Instructions to authors

Bollettino Malacologico is published by Società Italiana di Malacologia (SIM). All articles are published in PDF/A format on SIM website after acceptance by the Editor-in-Chief and in paper format in two issues per year, plus occasional supplements for particularly long or relevant articles. Each article has a doi (digital object identifier).

The submission of particularly long manuscripts should be discussed with the Editor-in-Chief in advance. The journal publishes every article without fees for the Authors, color figures included. All articles are uploaded on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) five years after publication, becoming de facto open access.

We are particularly interested in manuscripts about the taxonomy, ecology and biogeography of marine and continental, recent and fossil mollusks. We consider manuscripts on other aspects of malacology on a case-by-case basis. English is the main language of the journal. The use of Italian shall be considered an exception that should be discussed in advance with the Editor-in-Chief and will be approved after a first assessment of the manuscript.

Every submitted manuscript undergoes a revision by members of the scientific board and/or external peers. The Authors can suggest the name of reviewers (including their email address), but the reviewer choice and the final assessment of the manuscript rest solely on the Editor-in-Chief. All manuscripts must adhere to the content of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, accessible athttps://www.iczn.org/the-code/the-code-online/.

The submitted manuscripts must not have been published already nor under evaluation of other journals, and approved by all co-authors. With submission, the Authors authorize SIM to use their personal data.

Manuscripts must be submitted by email directly to the Editor-in-Chief at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The manuscript must be in a.doc, .docx, .odt o .rtf file. At first submission, the figures can be embedded in the text next to their first citation; at this stage, it is not necessary to submit high-resolution figures, which will be necessary upon acceptance.

The first page of the manuscript must have the title (in bold, Times New Roman, 14 pt character), the name and address of the Author(s), with email address and ORCID link of each Author when available. If the manuscript was contributed by multiple Authors, the corresponding author must be indicated and will be the point of contact for the Editor-in-Chief. The title must be informative and concise; abbreviations should be avoided. High-level taxonomic names must be reported between brackets.

The second page must contain an abstract of no more than 350 words in the same language as the main text. The abstract in the other language (in Italian, if the manuscript is in English, and the other way around) can be longer. Abstracts must report: the scope of the study, the main methods, the results, including taxonomic and nomenclatorial novelties, and conclusions. No citations are allowed. The abstract in Italian, if the main text is in English, and that in English if the text is in Italian, must include a translation of the title. After the abstracts, minimum five keywords must be reported, avoiding words already contained in the title.

The main body of the manuscript should be arranged in Introduction, Materials and methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References written in lower case, except the first letter, in Times New Roman 14 pt bold character. Very short manuscripts may adopt a simpler structure. Second-level headings are written in normal, lower-case, font. Footnotes are not permitted. Authors should write clearly and concisely, avoiding excessively long sentences. Any offensive or discriminatory language is strictly forbidden and may lead to the manuscript rejection.

The Introduction must report the scientific context of the study, with a clear sentence on the study aims at the end.

The Materials and methods must report methodologies in sufficient detail to render the study reproducible. This section must also contain a list of abbreviations and acronyms used in the text.Only the unit of measures of the International System of Units are accepted. Please, use official acronyms for institutions; such acronyms must be listed in this section.

The section Results can also be called Systematics in case of taxonomic studies. The editorial office registers each new taxa in Zoobank and adds the Zoobank codes to the manuscript. Therefore, this procedure must not be carried out by Authors.

The Discussion must present the relevance of the study results in the context of the scientific literature on the topic, highlighting its novelty. Please avoid speculative statements. Very short manuscripts or in other exceptional cases a single section with results and discussion combined is acceptable.

The Acknowledgements must refer to any funding if received to conduct the study.

The manuscript must be written in Times New Roman 12 pt character, except where explicitly stated otherwise. The names of genera, subgenera, species and subspecies must be italicized, but not those of higher rank. Italics must also be used for quotations, which should be reported between quotation marks.At the first citation, names must include authorship and date.In each section, it is allowed to abbreviate the genus names, paying attention no ambiguity is introduced. Intervals must be reported with an en dash, e.g. for a page interval: 3–35, not 3-35.

Collecting data must be reported according to the format of the European Journal of Taxonomy, that is, in the following format with fields separated by semicolon, in this order: COUNTRY • specimen(s) (e.g., “1 ♂”); geographic / locality data (from largest to smallest); geographic coordinates; altitude / elevation / depth (using alt. / elev. / m a.s.l. etc.); date (format: dd Mmm. YYYY, e.g., “16 Jan. 1998”); collector (followed by “leg.”); other collecting data (e.g., micro habitat / host / method of collecting / “DNA voucher specimen”/ “vial with detached elements”, etc.); barcodes/identifiers (e.g., “GenBank: MG779236”); institution code and specimen code (e.g., “CBF 06023”); museum and inventory number where specimens have been deposited.

A bullet point “•” (unicode: hex 2022, decimal 8226) is used to signify the beginning of a material citation. In Microsoft Word, the following keyboard shortcuts can be used to obtain a bullet point:

•for Mac: Alt + 8 (QWERTY keyboard) / Alt + shift + full stop (AZERTY)

•for Windows: Alt + 0149 on the numeric keypad

Example 1:

ITALY • 1 sh; Novaglie (Lecce); 39.5134° N, 18.2339° E; 20 m depth; 18 May 1989; collection CGM • 1 sh; Porto Cesareo (Lecce); 80–100 m depth; Jun 2016; collection CGM.

Example 2:

Fields can be described in the section Materials and methods, unavailable data may be marked by NA (not available). Example 1 would be:

ITALY • 1 sh; Novaglie (Lecce); 39.5134° N, 18.2339° E; 20 m depth; 18 May 1989; NA; collection CGM • 1 sh; Porto Cesareo (Lecce); NA; 80–100 m depth; Jun 2016; NA; collection CGM.

For further details, please check Chester et al., 2019. EJT editorial standard for the semantic enhancement of specimen data in taxonomy literature.European Journal of Taxonomy, 586: 1–22.https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2019.586

New taxa must be mentioned for the first time when described, except in the Abstract. Original descriptions must preferentially be reported in telegraphic style.

The list of synonyms must report only the most important ones to enable the unambiguous reporting of the species (e.g. those verified by the Author or well-documented cases reported in the literature). Always report the author name in full (no abbreviations) and the year of publication. E.g.Capsa lacunosa Chemnitz, 1792 – Hörnes, 1859: 91, pl. 9, fig. 1a–c and not Capsa lacunosa Chemn. - Hörnes, 1859: p. 91, pl. 9, fig. 1a–c.

Examples of systematics hierarchy and synonymy:

Family Cardiidae Lamarck, 1809

Subfamily Cardiinae Lamarck, 1809

Genus Procardium ter Poorten & La Perna, 2017

(type species Procardium indicum (Lamarck, 1819))

Procardium indicum (Lamarck, 1819)

(Fig. 1. A–D, Fig. 2 C)

Cardium indicum Lamarck, 1819: p. 4.

Cardium darwini Mayer, 1866

All publications cited in the text, including in lists of synonyms, must be listed in the section References in alphabetic order.

Journal names or book titles in non-Latin language must be transliterated and titles translated into English, adding a note on the original language, e.g. “[in Russian]”. Please add the doi whenever present. Please assure consistency between the cited references and the reference list.

The formatting of citations and references follows the European Journal of Taxonomy. Authors are invited to use citation management software such as the open source Zotero https://www.zotero.org/ that render the management of literature easy, guarantee the consistency between citations and references, and allow the automatic formatting of the references.

Examples of citations:

…as reported by Richardson & Smith (1965)

…as described in the literature (Ross et al. 1993; Rosenberg 1995, 1997; Michelini & Andriani 2000)

…the original illustration (Torwald 1879: p. 56, tav. 2, fig. 5).

Examples of references:

Salas C. 1996. Marine Bivalves from off the Southern Iberian Peninsula collected by the Balgim and Fauna 1 expeditions.  Haliotis 25 (1): 33–100.

Grill B. & Zuschin M. 2001. Modern shallow- to deep-water bivalve death assemblages in the Red Sea – ecology and biogeography.  Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 168: 75–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0031-0182(00)00250-9

Boss K.J. 1982. Mollusca.In: Parker S.P. (ed.), Synopsis and Classification of Living Organisms.  Vol. 1: 945–1166. McGrow-Hill, New York.

Carter J.G., Campbell D.C. & Campbell M.R. 2000. Cladistic perspectives on early bivalve evolution.In: Harper E.M., Taylor J.D. & Crame J.A. (eds.) The Evolutionary Biology of the Bivalvia.Geological Society, London, Special Publications   177: 47–95. https://doi.org/10.1144/gsl.sp.2000.177.01.04

Vokes H.E. 1980.Genera of the Bivalvia: a systematic and bibliographic catalogue (revised and update). Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca.

Nofroni I., Renda W. & Vannozzi A. 2022.Mingled in the crowd: A new Megastomia from eastern Mediterranean Sea (Gastropoda: Pyramidellidae).  Bollettino Malacologico 58 (2): 151–159.https://doi.org/10.53559/BollMalacol.2022.16

Figures must be submitted at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi in tiff or jpeg format. Figures must be formatted with the final printing sizes: single (8.4 cm) or double column (17.2 cm). The maximum printing area is 17.2 × 26.5 cm. Figure sizes must be chosen with care, considering their complexity and quantity of images contained also in the perspective to avoid the waste of printing space.

All figures must be numbered progressively, in the same order as they are cited in the text. In figures containing multiple images, these must be indicated by upper case letters on top left of each image, in Arial 12 pt character. Any other text in the figure must be lower case.

Figures must be cited in the text using the abbreviations Fig. e Figs. like in the following examples: Fig. 3, Fig. 6 A–F (meaning images A to F), Fig 8 A, B (meaning images A and B), Fig. 9 A, C (meaning images A and C), Figg. 5 A, 7 B, Figg. 3, 5. Citations of figures of other works should be reported as fig. and figs., not in bold.

Images must not be smaller than 4 or 5 cm, and anyway be of sufficient size to be visualized well, but not excessively large (usually not exceeding 8 cm). Please avoid large empty spaces. Scale bars, in black or white, may be added and their size indicated in the legend. Maps must be simple and with the cited localities well visible.

The high-definition figures must be submitted after the final acceptance of the manuscript.

Tables must be embedded in the text file with a sans-serif character not smaller that 8–9 points. Do not use spreadsheets. Avoid excessively thick borders and grid lines. Tables must be cited in the text as Tab. (e.g.: Tab. 2, Tabs. 3–6). Abbreviations must be explained in the legend or in the section Materials and methods.

Legends must be inserted below figures or above tables in the manuscript, and must include: name and authorship of any illustrated species, origin of the specimens, size of the specimen or indication of the scale bar size, institutional repository (including inventory numbers, when available)

The Author will receive proofs only once as a pdf file sent by email. Only mistypings or other minor mistakes can be corrected at this stage. Major edits will be charged to the Authors. Proofs must be returned as soon as possible.

Authors will receive a PDF/A version of their article. Reprints can be provided upon request and at the Authors’ expenses.