PLOS/Author Guide

PLOS Topic Pages
PLOS Computational Biology • PLOS Genetics • PLOS ONE

About

For Authors

For Reviewers

Publications

Scope

Scientific scope: Topics should be within the scope of PLOS Computational Biology (e.g. algorithms, methods, processes), PLOS Genetics (e.g. concepts, phenomena, fields), or PLOS ONE (other topics in science and medicine)

Wikipedia scope: Topics should be absent from (English-language) Wikipedia, or be rated “Stub-Class” or “Start-Class” on Wikipedia’s quality scale (how to find an article's quality rating).

Format

PLOS Topic Pages are a format of broad review articles in PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, and PLOS ONE. They are are dual-published both in the journal as a copy of record, and into Wikipedia to seed a new Wikipedia page which acts as a living document.

Published in PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, or PLOS ONE
Published as Wikipedia page

Background

PLOS Topic Pages were started in 2012 by PLOS Computational Biology (see introductory editorial and blog post as well as a more recent case study and PLOS Computational Biology's Topic Pages collection). In 2017, PLOS Genetics joined the initiative, as detailed in a blog post. The scope was further expanded by the participation of PLOS ONE in 2018.

Submission

1) Presubmission inquiry
Ideally, submit a presubmission inquiry including a prospective Wikipedia-style abstract, expected section headings and some example Wikipedia pages that should link to the article you plan to write:
Comp Biol Genetics ONE

2) Account creation
Sign up for a Wikimedia account: Create account

3) Draft creation

4) Complete submission
When the draft is ready for peer review, submit to the relevant PLOS journal via editorialmanager:
Comp Biol Genetics ONE

Process

Topic Pages Wiki draft & public peer review → PLOS publication if accepted → Author copies to Wikipedia

Topic Pages are created, peer reviewed, and edited on the Topic Pages Wiki authoring tool (compbiolwiki.plos.org) in the style of a Wikipedia page: it is very important to be aware of the fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates (Five pillars) before the page is drafted. First-time users will need to create a Topic Pages Wiki account (via “Log in/create account”) and confirm their email before editing. When preparing your Topic Page on Topic Pages Wiki, please adhere to PLOS’ formatting requirements as far as possible. Formatting requirements are broadly similar between PLOS and Wikipedia, but there may be some differences. Authors not familiar with writing for the English Wikipedia are strongly encouraged to go through at least one of the Topic Pages that have already been published (see PLOS Topic Pages) in detail, taking note of the writing style and linking patterns in particular. Some appropriate guidelines are referenced below.

Once the on-wiki draft is ready for editorial consideration, authors should email the PLOS journal office at ploscompbiol@plos.org, plosgenetics@plos.org, or onecalls@plos.org. Please include within your message suggestions for at least three reviewers, along with their contact details and your reasons for suggesting each person. Please note that editors many not use your suggestions, but your help is appreciated and may speed up the selection of appropriate reviewers. Peer reviews are posted publicly to the 'discussion' page of the submitted article.

After peer review, if the article is accepted, authors must email their source files to the journal office staff for PLOS Computational Biology at ploscompbiol@plos.org, the staff for PLOS Genetics at plosgenetics@plos.org, or the staff for PLOS ONE at onecalls@plos.org, who will ready them for production in the journal. Please be prepared to provide an article file and separate figure files. Please state in the email if you have any competing interests or funding to declare, and indicate or confirm who should be listed as the corresponding author. At the point of publication in the PLOS journals, the journal office will notify the authors; the authors are then required to upload the text to Wikipedia at their earliest opportunity. It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that Wikipedia’s conventions are followed when adding or editing the page on Wikipedia. Please contact the journals if you have any questions about the article or its formatting. The publication in the PLOS journals will be accompanied by the reviews (always) and reviewer identities (when revealed). This information will not be uploaded to the corresponding Wikipedia page but to its talk page instead.

Basic Article Organization

Topic Pages articles have slightly different organisation in Wiki, PLOS, and Wikipedia.

Instructions/items with a globe apply to the PLOS submission (and Topic Pages Wiki drafting process) but should not be followed/included in the version uploaded to Wikipedia. W shows that information refers only to the later submission to Wikipedia.

Authors and Affiliations

Provide the first names or initials (if used), middle names or initials (if used), surnames, and affiliations—department, university or organization, city, state/province (if applicable), and country—for all authors. One of the authors should be designated as the corresponding author, with an email address. It is the corresponding author's responsibility to ensure that the author list is accurate and complete.

Please provide an ORCID for each author, so that the Wikidata item about your PLOS article can be properly set up.

Title (150 characters or less)

The title should be very concise and limited to a description of the topic being discussed. If the title of the PLoS article is intended to be different from the final Wikipedia page please indicate this and keep in mind the style of article titles in Wikipedia.

Article Organization

Your article should begin with an introductory abstract that provides a definition of the article's topic and links it to related topics. It does not contain section headings. The remainder should be divided into sections; each with a section heading that can be nested in a hierarchy of a maximum of three heading levels (Sections in Wikipedia)

Hyperlinks

When using a specialist term for the first time, add a wikilink to the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Hyperlinks other than to Wikipedia may be included in the text. They should be archived by way of the Internet Archive.

W [[w:page|words to display]] produces: words to display

References

Try to limit your references to published or accepted manuscripts, books etc. Please style your references according to References in PLOS.

W Wikipedia’s instructions on how to add and format citations can be found here: Citing sources in Wikipedia. Especially useful is the Cite journal template. Avoid phrases like "Miller at al. have shown …", unless Wikipedia pages about the authors exist.

Tables

All tables should have a concise title.

Tables in the PLOS article should be numbered and cited in the main text, e.g Table 1, Table 2, etc.) and cited sequentially at least once in the text. Tables should be placed at the end of the text file.For more information, please use the table guidelines for PLOS (Tables in PLOS).

W Tables in Wikipedia.

Images, Figures and Multimedia

Provide a concise title for each figure, followed by a short factual description (if necessary).

Images in the article will be numbered and cited in the main text (Figure 1 etc.) and cited sequentially at least once in the text, with figure legends listed at the end of the article text. For the article to be accepted for publication in PLOS, you will need to supply high-resolution versions of the figures in TIF or EPS format only (SVG versions thereof can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, see Wikipedia section). When preparing your figures, please ensure that the files conform to our Guidelines for Figure and Table Preparation (Figures in PLOS) and provide files ready sized at 1-column width: 3.27 Inches/8.3 cm/235.53 Points/19.62 picas.

All files will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (Licenses in PLOS), which allows them to be freely used, distributed, and built upon as long as proper attribution is given. Please do not submit any figures that have been previously copyrighted, unless you have express written permission from the copyright holder to publish under the CCAL license. Of note, many files on Wikimedia Commons are available under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license (the default license across most Wikimedia projects), which means they cannot be reused within a CCAL article (using them on Wikipedia is fine). Authors uploading their own original figures should make them available under a Creative Commons Attribution License to enable reuse in the CCAL article if accepted for publication.

Some image caption text

W Images should be in SVG format if possible. For photographs, any original format will do. Copyright information will be required for the File page for each figure when uploaded into Wikipedia (Images in Wikipedia). PLOS’ CCAL license is fully compatible with use on Wikipedia after publication, providing you cite the PLOS article.

W Wikipedia’s instructions on how to upload and include images can be found here: Adding images in Wikipedia. Files can also be upload at this link and included it in your article using [[file:example.jpg|thumb|100px|{{figure|1}} Some image caption text]]

Conclusions and opinions

A section containing conclusions/perspectives/outlook/opinions can be included in the journal version, but will be omitted from the Wikipedia version (which does not permit original research or point of view and discourages the use of first-person pronouns).

Acknowledgments (optional)

People who contributed to the work but do not fit the criteria for authors may be listed in the Acknowledgments, along with their contributions. You must also ensure that anyone named in the Acknowledgments agrees to being so named. Do not include funding information in the Acknowledgments.

Details of any funding sources that have supported the work should be confined to the funding statement provided to staff at the point of acceptance (typically we will state that: ‘The authors received no specific funding for this work’).

See also

W Please link from here any existing Wikipedia entries that are relevant to your article but not linked from it elsewhere (See also sections in Wikipedia).

Pages that should link here

W Please list here any existing Wikipedia entries that should link to your article. See Circular permutation in proteins for an example.

Multimedia Files and Supporting Information

PLOS staff will upload the history of the Topic Pages Wiki article (including previous versions) and the reviews and responses to reviewers. We aim to make the review process open, publishing the names of reviewers where possible.

Audio or video files may be appropriate for some Wikipedia articles. Such files may be submitted to PLOS as supporting information.

W For information about the types of multimedia files preferred by Wikipedia, see Multimedia in Wikipedia

W Basic Checklist for Uploading to Wikipedia after Publication in PLOS

PLOS staff will contact you to let you know when your article is being published. Please be ready to upload your article to Wikipedia after publication in PLOS.

• Remove author names, affiliations and Acknowledgments.
• Remove mention of supporting files.
• Ensure References are formatted for Wikipedia rather than for PLOS.
• Ensure that links pointing to other Wikipedia articles are formatted correctly.
• You are encouraged to upload full-resolution or vector format (SVG) versions of the images there: Upload the figures to Wikimedia Commons.
• More information: Introduction to Wikipedia editing

W Acknowledging PLOS on Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides an {{Academic peer reviewed}} template that should be added to the references section of articles and that should link to the original version of the article. It also adds the Wikipedia page to Category:Wikipedia articles published in peer-reviewed literature, Category:Wikipedia articles published in PLOS Computational Biology, and Category:Wikipedia articles published in PLOS Genetics.

After publication

After the article is published, authors are requested to assist with the following steps (editors will assist)

Copy the published article to Wikipedia

W Simply copy the text of the page on PLOSWiki over to the corresponding page on Wikipedia (omitting the {{author}} template at the top).

W Remove figure numbers in wikipedia version

W Add a 'See also' section of related topics at the bottom.

W Link other wikiedia pages to the updated wikipedia article (or suggest a list on the article's 'talk page')

W You can add the {{Academic_peer_reviewed}} to the References section of the Wikipedia page (or an editor will do this for you)

Did you know (optional)

W New or significantly expanded articles can be nominated to be featured on the Main Page in the Did you know section and typically gain a 5,000-20,000 person reading spike for a couple of days. You can facilitate this process by highlighting one or several statements that are supported by a citation and would fit into a short "Did you know that ...?" sentence, optionally accompanied by an image or media file. In general, sentences should be short and catchy (<200 characters) and refer to a point in the article that is supported by a reference not authored by you.

Example: Selfish genetic elements (archived copy of the Main Page with that article in DYK; traffic stats). We encourage you think about these while drafting the article here. The nomination can be made any time in the seven days after the article is posted to Wikipedia.

1) At this link, enter the Wikipedia page name in the and then paste the following text ("hook" and "ALT" are where you suggest possible 'did you know' sentences):

{{subst:NewDYKnomination
 | article       = Wikipedia page name
 | status        = Expanded
 | hook          = ... that 
 | ALT1          = ... that 
 | ALT2          = ... that  
 | author        = Your Wikipedia username
 | author2       =   
 | author3       = 
 | comment       = 
 | reviewed      = 
}}

2) Finally go to this page and paste this text at the top: {{Did you know nominations/WikipediaPageName}}

Wikidata (optional)

W Given that "Wikidata is to structured data what Wikipedia is to free text" and may well become "the central hub for linked open life science data", we strongly recommend that you help set up and improve the Wikidata items corresponding to your Topic Page - one for the Wikipedia topic, one for the PLOS article. The PLOS article is easy to add by submitting its doi to the SourceMD tool. To update the Wikidata item on the topic, search for it here or look for the "Wikidata item" link on the left hand side of the Wikipedia article.