BirdingASIA – Guidelines for Contributors
BirdingASIA is a forum for articles on the avifauna of the Oriental region. Regular features include articles on identification, enigmatic species, little visited birdwatching 'hotspots', species under threat, unusual anecdotal records and short field-based studies. Manuscripts submitted are subject to editing and refereeing where appropriate. New publications for review, records for 'From the field' and Letters to the Editor are always welcome and will be published as soon as possible after receipt. The Editor is happy to discuss contributions with authors and advise on preparation. Some basic guidelines are given below:
General
British English, not American, spelling must be used, thus ‘colour’, not ‘color’, ‘grey’, not ‘gray’, ‘analysed’, not ‘analyzed’ etc. Metric units and their international symbols must be used, dates should be written 1 January 2020, times of day as 08h30, 17h55 (24-hour clock). Numbers one to ten should be written in full, except when used with a measurement abbreviation or higher number, thus: five birds, but 5 km and 5–11 birds. Numerals are used for all numbers greater than ten, written thus: 11, 110, 1,100, and 11,000. Single quotation marks are to be used.
Taxonomy and nomenclature
When a bird species is first mentioned, both the English and scientific name must be given, thereafter the English name only. Scientific trinomials need be used only if subspecific nomenclature is relevant to the topic under discussion. These recommendations apply also for other animal or plant species mentioned. Taxonomy and nomenclature should generally follow IOC (worldbirdnames.org, Gill et al. 2020) but deviations from this are permitted so long as this is specified at the start of the manuscript, e.g. “taxonomy and nomenclature follow del Hoyo & Collar (2014, 2016)”.
Submitting
Submissions should be addressed to The Editor (currently Alex Berryman) birdingasia@orientalbirdclub.org. Text, tables, figure legends (which must be self-explanatory) and appendices should be combined in one Word.doc file.
Images
All relevant images submitted will be evaluated and, if appropriate, the Publications Committee reserves the right to swap images. JPEG files must be 'maximum' quality, that is, at their minimum compression. Slides must be scanned on a specialist slide scanner. If images are large, please email them with a file-transfer service (e.g. WeTransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive).
Figures (maps, diagrams)
These should preferably be sent as high-resolution files (JPEG, PNG or TIFF). Maps should be marked with a scale and north arrow.
Disclaimer
Every effort is made to retain articles in their submitted form, but the Publications Committee reserves the right to make necessary changes, very occasionally without notifying the author. All authors will receive proofs of their article prior to publication to check for errors. All contributors submitting material to BirdingASIA also give permission for its use on the OBC websites. It is assumed that the above conditions have been understood and accepted.
Contact addresses
The Editor, BirdingASIA birdingasia@orientalbirdclub.org or Oriental Bird Club, P. O. Box 324, Bedford MK42 0WG, UK ISSN 1744-537X.