As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• Important: Details are provided in the ‘Comments for the Editor’ section during submission for: a) referee suggestions and contact details for at least three referees (current affiliations and email addresses; for peer-reviewed submissions only), and b) a declaration of conflict of interest.
• The submission has not been previously published (except in part as an abstract, published lecture, dissertation or thesis), nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in the ‘Comments for the Editor’ section during submission).
• The submission is free of plagiarism and data manipulation.
• The submission file is in Microsoft Word format, written in good English and has been ‘spell checked’ and ‘grammar checked’. (Authors whose native language is not English are encouraged to seek help at an early stage.)
• Pages should be numbered serially, with 1.5 spacing for all text.
• All references mentioned in the reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa, and where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
• All illustrations, figures, and tables have self-explanatory captions and are placed and sized within the text at the appropriate points to assist readability (not at the end), and that images have been compressed so that the file does not exceed 15 MB/15 000 KB.
• Permission has been obtained for the use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet).