Instructions for Contributors
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club
Authors are invited to submit papers on topics relating to the broad themes of taxonomy and distribution of birds. Descriptions of new species or subspecies of birds are especially welcome and may be accompanied by colour photographs or paintings. Such papers are prioritised for publication. Registration of papers and new taxa names on ZooBank is handled by the editors. The cover letter / e-mail with initial submission must include a statement indicating the manuscript reports research that has not been published or submitted concurrently to another peer-reviewed journal in either the same or another language, and that it is submitted exclusively to Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club.
Submission may be made electronically to the Editor (GMKirwan@aol.com): if your paper includes many illustrations/photographs, please prepare a separate file containing both the text and figures in .pdf format, as well as a Word file with the text alone. Photographs are welcome for inclusion. All reviews, the return of papers and reviewers’ comments to authors, is undertaken electronically.
Papers should follow the general style:
Title – lower case, centred, bold
by Author(s) – lower case, centred, italics
Introductory section without a heading
Primary headings – lower case, centred, bold
Secondary headings – left justified, lower case, italics, bold
English names of animals should begin with capitals; give English name at first mention of every species.
Numerals – thousands separated by commas, e.g. 12,000
Units of measurement, SI. Space between values and unit, e.g. 12.1 g
Statistical tests in the form: (r28 = 3.12, P < 0.01). (C23 = 7.31, n.s.)
Citations to references in text: Author (Date); Author & Author (Date); if three or more authors – Author et al. (Date); or (Author(s) Date) etc.
References:
Author, A. (or Author, A. & Author, B.) Date. Title of paper. Title of journal in italics. Volume: pages.
Author, A. Date. Title of book in italics. Publisher, place of publication.
Author, A. Date. Title of paper/chapter. In Editor, A & Editor, B. (Eds.) Title of book/proceedings in italics. Pages. Publisher, place of publication.
Address(es): addresses of authors, including at least one e-mail per paper.
Format for tables (to be typed on separate sheets at end of paper):
TABLE n
Description of table contents, including any abbreviations
Column A | Column B | |
Row 1 | Data | Data |
Row 2 | Data | Data |
Legends for figures should appear at the end of the paper, in the form: Figure n. Text of legend, including key to symbols etc.
Authors should include an abstract; these usually should involve no more than 150 words.
All papers accepted are published open access in both .html and .pdf format on the BioOne website, at https://bioone.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-british-ornithologists-club. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.