Common Mistakes

 This guide explains several common issues noted by our editors at each stage of the publishing process. Avoiding/addressing these kinds of mistakes before submitting will make things easier for you in that you will get less extraneous comments and more high-level feedback on your science. 

1.  Senior author missing. All manuscripts at eiRxiv are required to have a senior author. More information is provided on our Author Eligibility and Information page.
2. Inclusion of previously published figures. Figures that have been previously published cannot be used in your manuscript unless you have written permission from the author of the figure and the place of previous publication due to copyright reasons. If you feel that a previously published figure is absolutely essential to your manuscript please contact our editorial team where we will work with you to determine if the figure is necessary to include and provide guidance on the process of getting approval.
3. Manuscript is written like a lab report. One of the hardest things is transforming your work from a standard lab report format into a polished manuscript for publication! Our review process is aimed at helping our student authors with this, but here are some tips and tricks to help get you started:
   1. Use our manuscript template as you write your manuscript!
      1. We developed this template to specifically help our authors during the writing process and give examples of common mistakes in various sections of a manuscript.
   2. Look at previously published manuscripts at eiRxiv.
      1. We launched the server in April of 2025 and expect to have examples for you to review by the summer of 2025.
4. Formatted for publication already. Manuscripts submitted to us should not be formatted like the final posted PDFs you see of our articles. This formatting is done by our editors once the entire review process has been completed. Please use our manuscript template instead.
   This means that you should not use two-column formatting, font colors besides black, or place your figures directly in the results section of your manuscript (figures should still appear at the very end of your Word file above their caption).

1.  Figures are low resolution. Figures should be of high enough resolution that they remain clear when scaled up or down in size. If your figure is not easily readable in the Word file of your manuscript, it will show up grainy in the final PDF of your manuscript. Figures tend to size down well, but rarely size up nicely; so, we always recommended erring on the side of saving your picture too big rather than too small. Please make sure you are saving your figures as images (JPEG, PNG, or TIFF) and not just taking screenshots of them!
2. Tables submitted as images. Tables need to be editable and located at the end of your Word file. Our proofing editors will help edit tables so they show up clearly in the final PDF. To do this they need to be able to easily change the cell size and spacing!
3. Equation formatting. We have more information about equation formatting in our “Equation Guide” found in our Author Resources.