The following sections provide guidelines on how to prepare and compose your manuscript. Please follow these standards to ensure a smooth peer-review and production process.
If you or your institute plans a press release or some other promotional work on your paper, please inform Media and Communications at Copernicus (media@copernicus.org) before. We may be able to assist you and help distribute your work further.
Please download the Copernicus Publications LaTeX Package to prepare your manuscript. The package contains the LaTeX2e class file, the configuration file, all needed style files, as well as a template serving as the framework for your manuscript. Please download the Copernicus Publications LaTeX Package, version 6.2, 15 January 2020.
Authors are kindly requested to make use of the template.tex file embedded in the LaTeX Package since most of the definitions for the structure of manuscript elements are described there. Since we convert all typeset TeX files into XML, the expressions and markups have to be highly standardized. Therefore, please keep the following in mind:
If you are familiar with BibTeX, you can use copernicus.bst from the package. It will sort your bibliography entries alphabetically and produce the proper layout of the reference list.
To prepare your manuscript in a format compatible with MS Word (*.doc, *.docx, or *.rtf), please use the Copernicus Publications Word template (docx). Please use the Microsoft equation editor and not the graphic mode when compiling your equations.
To prepare your manuscript following the literate programming [1] paradigm, you can use R Markdown [2]. This format allows you to interweave text and code in a single plain-text file format. Your manuscript is then fully transparent and reproducible – see this GeoLog blog post for some background and examples [3]. R Markdown supports multiple programming languages, including R, Python, and SQL. It is intentionally kept simple and therefore very easy to learn. The Markdown document is rendered into a PDF based on the Copernicus Publications LaTeX Package (see section "Technical instructions for LaTeX") in version 5.0. Thus R Markdown manuscripts support the full features of LaTeX for chemical formulas and mathematical equations as needed, as well as powerful citation management with BibTeX.
Please install the rticles
[4] package to use the Copernicus Publications template for R Markdown. You can create a new document based on the template and render it to a PDF with the following commands:
library("rticles")
library("rmarkdown")
rmarkdown::draft(file = "MyArticle.Rmd",
template = "copernicus_article",
package = "rticles", edit = FALSE) rmarkdown::render(input = "MyArticle/MyArticle.Rmd")
The created file MyArticle.Rmd
includes a YAML [5] file header with a number of configurations and required metadata, such as authors and affiliations, running title, and special sections (e.g. code/data availability, acknowledgements). These options are explained within the document and can be deleted if not needed. The template also includes examples of text formatting, figure addition, table insertion, and citation/reference usage, etc.
RStudio [5] is a recommended editor for R Markdown documents and provides a user-friendly interface for document creation and a plug-in for comfortable reference management.
Please note that the Copernicus Publications template for R Markdown is not maintained by Copernicus but by community member Daniel Nüst.
For the review process a *.pdf file of the complete manuscript is required following the standards for sectioning and structure (see below). Tables and figures as well as their captions should be included in the text. All pages must be numbered consecutively and line numbers must be included. Please note that only manuscripts submitted in portrait format will be considered for review. Single pages in landscape format are not acceptable.
The abbreviation "Fig." should be used when it appears in running text and should be followed by a number unless it comes at the beginning of a sentence, e.g.: "The results are depicted in Fig. 5. Figure 9 reveals that...".
Papers should make proper and sufficient reference to the relevant formal literature. Informal or so-called "grey" literature may only be referred to if there is no alternative from the formal literature. Works cited in a manuscript should be accepted for publication or published already. In addition to literature, data and software used should be referenced (citations should appear in the body of the article with a corresponding reference in the reference list). These references have to be listed alphabetically at the end of the manuscript under the first author's name. Works "submitted to", "in preparation", "in review", or only available as preprint should also be included in the reference list. Please do not use bold or italic writing for in-text citations or in the reference list.
Please supply the full author list with last name followed by initials. After the list of authors, the complete reference title needs to be named. Journal names are abbreviated according to the Journal Title Abbreviations by Caltech Library, followed by the volume number, the complete page numbers (first and last page), the digital object identifier (DOI), and the publication year. If the abbreviation of a journal name is not known, please use the full title. In addition to journal articles, all reference types are summarized together with examples below.
If there is more than one work by the same first author, their papers are listed in the following order: (1) single author papers (first author), followed by (2) co-author papers (first author and second author), and finally (3) team papers (first author et al.). Within these three categories the respective papers are then listed as follows:
In terms of in-text citations, the order can be based on relevance, as well as chronological or alphabetical listing, depending on the author's preference. In-text citations can be displayed as "[…] Smith (2009) […]", or "[…] (Smith, 2009) […]". If the author's name is part of the sentence structure only the year is put in parentheses ("As we can see in the work of Smith (2009) the precipitation has increased"). If the author's name is not part of the sentence, name and year are put in parentheses ("Precipitation increase was observed (Smith, 2009)"). If you refer to multiple references at the same position all references are put in parentheses separated by semicolons ("Precipitation increase was observed (Smith, 2009; Mueller et al., 2010)").
Reference list | Short citation |
Single author: chronologically | |
Smith, P.: …, 2009. | Smith, 2009 |
Smith, P.: …, 2010a. | Smith, 2010a |
Smith, P.: …, 2010b. | Smith, 2010b |
Co-authors: alphabetically before chronologically | |
Smith, P. and Brown, P.: …, 2010. | Smith and Brown, 2010 |
Smith, P. and Carter, T.: …, 2007. | Smith and Carter, 2007 |
Smith, P. and Carter, T.: …, 2010a. | Smith and Carter, 2010a |
Smith, P. and Carter, T.: …, 2010b. | Smith and Carter, 2010b |
Smith, P. and Thomson, A.: …, 2005. | Smith and Thomson, 2005 |
Team: chronologically before alphabetically | |
Smith, P., Thomson, A., and Carter, T.: …, 2006. | Smith et al., 2006 |
Smith, P., Carter, T., and Hanson, M. B.: …, 2008a. | Smith et al., 2008a |
Smith, P., Carter, T., and Walter, N.: …, 2008b. | Smith et al., 2008b |
Smith, P., Carter, T., and Hanson, M. B.: …, 2009. | Smith et al., 2009 |
Smith, P., Brown, P., and Walter, N.: …, 2010. | Smith et al., 2010 |
Porter, J. G., De Bruyn, W., and Saltzman, E. S.: Eddy flux measurements of sulfur dioxide deposition to the sea surface, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 18, 15291–15305, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-15291-2018, 2018.
Jung, M., Koirala, S., Weber, U., Ichii, K., Gans, F., Gustau-Camps-Valls, Papale, D., Schwalm, C., Tramontana, G., and Reichstein, M.: The FLUXCOM ensemble of global land-atmosphere energy fluxes, arXiv [preprint], arXiv:1812.04951, 11 December 2018.
Singh, O. N. and Fabian, P. (Eds.): Atmospheric Ozone: a Millennium Issue, Copernicus Publications, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, 2003.
van Edig, X., Schwarze, S., and Zeller, M.: The robustness of indicator based poverty assessment tools in changing environments – empirical evidence from Indonesia, in: Tropical Rainforests and Agroforests under Global Change, Environmental Science and Engineering (Environmental Engineering), edited by: Tscharntke, T., Leuschner, C., Veldkamp, E., Faust, H., Guhardja, E., and Bidin, A., Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany, 191–211, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00493-3_9, 2010.
Buiter, S.: How syn-rift sedimentation promotes the formation of hyper-extended margins, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18622, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18622, 2020.
Iwata, M., Matsumoto, H., and Kojima, H.: Computer experiments on the plasma wave generation in the vicinity of Earths bow shock, in: Proceedings of the 6th International School, Symposium on Space Plasma Simulation Overview, Garching, Germany, 3–8 September 2001, 4–6, 2001.
Loew, A., Bennartz, R., Fell, F., Lattanzio, A., Doutriaux-Boucher, M., and Schulz, J.: Surface Albedo Validation Sites, EUMETSAT [data set], https://doi.org/10.15770/EUM_SEC_CLM_1001, 2015.
Randall, D., Dazlich, D., Heikes, R., and Konor, C.: CSU model for DCMIP 2016, Zenodo [code], https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5800992018, 2017.
Monger, J. W. H. and Journeay, J. M.: Guide to the geology and tectonic evolution of the southern Coast Mountains, Geol. Surv. of Can., Ottawa, Ont., Open File Rep. 2490, 77 pp., 1994.
Brown, R. J. E.: Permafrost in Canada, Geol. Surv. of Can., Ottawa, Ont., Map 1246A, 1967.
Kronberg, E. A.: Dynamics of the Jovian Magnetotail, Ph.D. thesis, International Max Planck Research School, Universities of Braunschweig and Göttingen, Germany, 133 pp., 2006.
Copernicus Publications: https://publications.copernicus.org/, last access: 25 October 2018.
The following aims to provide guidelines for authors on how to compose their manuscript with regards to conventions of English. Please note that the copy editor is responsible for applying these guidelines in addition to checking the grammar and punctuation of each manuscript (see English copy-editing services for more information). However, assistance from the author will expedite the production process.
The author's response should be structured in a clear and easy to follow sequence: (1) comments from referees, (2) author's response, (3) author's changes in manuscript. Regarding author's changes, it is recommended to provide a marked-up manuscript version (track changes in Word, latexdiff in LaTeX) converted into *.pdf and combined with the author's response.
In collaboration with the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), Copernicus Publications provides authors with the possibility of uploading video supplements and/or video abstracts relating to their accepted article.
If you wish to upload a video associated with your article, please register the video in the AV Portal of TIB Hannover and follow the instructions. Within about three days, the TIB will issue a DOI for your video. This DOI has to be entered during your production file upload at Copernicus after the acceptance of your manuscript. The journal library will use the DOI to link your article with the corresponding video.
Registration and upload steps
Technical specifications
An open-access journal for refereed proceedings in extraterrestrial research