 Tools for Authors
This page brings together details of software and other tools that may be helpful to BioMed Central authors when formatting manuscripts for submission.
Reference management software
We recommend authors to use reference management software to ensure that their reference lists are correctly formatted.
BioMed Central's website allows references to be seamlessly downloaded and imported into the following reference management packages:
Authors who use the latest versions of EndNote and Reference Manager to format their references also benefit from a US $50 discount on BioMed Central's Article Processing
Charge.
Proofing tools
SciProof is a professional
tool for scientific proofing, spell-checking and style-checking. It works
with Microsoft Word, and although itis currently Windows only, a Mac version
is under development. Read a review
of Sciproof in The Scientist.
Graphics conversion tools
The following tools may be useful if you need to convert figures into a format suitable for submission to BioMed Central:
For tips and advice on figure cropping issues, see our figure cropping FAQ.
Statistics tools
Graphpad
software offers a selection of free online calculators
for doing quick statistical calculations.
XML-based article authoring tools
Publicon is a powerful scientific authoring tool. Incorporating the equation-editing engine of Mathematica, a logical reference manager, and all the features you expect from a word processor - Publicon's WYSIWYG interface enables authors to submit their manuscript as XML and MathML to BioMed Central journals in the form of Publicon's native Notebook (.NB) file. See our Publicon information page.
Submitting in XML brings many benefits including:
- Faster manuscript processing
- Discounted Article Processing Charge
- Better handling of equations (with support for MathML)
- Avoidance of article mark-up errors
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