PJA Series B Instructions to Authors

Manuscripts for publication in the Proceedings of the Japan Academy (PJA), Series B should be prepared and submitted according to the following instructions.

General Information

1. Aims and scope: The Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B was founded in 1912 as the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy by the Imperial Academy of Japan (now the Japan Academy). The journal was split into the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series A and Series B in 1977. PJA Series B publishes reviews and research articles in broad ﬁelds of natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth and planetary sciences, biology, engineering, agricultural sciences, medical and pharmaceutical sciences.^*) Manuscripts are evaluated at least by two reviewers. Ten issues are published per year. The content is open access and available online through J-STAGE (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/pjab).
^*) For papers in mathematics, please refer to the Notice to Authors of the PJA Series A.
2. Categories: PJA Series B publishes articles in the following categories.
a) Review: Papers that review literature and provide summary views of particular subjects or ﬁelds. They can be objective and balanced overviews or can also be summaries of the authors’ own accomplishments in the style of personal reminiscences. In the former case, the authors are anticipated to have actively contributed to the subjects under review. In the latter scenario, the scientiﬁc context surrounding the authors’ work should be appropriately and fairly presented, ensuring a proper contextualization of the authors’ contributions.
b) Research Article: Papers that describe hitherto unpublished original works.
c) Special article: From time to time the PJA Series B publishes a limited number of short commentaries or essay-style articles on subjects deemed appropriate and timely by the Editorial Board. In principle, the Editorial Board will solicit manuscripts of this kind.
3. Procedures: Anyone can submit manuscripts for consideration for publication in the PJA Series B. Authors are free to consult any members of the Academy during the preparation of their manuscripts. All submitted manuscripts undergo the following editorial procedures:
a) Each submitted manuscript is assigned to a handling editor, who is a member of the Japan Academy, according to the area of his/her expertise. Please recommend one or two potential handling editors from our editors (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/editorialboard). However, the assignment of the handling editor is strictly a prerogative of the Editorial Board. The manuscript is evaluated by at least two referees. Editor-in-Chief and the handling editor make the ﬁnal decision regarding acceptance or rejection after considering the opinions of the referees.
b) The handling editor communicates the accepted manuscript at a monthly meeting of the Academy. When a member of the Academy is an author, he/she communicates the manuscript by himself/herself instead of the handling editor.
4. Submission of manuscripts: a) Submission of manuscripts is welcome from all around the world. Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the guidelines outlined in the “Preparation of Manuscript” part below.
b) The manuscript must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes ethical information (see Section 8), the list of potential handling editor(s) (see Section 3) and potential reviewers (see Section 5).
c) The manuscript and the cover letter are to be submitted through the online system (https://mc. manuscriptcentral.com/pjab). Please list co-authors’ information in the system, including their e-mail addresses. If submitting via e-mail, the Editorial Office will post it on the online system on behalf of the authors; ensure that the e-mail addresses of the co-authors are provided in the cover letter or manuscript.
d) The contact information for the Editorial Office is as follows:

Editorial Office of the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B
c/o The Japan Academy, 7-32, Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0007, Japan
Tel: +81-3-3822-2101
Fax: +81-3-3822-2105
e-mail: proc-b @ mext.go.jp
5. Recommendation of potential reviewers: Authors are encouraged to provide a list of 3–5 names, along with affiliations and e-mail addresses of individuals whom they consider knowledgeable, impartial, and fair, and therefore suitable as reviewers for the manuscript. Individuals currently employed at the same institution as any of the authors or those who have been close collaborators in the recent past (e.g., within the past three years) should not be included in the list. See also the Editorial Policy (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/editorialpolicy.html). Authors may also specify individuals they wish to exclude from the evaluation process, providing reasons for such requests. It is important to note, however, that the final decision regarding the selection of reviewers rests with the Editorial Board.
6. Conflict of interest: Authors must include a “Conflict of interest” section in their papers to declare whether they have any employment or financial interests related to the submitted paper. Conflicts of interest apply to those within the past three years at the time of submission. Please also see the Editorial Policy for more information. (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/editorialpolicy.html).
7. Authorship: Authors’ names should be properly listed. All authors must have reviewed the final manuscript and agreed to submit it to the PJA Series B. Please also see the Editorial Policy for more information. (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/editorialpolicy.html).
8. Ethical considerations: Publication or submission of duplicate work is prohibited. For experiments involving human subjects, authors should specify if the procedures adhered to ethical standards set by the responsible committee on human experimentation (both institutional and national) and compiled with the Helsinki Declaration of 1964, as revised in 2024 (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki/). For experiments involving animals, authors should state that they followed institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. These details, when applicable, should be included in the text.
9. Charges: PJA Series B does not impose any processing or publishing fees. The publication expenses for the PJA Series B are funded by the annual budget of the Japan Academy.
10. Copyright and Open Access: Authors retain the copyright to their work and grant the Japan Academy a non-exclusive license to publish, including depositing articles in online services such as the J-STAGE or PubMed Central. All articles are published as open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-4.0 International (CC BY-NC) license by default (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). This license permits users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as proper attribution is given to the author. Authors can choose another Creative Commons license if necessary. Authors retain the freedom to use their articles or supporting data, incorporating ﬁgures into their future works or depositing them in the repository of their institution or preprint servers. In such cases, appropriate attribution, like citing “Proc. Jpn. Acad., Ser. B 100, 1–14” should be provided.
11. License to Publish: Authors are required to sign the License to Publish to permit the Japan Academy to publish their work in the PJA Series B under a Creative Commons license and other conditions. The license document will be sent after acceptance of the manuscript.
12. Preprint: The PJA Series B encourages authors to deposit early versions of articles in appropriate repositories or preprint servers. Preprints are not considered publications, but all other prior/redundant publications are forbidden. Please specify the use of preprint servers in the cover letter and provide the link to the preprint. Upon publication, authors are requested to establish a link from the preprint to the published article using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
13. Advance online publication: Accepted manuscripts are typically published within approximately two months. Authors may choose to make the initial proof publicly accessible on J-STAGE as an advance online publication.

Preparation of Manuscript

14. Templates etc.: The manuscript should be written in English on the A4-size paper in a single-column format. The text should be prepared using either Microsoft Word or TeX (LaTeX). Submission files should preferably be in PDF format. Please ensure that the total file size does not exceed 5 MB whenever possible. When a manuscript is accepted, authors are requested to submit high-resolution files. Manuscript templates are available for download on the website (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/authors.html). The use of the templates is optional.
15. Length: Manuscripts should be written clearly and concisely, avoiding redundancy and excessive details. The standard length of a manuscript should be within 8,000 words for Reviews and within 5,000 words for Research Articles. For authors preparing their manuscripts using the LaTeX class file provided by this journal, the approximate length should be 20 pages for Reviews and 10 pages for Research Articles. The word count should include the text from the Introduction through the Acknowledgments, but exclude the author information, Abstract, Keywords, Non-standard abbreviation list, References, List of Supplemental materials and Figures legends. Despite the above length guidelines, we encourage the submission of shorter manuscripts.
16. Title page: The title page should carry the following contents. If the required contents are included, there is no need to list them.
a) The category (i.e. Review, Research Article)
b) Title
c) Full names of all authors
d) Affiliations, cities, countries and ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs --if authors have accounts) of all authors
e) Corresponding author’s name, complete address, and e-mail address
f) Abstract (no more than 200 words; It must be written in one paragraph). The author should keep in mind that the readers of this journal are spread across a wide range of natural science branches. The abstract should be understandable by readers who are not specialists in the ﬁeld covered by the manuscript.
g) Keywords (up to 6; each keyword should be divided by commas)
h) Non-standard abbreviation list (see Section 20)
i) The total word count (see Seciton 15) and the word count of the abstract should be provided if the software used to prepare the manuscript allows.
j) Fields (select a ﬁeld from the following: Agricultural Sciences, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Engineering, Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Physics, Other ﬁelds; In the online system, this is asked in the speciﬁc section and is not necessary to describe in the title page.)
17. Graphical abstract: The graphical abstract will be included on the table of contents and abstract pages when the paper is published online. Authors are requested to prepare a graphical abstract when the paper is accepted. Creating a graphical abstract is not mandatory, but this journal encourages authors to create it. Graphical abstract should convey the main idea of the paper to readers. A figure from the paper may be used in the graphical abstract.
18. Manuscript organization: Sections in the manuscript should feature bold-faced headings. The text should start on a new line after the section heading. For subsections and sub-subsections, employ bold and italic fonts, respectively. The text should persist on the same line after headings in subsections and sub-subsections. For reference formatting, please consult a recent issue of the journal. Ensure the paper is clearly written to cater to diverse readers in various disciplines. The manuscript may be structured in the following order:
a) Introduction
b) Main text; It is recommended that the Materials and methods section be placed after the Results and discussion (although these sections may not be included depending on the content of the paper).
c) Conflict of interest
d) Acknowledgement(s)
e) References
f) List of Supplementary materials
g) Figure legends
h) Tables
i) Figures
19. Equations: Equations should be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals within parentheses (e.g. [1], [2]) on the right-hand side.
20. Units and abbreviations: The use of the International System of Units (SI units) is recommended. If the author uses non-standard abbreviations, they should be deﬁned at their ﬁrst appearance by the full words and the abbreviations in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation only. If there are many abbreviations, they should be listed in the title page in alphabetical order (see Section 16). In view of the wide coverage of this journal encompassing all branches of natural science, use of abbreviations should be limited to those instances where their use is essential. Common or even standard abbreviations in one discipline may be totally unintelligible in another discipline.
21. References: Only references that have been published or accepted for publication in the final form can be cited. Findings that are still under consideration for publication may be mentioned in the text as “personal communications”, “in preparation for publication”, or “submitted for publication”, but should not be listed in the References. Avoid citing publications not generally available to the public unless absolutely necessary. If such publications are cited, the author should be ready to provide a copy upon request from readers. In principle, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL, “web address”) should not be listed in the References but should only be cited within the text due to their lack of archival permanency. However, the citation of articles in preprint servers with URLs is permitted.

Citation in the text

a) References should be cited in the text in the order of citations in Arabic numerals in superscript, each followed by a closing parenthesis and a comma between the citation numbers. Consecutive references can be connected by an en dash (e.g. ^{1)–3), 5)}) .

List of references

a) All references cited in the text with reference numbers should be listed under the heading “References”. In principle, only one reference should be listed under a single reference number. When multiple chapters are cited from a single book, each chapter should be treated as a separate citation and should be listed under its own reference number. Except for entire book citations, the article/chapter titles and the first and the last page numbers or the article number are required.

b) For the initial submission of the manuscript, it is imperative to list the names of all authors in the References. This is necessary for a fair editorial evaluation of the manuscript. However, only the first 6 authors should be listed for revisions or final submissions, followed by et al. when the number of authors exceeds six.

c) Articles in journals should be listed according to the following examples.

Kobayashi, M. and Maskawa, T. (1973) CP-violation in the renormalizable theory of weak interaction. Prog. Theor. Phys. 49, 652–657. doi: 10.1143/PTP.49.652.

Takahashi, K., Nakamura, M., Narita, M., Ueda, M., Takashima, Y., Watanabe, A. and Yamanaka, S. (2021) The pluripotent stem cell-speciﬁc transcript ESRG is dispensable for human pluripotency. PLOS Genetics 17, e1009587. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009587.

Nagata, S. Cloning of human Type I interferon cDNAs. Proc. Jpn. Acad. Ser. B (in press).

d) Chapters in multi-authored books should be listed according to the following example.
Sugimura, T., Nagao, M. and Wakabayashi, K. (2000) Complex factors pertinent to human hazard risks. In Food Borne Carcinogenesis: Heterocyclic Amines (eds. Nagao, M. and Sugimura, T.). Wiley, New York, pp. 349–359.
e) An entire book should be listed according to the following example.
Noyori, R. (1994) Asymmetric Catalysis in Organic Synthesis. Wiley, New York.
f) Articles in a preprint server should be listed according to the following example.
Iye, M. (2021) Subaru Telescope — History, active/adaptive optics, instruments, and scientiﬁc achievements. arXiv:2105.10610.
g) For other types of references, consult examples in recent issues of this journal.
22. Figures: a) Figures should be prepared at a sufficiently large size to ensure readability. Letters and symbols should be 6-11 points at the final scale at which they will appear in the paper.
b) The width of the image is 8 cm for single columns and 16.5 cm for double columns. The maximum vertical size is 22 cm. Figures should be prepared at the final publication scale, or the intended size should be clearly indicated. If the size of the ﬁgure proposed by the author is considered unsuitable for publication, it may be adjusted appropriately at Editor’s discretion.
c) Please make sure to include the number of each figure so that reviewers can identify each figure.
d) Figures must be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals (e.g. Fig. 1, Fig. 2).
e) Figures for publication should be saved with a resolution at 300 dpi or higher. Following formats can be accepted: PDF, TIFF, EPS, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel. If the authors would like to use other ﬁle formats, please contact the Editorial Oﬃce.
23. Tables: The table caption should be placed at the top of the table. Vertical lines should not be used and horizontal lines should be minimized. Tables should be numbered consecutively in the order of their appearance in Arabic numerals (e.g. Table 1, Table 2).
24. Movies: Videos may be used as the main content of a paper or as supplementary materials. In principle, the size limit is 50MB per paper. Recommended file format is mp4, wmv and avi. For more information, please contact the Editorial Office.
25. Supplementary materials: All the data necessary to support the conclusions should be included with the main body of the paper. Any additional data supporting the interpretations may be included in Supplementary materials. This material may include movies, tables, figures, texts, and so on. Supplementary materials will be made available free of charge on the J-STAGE. Each ﬁle should be no more than 50 MB in size. Supplementary materials cannot be added after acceptance. Please cite in the text that there are Supplementary materials. It is recommended to make a section for Supplementary materials (see Section 18).
26. Profile: Review articles can include proﬁles of all authors or key author(s). They are recommended by the Editorial Oﬃce when the manuscript is accepted for publication.

(Revised December 2025)