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Submissions and publication policies

Submissions

Submissions should consist of the following items, submitted through the Human Biology Digital Commons website. Please have all your materials ready upon submission, as your submission progress isn’t saved in the portal:

  • A cover letter to the editors
  • A single manuscript file (MS Word). The manuscript file must include the full text of the article, the reference section, followed by the tables and figures with their corresponding captions. All text should be double-spaced.
  • Each figure must be uploaded as an individual file. Just above the "Submit" button, there is a heading "Additional Files," with a box to check. After you hit submit, you will be taken to a page where you can upload figures or any other additional files.
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    Style Notes

    General

    Authors should organize their manuscript as follows:

  • MS Word Document, double-spaced
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    The first page should include:

  • Title page
  • Author names and affiliations
  • Email address of the corresponding author
  • Short title
  • Keywords
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    The second page should include:

  • Abstract of the paper (500 words maximum)
  • The abstract should give a summary of the article and not be merely descriptive. For example, state the results and conclusions; do not use phrases such as “The results are discussed in terms of anthropology.” The pre-review made by the editor is largely based on the abstract and title; therefore, the abstract should be well-written and informative.
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    The third page should include:

    Here begins the actual text of the manuscript. The text should contain the following sections:
  • Introduction: outlining the background of your topic and stating your purpose in writing the present article
  • Materials and Methods: the study population, statistical methods, measurement methods, etc.
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions (if needed)
  • Literature Cited: references should be cited by author and date (see examples in References section below)
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    Additional Required Sections

    The following sections are required for all manuscripts and should appear after the manuscript text and before the references section.

    Data Availability Statement

    All accepted manuscripts are required to publish a data availability statement to confirm the presence or absence of shared data. If you have shared data, this statement should detail how the data can be accessed, including an identifier (DOI, accession number) from the repository where the data are deposited. Include both original data generated and any secondary data used in the study. If data cannot be shared for ethical or legal reasons, explain this in the Data Availability Statement. Most public repositories can generate a password for reviewers or allow a future release date in order to keep the data private until after publication.

    Ethics Statement

    Human Studies and Subjects

    For manuscripts involving living human participants, the statement should include details on how the ethical review of the study was conducted. This includes information on the committees, organizations, and individuals involved in the ethical review. Also include information on how study participants were recruited and consented to participate in the study. Relevant information should also be included in Materials and Methods.

    Human Remains

    For manuscripts involving human remains, the statement should include information on the excavation history of the remains and how the institution and researcher obtained access to the remains. If descendent communities were consulted on the study, this engagement should be reported. If there are currently no identified descendant populations, this should be made clear in this section. Human remains qualify as whole or portions of deceased individuals, including skeletal, genetic, and mummified samples or data derived from human tissues.

    Animal Studies

    For manuscripts that involve animal research, the statement should include the name of the ethical body giving approval, and the protocol and procedures used. Authors should also include information on how experiments were performed in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. Relevant information should also be included in Materials and Methods.

    Author Contributions

    The contributions of all authors listed on the manuscript must be described. CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy, https://credit.niso.org) can be used to describe each author’s individual contributions to the work. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions of each author’s contributions are accurate and agreed upon by all authors.

    The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant categories below (authors may have contributed in more than one role):

  • Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
  • Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models
  • Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
  • Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
  • Formal Analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze/synthesize study data
  • Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
  • Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
  • Data Curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse
  • Writing – Original Draft: Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
  • Writing – Review Editing: Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically visualization/data presentation
  • Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
  • Project Administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
  • Funding Acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication
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    References

    Each in-text citation should be author name plus the year as follows:

  • Single author: (Harrington 2021)
  • Two authors: (Follis and Mulligan 2025)
  • More than two authors: (Kolman et al. 2011)
  • More than one publication with the same first author and same year: (Tushingham, Damatio, et al. 2020; Tushingham, Eerkens, et al. 2020)
  • The Literature Cited section references should be in alphabetical order by author. This section should include all references cited in the text, figure captions, and tables.

    • Each reference in the Literature Cited section should be complete. For journal articles with more than three authors, include the names of the first three authors, then "et al.," year, title of article, journal title (abbreviated according to Index Medicus, or spelled out completely if the journal is not listed in the Index), volume number, and inclusive page numbers. For articles with two or three authors, "and" should precede the last author's name. The first author should be listed as Last Name, X. X. and subsequent authors should be listed as X. X. Last Name. See examples below:

    Journal Article: Morton, N. E., C. Smith, R. Hill et al. 1976. Population structure of Barra (Outer Hebrides). Ann. Hum. Genet. [Vol. no.]:339–352.

    Journal Article in press: Huang, X., Z.-Y. Xia, and X. Bin. (In press). Genomic insights into the demographic history of southern Chinese. Innovations.

    Book: Davidoff, L., and C. Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. [ed. here]. London: Hutchinson.

    Chapter within an edited volume: Melton, P. E. 2012. Mennonite migrations: Genetic and demographic consequences. In Causes and Consequences of Human Migration: An Evolutionary Perspective, [edition goes here, e.g., 2nd ed.], M. H. Crawford and B. C. Campbell, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 299–316.

    Book with translator: Herodotus. 2003. The Histories. A. de Sélincourt, trans. London: Penguin.

    Master's thesis: Isaacks, M. 2015. The use of near-infrared remote sensing in the detection of clandestine human remains. Master’s thesis, Texas State University.

    PhD dissertation: Kim, J. 2016. Understanding population-specific age estimation using multivariate cumulative probit regression for Asian skeletal samples. PhD diss., University of Tennessee.

    Preprint: Xia, Z.-Y., S. Yan, C.-C. Wang et al. 2019. Inland-coastal bifurcation of southern East Asians revealed by Hmong-Mien genomic history. Preprint, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/730903v1, doi: 10.1101/730903.

    Online publication: Popp, J. 2018. How Indigenous knowledge advances modern science and technology. The Conversation, 2 January. https://theconversation.com/how-indigenous-knowledge-advances-modern-science-and-technology-89351.

    General web page: US Environmental Protection Agency. 2020. Environmental justice. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice (accessed 29 May 2020).

    Conference proceedings: Vigil-Hayes, M., M. E. Duarte, N. D. Parkhurst et al. 2017. #indigenous: Tracking the connective actions of Native American advocates on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, February 2017, Portland, OR, USA. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1,387–1,399.

    Software: R Core Team. 2016. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org.

    Tables

    Place all tables after the Literature Cited section. Each table should be placed on a separate page, double-spaced. Use the table function in Word if possible (if you cannot use the table function, use tabs between entries to make the columns; do not insert a series of spaces). Do not use vertical or slant rules. Keep in mind that the table should not contain more columns of data than will fit on a printed page turned sideways. Tables should be numbered sequentially in the order they are to appear. Make sure that each table is cited in the text in sequential order. Each column should have a heading, and all units should be clearly marked (%, cm, etc.).

    Figures and Figure Captions

    After the tables should be a list of figure captions, followed by the figures. Because the figure captions are typeset, they should not be part of the actual figures; all figure captions should be placed on a separate page that comes before the figures.

    Figures should be supplied as high-resolution TIF or JPG files. Resolution should be approximately 300 dpi at actual printed size (i.e., the size when printed in the journal). Please make sure that legends, axis labels, and other text elements are of sufficient size to be readable when re-sized to fit the journal layout.

    Reviewed Books

    Books produced by U.S. and international publishers should be sent for review to Connie J. Mulligan, Department of Anthropology, 2033 Mowry Rd, PO Box 103610, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610-3610.

    Addendum

    It is the style of Human Biology to use the Human Gene Mapping Workshop nomenclature for genetic systems. This nomenclature system and its terminology are explained by Shows et al. in their article “Guidelines for Human Gene Nomenclature: An International System for Human Gene Nomenclature (ISGN, 1987)” [Cytogenet. Cell Genet. 46:1128 (1987)]. In addition, the abbreviations for specific alleles, enzymes, markers, etc. are given by McAlpine et al. [“Report of the Nomenclature Committee and the 1989 Catalog of Mapped Genes,” Cytogenet. Cell Genet. 51:1366 (1989)]. It is also the style of the journal to use metric units. In addition, symbols, diacritical marks, and other unusual characters should be clearly marked on the manuscript. Also be sure to distinguish between the number “1,” the letter “l,” and the letter “I” if you are using a sans serif typeface.