Guideline for Research Article

Following are the general requirements for the writing format of original research articles in the Laboratory Animal and Comparative Medicine:

Please ensure that the authors check each item to see if the article meets all the requirements, and carefully modify and standardize it. Only manuscripts that meet the review and writing requirements can be arranged for the editing and processing stage after acceptance.

1. Titles must be complete, clear, and concise. The authorship and affiliations must be confirmed without dispute at the time of submission, especially as no changes can be made after acceptance. The affiliation name should be specific to the department or secondary organization, and the city and postal code should be provided. The first author and corresponding author should be introduced in detail at the bottom of the first page, including year of birth, gender, educational qualification, professional title, research direction, E-mail, and ORCID. If funded, the foundation name, number, and project title must be provided.

2. Original research articles should adopt structured abstracts, including objectives, methods, results, and discussion. The methods and results should be detailed and correspond with the main body. P-values must be included in the results section. The research findings should be objectively described in the conclusions section without overgeneralization. Abstracts should be written from the third-person perspective, avoiding terms like “we.” English abstracts must correspond exactly to Chinese abstracts, with accurate spelling and grammar and 3-5 keywords. Long abstracts of over 800 Chinese Characters are recommended.

3. The titles of the method section in the main body should reflect the content. Grouping details must be clearly introduced.

4. Main reagents and equipment providers, specifications, or models must be specified. Experimental animals should include microbial level, species and strain name, sex, age (in weeks), body mass and quantity. Source production license number is required. The experimental facility must comply with national standards and provide necessary information like the experimental animal use license number.

5. The main body should have a separate section on statistical methods, detailing the statistical software used, number of experiment repetitions, data presentation, comparison methods, and statistical significance criteria. Results should present quantitative data and not just descriptions, with statistical symbols in uppercase italics.

6. English abbreviations must include their full Chinese or English names when first mentioned in the abstract and text. Latin scientific names for species should be italicized. Chinese punctuation should be used throughout the text. Figures and tables must have Chinese and English titles and annotations, which should be self-evident.

7. Images must be provided in the highest resolution as single or combined full-column images, with specific refinement and combination requirements detailed separately (https://www.slarc.org.cn/dwyx/CN/news/news79.shtml). Coordinate graphs should have clear horizontal and vertical labels, scale values, group names, units, and statistical results between groups.

8. Physical quantity terms should be standardized.

9. The symbols for physical quantity units should be in a standardized form. When labeling units of physical quantities in figures and tables, the format “physical quantity/unit symbol” should be used.

10. For multi-digit values, use a space for thousands separator. Numeric ranges like 1.0～1.7% should be written as 1.0%～1.7% or (1.0～1.7)%. The format 1.52±0.13 mg should be altered to (1.52±0.13) mg. Ensure that data in tables are cross-checked and consistent with the narrative in the main body. The number of decimal places should be consistent for similar types of data.

11. The introduction section should cover the background of the research, reasons for conducting the research, a brief overview of the research, and its main objectives. The discussion section should detail the specific significance of each result, its relevance and differences compared to similar studies nationally and internationally, and should appropriately discuss the limitations of the current research and directions for future research.

References should include both Chinese and English sources, and be updated to the most recent year. Generally, more than 50% of references should be published in the last five years. Information of references must be rigorous and carefully checked one by one to ensure consistency with the content described in the main body and that the cited content is clear and complete.