News. Letters are typically up to 700 words, but the length will depend on the number of submissions in the issue. We will endeavour to include your full submission. This will sometimes require that we publish it in a later issue of the magazine.
News and views: 500–700 words
This section provides short updates from within The Society, updates relevant to physiologists (related to policy, education, publishing), updates from relevant sector organisations, book reviews, or opinion pieces. The pieces should start by clarifying why the story is newsworthy, then provide relevant context and background.
Events: 500–700 words
Event reports can be written prior to a conference or afterwards. Here are a few questions/tips to consider in order to write an engaging event report:
What makes/made the event unique? Will it/Did it bring together groups that don’t usually interact? Will it/did it target a specific demographic? Will there be/was there a debate involved?
Rather than listing all the speakers, provide deeper insight into a few of the ones you find most interesting, giving readers a flavour of their work that might entice them to attend the event/research them further or attend our future events.
Aim to give the article a personal spin. Are there particular symposia or talks you’re looking forward to/enjoyed? Is there anything else about the meeting that makes/made it particularly appealing to you?
Membership: 500–1000 words
This section aims to put a spotlight on the interesting lives and work of our Members, including those who have received Society grants or awards, or have taken up important positions in The Society’s leadership. Tell us the story of your interesting outreach, education, mentoring, or other projects, or recount the progression of your career.
Obituaries: up to 900 words
Tell the story of the person, including their professional biography as well as more personal aspects such as anecdotes about them or their personal interests. How did the deceased come to a career in physiology? Describe the course of their career, their close collaborators, and, of course, their major achievements. Give an indication as to their personality and their standing. What is their legacy, personal and professional?