plos

PLOS Journals

Workflow

1. Identify the exact journal and article type, open its current author guidelines, and fill in the limits table below. Never rely on remembered limits.
2. Check whether a format-free first submission is allowed. If it is, spend effort on content and mandatory statements rather than layout.
3. Restructure the manuscript into the venue's front matter and sections (see below).
4. Prepare the required statements, figures and supplementary files.
5. Run the checklist, then assemble the submission package: manuscript, source files, figures, declarations and cover letter.

Verify first (mandatory)

Each PLOS journal has submission guidelines (e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines) and policy pages (data availability, ethics, competing interests). PLOS LaTeX instructions and template: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. Confirm:

Item	Requirement (fill in)
Abstract length / structure (PLOS ONE commonly up to 300 words)
Author summary (PLOS Biology, Comp Bio, Genetics, Pathogens, NTDs)
Article type specifics (e.g. PLOS Medicine structured abstract)
Figure file formats and size

PLOS ONE publication criteria

PLOS ONE evaluates scientific rigor, not perceived impact: original research, sound methods, conclusions supported by data, adequate reporting, ethical standards, intelligible English, and data availability. Write the cover letter around soundness, not novelty.

Structure

Title (plus a short title), authors and affiliations, Abstract, (Author summary where required), Introduction, Materials and methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions (optional), Acknowledgments, References, Supporting information captions. Methods may come before or after Results depending on the journal.

Mandatory policies

• Data availability: all data underlying the findings must be fully available without restriction at publication, in the paper, supporting information, or a public repository, with a Data Availability Statement. Restrictions (e.g. patient privacy) must be explained with an access route. See reproducibility-statement.
• Ethics statement in Methods: approving committee names and approval numbers, consent type, and animal welfare details, as applicable.
• Financial disclosure and competing interests, entered in the submission system and reflected in the manuscript.
• Reporting guidelines: CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, ARRIVE and others, submitted as supporting information checklists where relevant.
• Trial registration for clinical trials. Protocols uploaded as supporting information.
• Code: encouraged or required depending on the journal (PLOS Computational Biology has a code policy).

References

Vancouver style: numbered in order of citation, in square brackets in the text [1], placed before punctuation. Use the PLOS CSL style or plos2015.bst from the LaTeX template. Include DOIs. Preprints can be cited. Unpublished data and personal communications go in the text, not the list.

Figures and supporting information

• Upload figures as separate TIFF or EPS files meeting the resolution/size rules. Check them with PLOS's PACE tool, which fixes many format problems automatically. Figure legends go in the manuscript after the paragraph that first cites them.
• Supporting information files (S1 Fig, S1 Table, S1 Text, ...) are uploaded separately with captions at the end of the manuscript.
• LaTeX submissions: PLOS requires a PDF plus source (single .tex with references included, or .bbl) at acceptance. Follow the template's rules on packages.

Related skills

abstract-and-title (author summary), reproducibility-statement, systematic-review-prisma, statistical-analysis, venue-templates (bundled PLOS ONE scaffold), cover-letter-to-editor.