Content Guidelines

start

Contents

The content of a Living Review

All submitted articles are peer reviewed and edited carefully, with attention paid to content, organization, and style.

See also “Who the readership is”
See also “How long and broad the review article should be”

The review article

  • should have the depth and style of a plenary review talk at a major international conference,
  • should present what their authors think are the most important results,
  • should give readers a guide to the most relevant literaure in the field.

To achieve this, you may want to address the following questions in your article:

What is the research being done on a topic?
  • What are the main problems being examined?
  • What is the significance of those problems?
  • How do they fit with research going on in other fields?
  • Are there important subsidiary themes in the field?
How are the research problems formulated?
  • What are the main concepts and constructs used?
  • What mathematical / computational / experimental / observational techniques are used?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of these research approaches?
  • What needs to be refined?
  • Are there intriguing or problematic aspects?
  • What needs to be tackled for the first time, or looked at again with a fresh eye?
Where do the research trends discussed point to?
  • What are we confident of, and what are the accomplishments?
  • What are the main questions that are now at the forefront?
  • In which direction(s) is/should the research field be moving?

Language

  • Your language should be clear and sentences should not be too long to make online reading easier.
  • The use of units and the spelling should be consistent throughout your review.
  • Abbreviations and acronyms should be explained when you first use them.

Multimedia

  • We encourage you to enhance your article with as many multimedia files as you feel appropriate to illustrate a point (e.g. animations, figures and other additional material like source code).
  • You should link to other electronic sources on the web if they are relevant.
  • Detailed proofs of theorems, and very long mathematical derivations may be better communicated in an appendix.
Examples:

For details on including multimedia, see “Technical guidelines”.

Structure

The electronic format requires a specific structure for the article. In most cases individual sections will become separate HTML documents which will be connected by links.

  • You should section articles according to logical breaking points.
  • Use connecting sentences at the end and beginning of sections to make the logical relationship between them apparent.
  • Include a short introduction at the beginning of each section, and a summarizing statement at the end of each section. This will help users who browse rather than read in sequential order.

To see how the online version of the article works see “Viewing Articles Online”.

References

We want high quality references, so that readers can start their literature search from your review:

  • Provide as complete information as is attainable,
  • add links to online versions of articles if possible,
  • ADS link and/or DOI,
  • links to project web sites, homepages, etc.

Annotate your references within the text, not in the bibliography item, since within the journal wide reference database embedded comments would appear out of context.

For details on formatting references, see “Citation guidelines”.

start | top