eLife Formatting Requirements: Complete Author Guide

ELife's review process is unlike any other major journal, and it directly affects how you format and prepare your submission.

The current model (as of 2023 onward): eLife only peer reviews submissions that are available as preprints. Authors can submit directly or transfer a preprint from bioRxiv or medRxiv, and eLife will deposit the work as a preprint if it is sent for review and you have not posted it. The journal conducts peer review and publishes every reviewed paper as a Reviewed Preprint with its eLife Assessment and Public Reviews.

What gets published for every reviewed paper:

• eLife Assessment: A short editorial summary of the paper's significance and strength of evidence

• Public Reviews: The reviewers' assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the work, signed by eLife and not by individual reviewers

• Author Response: Your response to the reviews, if you provide one

This means your responses to reviewers become part of the permanent scientific record. Write them carefully. They're not just for the editor's eyes.

Formatting implication: eLife aims for minimal changes during submission of the Reviewed Preprint, and its staff work with authors on a wider range of file types for the Version of Record. You can also transfer a preprint from bioRxiv or medRxiv directly.

ELife asks for a short abstract.

• Length: normally 150 to 200 words (medical submissions can run to around 250 words)

• Structure: subheadings are discouraged, except for medical submissions, which should use Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions, Funding and, for trial reports only, Clinical trial number

• Biological system: if the species or broader taxonomic group is not mentioned in the title, it must be included in the abstract

eLife asks for a clear, measured, and concise summary of the work. Focus on the question, the approach, the main finding, and one sentence on broader significance.

Impact statement: eLife's submission information includes an impact statement: a single sentence (typically 15 to 30 words) that summarises the most important finding, complements rather than repeats the title, is written in the third person, and avoids acronyms that are not well known to a broad readership.

ELife does not have space or printing constraints, so any number of colour figures can be included within Research Articles, although it urges authors to present their results as concisely as possible.

Figure specifications:

Figure supplements: eLife uses "figure supplements" rather than "supplementary figures." These are additional panels or experiments that support a main figure. They're labeled as "Figure 1-figure supplement 1," "Figure 1-figure supplement 2," etc. This is a meaningful structural difference from other journals where supplementary figures are numbered independently (Fig. S1, Fig. S2).

The figure supplement system means each main figure can have multiple supporting figures directly linked to it. This creates a more logical organization than a flat list of supplementary figures. Reviewers appreciate it because they can see the supporting data in context.

Source data: eLife encourages authors to upload source data files linked to specific figures. These are the raw data underlying each figure panel. Source data files appear in the published article as downloadable attachments.

Table requirements:

• Tables should be editable and included within the article file (main tables at the end of the text file) so that they can be typeset

• eLife cannot accommodate tables as figures or figure supplements

• Coloured text and cells are discouraged in tables because they are less accessible and machine readable

eLife accepts any reference style and will format all references during the production process, so you do not need to spend time formatting them. If you use a reference manager, eLife suggests selecting APA style as the best match for eLife reference style. Please provide a DOI wherever possible.

Published works, datasets (newly generated and previously published), program code, and previously published methods must be appropriately cited and included in the reference list. References for data sets and program code should include a persistent identifier, for example a DOI or accession number.

Preprints should be cited with the author(s), year, title, name of the preprint server, and a DOI or URL.

ELife's approach to supplementary data is built around transparency and accessibility.

Figure supplements (described above): Linked to specific main figures. Peer-reviewed and published alongside the article.

Source data: Raw data files attached to specific figures or tables. Published as downloadable files.

Source code: Code used for analysis should be deposited in a public repository (GitHub, Zenodo) and linked in the paper. eLife strongly advocates for reproducible research.

Supplementary files: eLife discourages uploading large PDFs of data or text as supplementary files, but welcomes information that is not central to the narrative, such as long lists of strains or plasmids, in the most useful format.

Reporting standards: eLife asks authors to upload a completed form based on the MDAR checklist, describing where the submission covers areas such as sample-size estimation, replicates, and statistical reporting. eLife publishes the completed checklist.

Data deposition: Major datasets should be made available in a trusted digital repository (recommended), with domain-specific archives for data such as sequencing and structural data. Datasets should be cited in the text and listed in the reference section and/or the data availability statement, with accession numbers or DOIs.

Title page: eLife's submission system captures most metadata, so the title page requirements are minimal:

• Full title

• Author names and affiliations

• Corresponding author email

• Abstract

Cover letter: Include with your submission. It should briefly explain:

• What the paper is about

• Why it fits eLife's scope

• The preprint DOI (if already posted)

• Any related manuscripts under consideration elsewhere

ELife's scope covers all areas of the life sciences and medicine. Editors aim to review papers that report results significant within a particular field of research, or on a topic of broad interest, and in general do not review papers that appear to report incremental results. Your cover letter should explain what the paper does, why it matters, and why the evidence is solid.

These are the details that regular eLife authors know:

Preprint posting is required before review. eLife only peer reviews submissions that are available as preprints. You do not need to have posted one for the initial evaluation, and eLife can deposit the work as a preprint if it is sent for review.

Public Reviews and Author Responses are public. Every Reviewed Preprint includes the eLife Assessment, the Public Reviews and, if you provide one, your author response. Format your Author Response clearly and professionally because it becomes a permanent part of the scientific record.

eLife Assessment uses standardized language. The editorial assessment of your paper uses specific terms to describe the significance ("landmark," "fundamental," "important," "valuable," "useful") and the strength of evidence ("exceptional," "compelling," "convincing," "solid," "incomplete," "inadequate"). These terms have defined meanings in eLife's framework.

No traditional acceptance/rejection. Under eLife's reviewed preprint model, every paper that is sent for review is published as a Reviewed Preprint with a public assessment. Authors decide when they are ready to request a Version of Record.

ORCID iDs. eLife verifies the identities of authors primarily through email addresses and ORCID iDs.

Author contributions. Information about individual author contributions should be provided using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).

Competing interests. A competing interests statement is required for each author.

Funding information. List the sources of funding, with grant DOI or reference numbers where possible.

Ethics statements. For human participants research, state in the Methods the name of the institutional review board that approved the study; for animal research, follow the ARRIVE guidelines.

Structured manuscript sections. eLife usually expects Introduction, Results, Discussion, Materials and Methods in that order; medical submissions use Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. Short Reports and Research Advances can combine Results and Discussion.

For manuscripts targeting eLife, four patterns generate the most consistent desk-rejection outcomes.

Reviewed Preprint model misunderstood: revisions are optional. eLife operates a Reviewed Preprint model where authors can choose to revise or not, and the journal publishes the Public Reviews alongside the paper regardless. Manuscripts submitted without awareness of this model, particularly where authors expect a traditional round of revisions in response to reviewer requests, face friction in the process. Authors must decide at submission whether they are prepared for full transparency in the review record.

Significance statement too technical for the target audience. eLife's scope spans all areas of biology and medicine, and the editors expect the significance of each paper to be accessible across fields. The impact statement (and the plain-language eLife digest that some Versions of Record include) must be written for a non-specialist reader. Manuscripts where the significance statement uses jargon without definition or assumes deep field knowledge fail this accessibility standard.

Claims not supported by the volume and rigor of data. eLife has no maximum length for Research Articles, but its editors and reviewers look for every conclusion to be supported by sufficient experimental evidence. Papers that make broad mechanistic claims on the basis of a limited number of cell lines, a single mouse model, or correlative data without mechanistic validation attract critical Public Reviews and a lower eLife Assessment. The journal's transparency means these gaps are visible in the published review record.

Reproducibility requirements for code and data not met. eLife requires authors to provide the program code, algorithms and scripts needed to reproduce the published results, and to make all original data supporting the claims available in the manuscript, supplementary materials or a trusted digital repository (recommended). Submissions where this is incomplete, or where "data available on request" is used instead, do not meet eLife's data availability policy, which says that statement is not acceptable.

A eLife submission readiness check evaluates manuscript scope, data availability compliance, and significance framing against these desk-rejection patterns before you submit.