Species Diversity is an open-access journal that publishes new and significant findings on zoological diversity, with its primary focus on the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine fauna of Japan, East Asia, and the surrounding regions and seas. The journal also strives to contribute to an understanding of the faunal diversity of all parts of the world. The editors actively encourage the submission of papers dealing with all aspects of animal taxonomy, systematics, speciation, biogeography, and life history. Various styles of paper are sought, ranging from voluminous revisions and review articles to single species descriptions, other short research reports, and essays concerning zoological nomenclature. Species Diversity is published by the Japanese Society of Systematic Zoology (JSSZ). It was founded in 1996 as the English-language successor to the Proceedings of the Japanese Society of Systematic Zoology (Dōbutsu Bunrui Gakkai Shi: ISSN 0287-0223) [Apr. 1965–Dec. 1996], which is now published by JSSZ under the title TAXA as a Japanese-language journal.
Manuscripts are accepted on the understanding that the content has not been submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere. All manuscripts, except for Correction or Erratum one, will be reviewed by at least two referees (single blind) selected by the Editor and Associate Editors. Correction or Erratum manuscripts will be checked by the Editor. The manuscripts revised after review will be returned to authors again after a final round of copy-editing, check for adherence to International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, Fourth Edition (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1999), etc. The criterion for publication is the scientific merit of the work. Final responsibility for acceptance of manuscripts lies with the Editor. The Editor and Publisher reserve the right to modify manuscripts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition, and to improve communication between author and reader. A published article becomes the permanent property of the Japanese Society of Systematic Zoology. Prior to its publication, the author(s) should transfer the exclusive copyright of the article, which includes the rights set forth in Articles 27 and 28 of the Japanese Copyright Act, to the Society with the exception of the copyright of any supplementary material of the article. From Volume 28 Issue No. 2 in 2023, all articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium of format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source. The contents of the articles are licensed under the CC BY 4.0, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material from other sources is included in the article, it is the authors’ responsibility to obtain an appropriate permission from the copyright holder.
Contributions may take the form of RESEARCH ARTICLES, CORRESPONDENCE (taxonomic/nomenclatural notes), REVIEW ARTICLES, and CORRECTION or ERRATUM. Authors wishing to contribute Review Articles, Correction, or Erratum should contact the Editor or Associate Editors before submission. Articles are indexed in DOAJ, EBSCO, Scopus, and Zoological Record.
Authors must include at least a member of the Japanese Society of Systematic Zoology. However, this does not apply to submit by author(s) who have been requested by the Editorial Committee.
Submissions from outside Japan: An overseas author who pays the Article Processing Charge (APC) of 5,000 Japanese yen (JPY) will receive membership in the JSSZ until December of the current year. During this time, the author may submit any number of articles without paying additional APC(s).
Submissions from within Japan: From 2023 the annual membership dues are 8,000 JPY, which includes subscriptions to both Species Diversity and the Japanese serial Taxa.
Page charges: Thirty free offprints of Research Articles are available. There are no page charges if the printed version is in black and white and only the PDF version is in color, but 5,000 JPY + tax is charged for each page appearing in color in the printed version.
Authors should submit manuscripts by e-mail to the Editorial Committee (species_diversity@jssz.sakura.ne.jp). The manuscripts are to be sent as attachment files; down-sized image files for FIGURES and spreadsheet files for TABLES should be unified with the text into a single MS Word document. The document size should not exceed 5 MB. If you have problems in reducing the file size, ask to the Editor before the file is sent by e-mail.
In addition, be sure to include the following four statements in your cover letter. The details are also to be clearly stated in the Competing interests and/or Ethics in the Declarations section of the manuscript.
All authors have agreed to submit the manuscript, and the corresponding author has received permission from the co-author(s). Please also state each author’s contributions to the work in the Authors Contributions section.
This article has not previously been published and is not concurrently being considered for publication elsewhere.
The article does not infringe on the copyright or other proprietary rights of any person or entity and does not contain abusive, defamatory, obscene, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful statements of any kind.
The authors declare that they have no known conflicts of interest that may have influenced the work reported in this article. If in fact any conflicts of interest exist, they must be specified here in place of this statement.
Ethics and Disclosures: The journal supports the code of ethics of the “Declaration of Helsinki”. Research must be conducted within this framework (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Submitted manuscripts will be checked for plagiarism and duplicate publication using the Crossref Similarity Check text-matching software (https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/). We endorse and follow the WAME (World Association of Medical Editors) principles and guidelines on how to deal with misconduct: Recommendations on Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals (https://wame.org/recommendations-on-publication-ethics-policies-formedical-journals).
In addition, based on the Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), authors are also required to properly comply with international legislation concerning the use of genetic resources and with the laws and regulations of the countries where specimens were collected. It is also recommended that, in the manuscript, the authors include proper evidence of ABS compliance (e.g., code numbers of official documents, names of local institutional contacts, etc.). If necessary, the ABS advisory editor will provide authors with suggestions and recommendations on correct compliance with their ethical responsibilities.
Manuscripts should be prepared with a word processor, which is compatible with MS Word. The entire manuscript, including references, should be typed double-spaced, with margins of at least 30 mm. All pages should be numbered consecutively in the bottom center.
Manuscripts must be written in English. Spelling should be either British or American (current usage), but must be consistent throughout the manuscript. In general, the recommendations of Scientific Style and Format: the CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (Cambridge University Press 1994) should be followed. Authors not writing in their first language are asked to have manuscripts checked for grammar and syntax before submission. Manuscripts should be writ ten so that they are intelligible to the professional reader who is not a specialist in the particular field. Manuscripts which do not conform to these requirements may be returned to the author prior to review for correction. The manuscript should be presented in the following order:
Title page: This should contain the title of the contribution and the name(s) and address(es) of the author(s). The full postal address, telephone (and facsimile) number(s) and email address of the author who will receive correspondence and check the proofs should be included, as well as the present address of any author if different from that where the work was carried out. The main title should, where possible, contain the major key words used in the body of the manuscript; the title should include the class/phylum designation when a generic or specific name is used but should not contain authorities for scientific names. A short running title (less than 60 characters including spaces) should also be provided.
Abstract: All manuscripts must include a brief but informative Abstract, intelligible without reference to the main text. It should not exceed 300 words and should describe the scope of the work and the main findings. The names of organisms used (including authorities) should be given. References to literature should not be included.
Key Words: Key words (3–10) should be provided below the Abstract to assist with indexing of the article.
Introduction: This section should include sufficient background information to set the work in context. The aims of the manuscript should be clearly stated. The Introduction should not contain either findings or conclusions.
Materials and Methods: This should be concise but provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be repeated by others. The source of material should be given in detail, where possible.
Results: Results should be presented in a logical sequence in the text, tables, and figures; repetitive presentation of the same data in different forms should be avoided. The results should not contain material appropriate to the Discussion.
Discussion: This should consider the Results in relation to any hypotheses advanced in the Introduction and place the study in the context of other work. In purely descriptive manuscripts, Materials and Methods, Results, and, if necessary, Discussion may be combined.
Supplementary Information: Titles and/or brief descriptions of the supplementary materials are indicated here. The authors ensure that the supplementary information is explicitly referred to in the main manuscript, e.g., ‘Supplementary Fig. 1’, ‘Supplementary Tables 1, 2’, and ‘Supplementary Movie 1’. Where a manuscript is not accompanied by supplementary materials, this section need not be provided.
Acknowledgments/Acknowledgements: Technical assistance including proper evidence of the correct compliance of the ABS regulation may be acknowledged here. It is the authors’ responsibility to obtain written permission to quote material that has appeared in another publication. Please also refer to the specific examples published together on the journal’s website, along with the NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS.
Authors Contributions: Information about individual contributions to the work is provided here. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the contributions of all authors are accurate. The contribution statements should follow CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy; https://credit.niso.org/):
John Smith: Conceptualization; Writing – original draft; Formal Analysis; Writing – review & editing. Taro Yamada: Supervision; Funding acquisition; Writing – review & editing.
Funding: Details of funding sources of for all authors, including grant numbers, should be provided in this section. If no specific funding was provided for the research, the following statement should be made here:
This research has not received any specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sector.
Declarations: A declaration of competing interests should be provided here. If there is no conflict of interest, the following statement should be included:
Competing interests. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Where research has been conducted under any experimental regulation, details of the permission of experiments should be declared in this section:
Ethics. The animals used in this study were treated in accordance with the Regulation on Animal Experimentation under the permission numbers XXXX, YYYY.
References: In the text, references should be made by giving the author’s name with the year of publication in parentheses, not separated by a comma. If there are two authors use “and” to link authors’ names in all cases. When reference is made to a work by three or more authors, the first name followed by “et al.” should be used on all occasions. If several manuscripts by the same author(s) and from the same year are cited, a, b, c, etc. should be put a er the year of publication. Within parentheses, groups of references should be cited in chronological order, separated by semicolons [e.g., (Nakano 2010, 2014; Nakano and Lai 2012)]. Sources of authorities of any scientific names used in the manuscript should not be included in the References, except for those used in headings and in synonym lists; when desired, explicit citations of such sources may be made separately or by appending “(q.v.)” to the source. References should be listed in alphabetical order of the first author, the number of co-authors and the date of publication at the end of the manuscript, in the following form. For two-author references with the same first author, they are listed by the alphabetical order of the second author. For three-or-more-author references with the same first author, they are ordered only by the date of publication. If given, doi should be specified.
For papers and books with original titles written in a Roman-alphabet language:
Baker, H. R. 1980. A redescription of Tubificoides pseudogaster (Dahl) (Oligochaeta: Tubificidae). Transactions of American Microscopical Society 99: 337–342. doi:10.2307/3226011
Distant, W. L. 1904. The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Rhynchota, Vol. 1. Heteroptera. Taylor & Francis, London, xxxviii + 438 pp., 3 pls. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.9193 [in part]
Ferraguti, M., Grassi, G., and Erséus, C. 1989. Different models of tubificid spermatozeugmata. Hydrobiologia 180: 73–82. doi:10.1007/BF00027539
Finogenova, N. P. and Shurova, N. M. 1980. A new species of the genus Aktedrilus (Oligochaeta, Tubificidae) of the littoral zone of the Sea of Japan. Pp. 6–69. In: Kusakin, O. G. (Ed.) Coastal Plankton and Benthos in the Northern Parts of the Sea of Japan. Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok. [In Russian]
Motokawa, M. 2017. “Land emergence” and “elevation shift” affect diversification: a new perspective toward understanding the high species diversity of terrestrial animals in Japan. Pp. 3–23. In: Motokawa, M. and Kajihara, H. (Eds) Species Diversity of Animals in Japan. Springer Japan, Tokyo. doi:10.1007/978-4-431-56432-4_1
Papers including nomenclature acts (including proposals for new scientific names) with different publication years of printed publications and electronic publications should be listed in the following form (the electronic “Version of Record” of the below paper was published in 2016, and then
the paper was paginated in 2017):
Yoshida, T. and Motomura, H. 2016. A new cardinal fish, Verulux solmaculata (Perciformes: Apogonidae), from Papua New Guinea and Australia. Ichthyological Research 64: 64–70. doi:10.1007/s10228-016-0539-2
For electronic references:
Fricke, R. and Eschmeyer, W. N. 2012. A guide to fish collections in the Catalog of Fishes database. Available at http: //research.calacademy.org/redirect?url=http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/Ichthyology/catalog/fishcatmain.asp (16 March 2012).
For papers and books with no original title written in a Roman-alphabet language, translated titles in square brackets should be provided and, for books, transliterated titles as well:
Katayama, H. and Takahashi, F. 1980. [Tadpole shrimps—their introduction to Japan and ecology]. Pp. 133–146. In: Kawai, T., Kawanabe, H., and Mizuno, N. (Eds) Nihon no Tansuiseibutsu—Shinryaku to Kakuran no Seitaigaku [Freshwater Organisms of Japan—Ecology of Invasion and Disturbance]. Tokai Daigaku Shuppankai, Tokyo. [In Japanese]
Makushok, V. M. 1958. [The morphology and classification of the northern blennioid fishes (Stichaeidae, Blennioidei, Pisces)]. Trudy Zoologicheskogo Instituta Akademii Nauk SSSR 25: 3–129. [In Russian]
Reshetnikov, Y. S. 2003. Atlas Presnovodnykhryb Rossii. V Luvkh Tomakh. Tom 1. Vtoroye Izdaniye [Atlas of Russian Freshwater Fishes. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Second Edition]. Nauka, Moscow, 379 pp. [In Russian]
Sheiko, B. A. and Fedorov, V. V. 2000. Glava 1. Pp. 7–69. In: Moiseev, R. S. and Tokranov, A. M. (Eds) Katalog Pozvonochnykh Kamchatki i Sopredelynykh Morskikh Akvatoriy [Catalog of the Vertebrates of Kamchatka and Adjacent Waters]. Kamchatskiy Petchatniy Dvor, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. [In Russian]
Titles of journals should not be abbreviated; those not written in the Roman alphabet should be transliterated, not translated.
Tables: Tables must be typed on separate sheets. They should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals with a descriptive title above the table. Column headings should be brief, with units of measurement in parentheses. Use superscript letters (not numbers) for footnotes and keep footnotes to a minimum. Vertical lines should not be used to separate columns. The approximate positions of tables should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript.
Figures: Illustrations, photographs and graphic charts are classified as figures, in stead of plates, and should be numbered consecutively. Photographs must fit within the single column (85 mm) or full text width (177 mm) and should be no more than 253 mm in height. Line figures should be drawn or grouped to fit these dimensions after reduction. A scale bar must be included for all photo graphs, with the scale indicated above or beside the bar.
Digital image files can be submitted as e-mail attachments. Although various types of file formats, including TIFF, JPG, GIF, PICT, BMP, or AI, are acceptable for the Printing Company, it is recommended that authors produce files in EPS format, prepared with Adobe® Photoshop or Adobe® Illustrator. When an analogue original artwork (hand-drawn line art, 35 mm reversal film, or black-and-white photographs) is to be scanned, the required minimal scanning resolutions are: 1200 dpi for line drawings: 266 dpi for black-and-white photographs; 800 dpi for combined line drawings and black-and-white photographs; 350 dpi for color photographs; and 600 dpi for combined line drawings and color photographs. Authors producing figures digitally should consider the above resolutions throughout the preparation process.
Figure legends: Legends should be self-explanatory and typed on separate sheets. The legend should incorporate definitions of any symbols used. The approximate positions of figures should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript.
Abbreviations and units: SI units (meter, kilogram, etc.) should be used wherever possible. Statistics and measurements should always be given in figures; that is, 10 mm except where the number begins the sentence. Confusing mathematical notation, particularly subscripts and superscripts, should be avoided; negative exponents are acceptable as long as they are used consistently. Use only standard abbreviations. The word “Figure/Figures” should be shortened to Fig./Figs unless starting a sentence.
Scientific names: The scientific name should be given for every animal with authority and date when first mentioned (for a botanical name, authority only). The generic name may be abbreviated to an initial in subsequent references except where intervening references to other genera would cause confusion. Common names of organisms, if used, must be accompanied by the correct scientific name when first mentioned.
Others: The following instructions should be adhered to when manuscripts are prepared with word-processing software:
Do not use a carriage return (enter) at the end of lines within a paragraph.
Use only one space after punctuation marks.
The text should be unjustified (i.e., only left margins aligned) except for the title page and headings.
Do not use end-of-line hyphenation, except in the case of compound words.
Use italics where appropriate, not underlining.
Use page footer function; do not insert page numbers in the text.
Distinguish a hyphen, an n-dash, and an m-dash.
Check the following before submission: (1) all references cited in the text are included in the reference section; (2) all figures and tables are cited in the text, in numerical order; and (3) the reference section is in proper format.
The Editorial Committee will register accepted manuscripts with nomenclatural acts in ZooBank before publication and the LSIDs will be indicated on the first page of each published paper. The authors need not register their publications and nomenclatural acts in ZooBank.
Page proofs only will be sent to the author and they should be returned to the Editor within 3 days of receipt. Alterations to the text and illustrations are unaccept able at proof stage (except correction of printers errors) and authors will be charged for changes from their original manuscript.
An offprint order form giving the cost of offprints will be sent to the corresponding author with the proofs. The order form should be returned with the corrected proofs. Offprints will be sent out within 3 weeks of publication, by surface mail.
(Revised on 18 July 2024)