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Some general guidance on supplementary material is provided below, however specific journals may have their own requirements regarding supplementary materials. Please consult the 'Author instructions' area of your journal's home page, found under 'Journal information', for information about whether your journal accepts supplementary materials, and any journal-specific requirements.
Once published, supplementary materials are considered a permanent part of the academic research record, along with your main article. They may not be modified, corrected or removed other than via our formal corrections, retractions and removals processes. These processes typically involve the publication of a notice linked to your main article, rather than changes to your published article or its supplementary materials. It is therefore of the utmost importance that prior to submission you ensure that all supplementary materials are correct, accurate and suitable for publication, taking into account any potential legal, privacy, ethical, technical, intellectual property or security considerations.
Unlike the content of your main article, supplementary materials are not edited or typeset and will be published in exactly the format you have supplied them. Again, it is therefore essential for you to check that your supplementary materials are suitable for publication, prior to submission.
If your supplementary files include material owned by third parties, please see our instructions on securing permissions for third-party materials.
Authorship, affiliations, funding, and other contextual information recorded in the metadata of supplementary materials will be inherited from, and thus identical to, that of your main article. If this information should be different for any of your supplementary files, we recommend you explain this with statements within each file where relevant. Please note however that information within supplementary files will not be extracted or displayed outside of the files, or included in the files' metadata.
Unless you are instructed otherwise, supplementary materials should be submitted at the same time as your main article, so that they can be made available to peer reviewers. Files should be labelled in such a way that it is clear that they are supplemental to the main article, what they are and to which article they belong, e.g. [Corresponding author surname] supplementmovie1.mov.
Please also ensure that each supplementary file is referenced at an appropriate point in the main text of your article.
Supplementary materials will be published online with your main article, accessible via a ‘supplementary material’ tab on the article's main page.
Audio files should be saved in one of the below formats:
Authors should follow these guidelines when preparing video files:
In addition to the audio and video file types listed above, we can also accept the following file formats for supplementary materials:
Journals may also accept other file types that are common in their particular fields of research.