JACS Formatting Requirements: Complete Author Guide

JACS publishes Articles, Communications, Perspectives and Spotlights. Notes, and Comments on papers already published, are not considered.

Source: ACS author guidelines for JACS (accessed October 8, 2026)

The Communication count is the one authors get wrong. ACS says the word count, not the template's page length, is the defining limit, and tells you exactly how to measure it: select from the abstract to the end of the main text, leaving out title, authors, affiliations and anything after the main text, and read the word processor's total. References are excluded "to allow article titles to be included at submission." A Communication over 2,200 words has to be cut before acceptance.

Communications are for results of "unusual urgency, timeliness, significance, and broad interest," and the cover letter must say briefly why yours qualifies. They use no section headings, and long footnotes are not allowed. Several short Communications on one closely related body of work are not acceptable; ACS asks for an Article instead.

Articles need standard headings and, per the guidelines, an opening that explains why chemists in other areas should care. Extensive literature reviews are not accepted inside an Article. Perspectives are usually invited, and ACS asks would-be authors to contact the Editor about the topic before writing.

Both Communications and Articles need an abstract of no more than about 250 words that gives the reason for the work, the most important results, and the conclusions. Pasting it into the web form does not count. It has to be in the manuscript document as well.

For Communications, ACS adds that the principal conclusions should ideally appear in the opening sentences. Put a number in the first two lines of the abstract: a yield, a selectivity, a rate constant, a binding constant. "We report a new method for" with no figure attached reads as a specialist paper.

A TOC graphic is required for every Communication and Article, and it must sit in the manuscript document file. The ACS TOC guidelines set the rest:

• Fits an area no larger than 3.25 x 1.75 inches (about 8.25 x 4.45 cm), submitted at actual size

• Sans serif lettering such as Helvetica, preferably 8 pt and never smaller than 6 pt

• TIF at 300 dpi for color or 1200 dpi for black and white, or EPS in RGB with fonts outlined or embedded

• Labeled "For Table of Contents Only" and placed on the last page of the manuscript, optionally also uploaded as a graphic file

• Entirely original artwork by a coauthor, with no photograph or caricature of any person, no logos or trademarked products, and ideally not a figure that already appears in the paper

ACS wants the graphic to give "a quick visual impression" of the paper "without providing specific results." That last clause is the common miss. A shrunken results figure with axis labels and data points breaks the spirit of the rule and is unreadable at TOC size anyway.

Under ACS Fast Format, figures, charts, tables, schemes and equations go inside the text at the point where they are discussed. Separate graphic files can wait until revision.

Resolution for graphics pasted into the manuscript:

• Black and white line art: 1200 dpi

• Grayscale art: 600 dpi

• Color art: 300 dpi

Size and lettering:

• Single column: up to 240 points (3.33 inches) wide

• Double column: 300 to 504 points (4.167 to 7 inches) wide

• Maximum depth 660 points (9.167 inches) including the caption, allowing 12 points per caption line

• Lettering no smaller than 4.5 points at final size; Helvetica or Arial work well

• Lines no thinner than 0.5 point

Color reproduction costs nothing, but ACS asks you not to submit color for graphics meant to print in grayscale, and not to rely on color alone to carry information. Its contrast guidance cites the WCAG minimums of 4.5:1 for text and 3:1 for other elements.

Schemes and structures: schemes show reaction sequences and are numbered separately from figures. Structures should come from a drawing program such as ChemDraw. Each figure needs a caption below it that makes sense without the text; tables need a one-phrase title, with detail in footnotes, and should not duplicate what the text already says.

Trademarked items and images downloaded from the web are not permitted in any graphic.

At first submission, Fast Format lets you cite in any consistent style, provided every reference is complete and includes its title. The published paper uses ACS style, so most authors convert at revision.

What ACS style and the JACS guidelines require:

• Superscript Arabic numerals, numbered in order of first citation

• References and footnotes together in one list at the end of the text

• Journal titles abbreviated with CASSI (Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index), not NLM

• References available only online cited by DOI

• No excessive self-citation, and no unnecessarily long reference lists

• Written permission, attached to the cover letter, for anything cited as a personal communication or unpublished work

Example reference in ACS style:

(1) Smith, A. B.; Jones, C. D.; Williams, E. F. Catalytic Asymmetric
    Hydrogenation of Trisubstituted Olefins. *J. Am. Chem. Soc.* **2025**,
    *147*, 1234-1240.

Note the differences from biomedical reference styles: semicolons between authors (not commas), CASSI abbreviations (J. Am. Chem. Soc., not JACS), year in bold, and italic volume. Use the CASSI search tool to confirm abbreviations; Zotero and EndNote both ship ACS output styles, but they fall back to full titles when their databases miss a journal.

Supporting Information may never be included in the manuscript document. Upload it separately, as Supporting Information for Publication or for Review Only, and number every page of the PDF consecutively.

Three JACS-specific rules are easy to miss:

• Appendices can only appear in the SI, not in the manuscript.

• Associated Content: the manuscript needs a brief description of each SI file, placed at the end of the text just before the references.

• Related work under consideration: copies of related manuscripts, whether already in press, accepted, under consideration, or close to submission, must be attached at submission and marked for review only.

Typical SI contents for a JACS Communication:

• General experimental procedures

• Detailed synthetic procedures for all new compounds

• Characterization data: 1H NMR, 13C NMR, mass spectrometry, HPLC traces

• Copies of NMR spectra

• X-ray crystallographic data (CIF files)

• Computational details (methods, coordinates, energies)

• Additional control experiments and mechanistic studies

Reviewers read the SI as carefully as the main text. Organize it so a referee can find the data behind each claim in the paper without searching.

ACS provides Word templates for Articles and Communications (Word 2011 for Mac and Word 2010 for Windows) and a separate page of TeX/LaTeX guidance. The template is strongly encouraged but not required. Without it, ACS asks for Times and Symbol fonts only, 1.5 or double line spacing, and a normal document format rather than plain text. If you use a non-Western version of your word processor, save as RTF.

For LaTeX, the achemso package is the widely used ACS class. It handles ACS reference formatting through BibTeX, which is why computational and physical chemists tend to use it; synthetic groups more often work in Word with ChemDraw.

These are the JACS rules that do not exist, or differ, at most other journals.

1. Banned title words. Titles may not contain "First" or "Novel," or any part or series number. Acronyms are allowed in a title only if every kind of chemist would recognize them.

2. Authorship notes. A simple equal-authorship statement is allowed. Itemized author contributions, the CRediT-style list many journals now require, are not permitted anywhere in the manuscript or SI.

3. No abbreviations list. Define each unfamiliar acronym in parentheses at first use instead.

4. No disclaimers. Disclaimers are not allowed in the manuscript or the SI, and dedications belong only in the Acknowledgment, subject to Editor approval.

5. Author names in full. Write "John R. Smith," not "J. R. Smith," because initials alone break indexing.

6. Safety statement. Any unexpected or significant hazard must be stated in the Experimental Section of an Article or the main text of a Communication.

The JACS author guidelines set reporting rules for the following types of work. Follow them in addition to the usual expectations of your subfield:

Studies with animals or human participants must name the approving ethics committee and give the case number; human work also needs a statement that samples or data were obtained with informed consent. Missing characterization for new compounds remains one of the most common reviewer complaints.

• Communication measured against the old four-page template instead of the 2,200-word count

• Abstract pasted into the web form but missing from the manuscript file

• TOC graphic uploaded only as a separate file, or built from a data figure with specific results

• Supporting Information placed inside the manuscript document

• "Novel" or "First" in the title

• An itemized author-contribution statement copied from another journal's template

• Characterization data missing for compounds in the scope table

For JACS-targeted chemistry manuscripts, the same formatting failures appear often enough that they are worth treating as a pre-upload checklist rather than as copyediting cleanup.

Specific failure pattern: the main text is Communication-length, but the evidence package is Article-length. Authors cut the narrative to 2,200 words while leaving the burden of proof in a very long Supporting Information file. That satisfies the count but still fails the format, because the editor cannot follow the discovery logic without reading the SI.

Specific failure pattern: chemical structures are readable in ChemDraw but not in the submitted figure size. At 240 points wide, stereochemistry, atom labels, reaction arrows and yield annotations have to survive a 4.5-point lettering floor. Reviewers read the chemistry through the schemes first.

Specific failure pattern: characterization is complete for the lead compound but thin for the scope. A polished main figure cannot compensate for missing NMR, HRMS, crystallographic, computational, or control-data support in the SI.

Specific failure pattern: a manuscript first built for another journal. A file that started life elsewhere tends to keep that journal's itemized contribution list, its abbreviations list, and a graphical abstract uploaded on its own. All three break JACS rules, and none of them is caught by a word count.