Dear Author,

Help us reproduce your artwork to the highest possible standards - in both paper and digital formats. Submitting your illustrations, pictures, tables and other artwork (such as multimedia and supplementary files) in an electronic format helps us produce your work to the best possible standards, ensuring accuracy, clarity and a high level of detail. The instructions in   this PDF file show how to prepare your artwork for electronic submission and include information on common problems, suggestions on how to ensure the best results, and image creation guides for popular applications.

Figure manipulation

Whilst it is accepted that authors sometimes need to manipulate images for clarity, manipulation for purposes of deception or fraud will be seen as scientific ethical abuse and will be dealt with accordingly. For graphical images, journals published by Elsevier apply the following policy: no specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if and as long as they do not obscure or eliminate any information present in the original. Nonlinear adjustments (e.g. changes to gamma settings) must be disclosed in the figure legend.

  Click here for the instruction PDF