Science Robotics welcomes research in all domains of robotics including land, sea, space, medical, and industrial applications, as well as artificial intelligence and human/robotic interactions. Research articles may address robotic issues at any scale, from complete systems to novel components, materials, or software. Read more on Mission and Scope.
Editorial Policies
These policies spell out the rights and responsibilities that authors agree to when submitting and publishing their papers in each of the Science family of journals. Authors should familiarize themselves with these policies before submitting a manuscript to Science Robotics.
Categories of Submitted Manuscripts
Research Articles should include an abstract and be structured as follows: Abstract, Introduction, Results, Discussion, Materials and Methods, References, Figures and Tables, Supplementary Materials. Research Articles should be no more than 8000 words in length (not including References) and may have up to 8 figures, tables, and/or movies. Supplementary materials are permitted and can include figures, tables, and movies not essential to the general understanding of the research presented in the main text, as well as other file types. Detailed information about preparing a new Research Article is available here.
Research Resources are currently only by invitation of the Editor. They describe nonhypothesis-driven research, including the presentation of new validated tools or techniques or validated databases or data sets that may be of interest to a broad range of robotics researchers. See the Research Resource help page for more information.
Reviews are currently only by invitation of the Editor. They can be up to 5000 words (not including abstract, references, and figure legends). Longer Reviews may be considered at the Editor’s discretion. They should have a short pithy title, an abstract of no more than 75 words, no more than 75 references, and up to six figures (with figure legends) or tables. If you are interested in writing a Review, please send a presubmission inquiry that includes title, author list and affiliations, and abstract to [email protected]. Detailed information about preparing a Review is available here.
Viewpoints are forward-looking articles that discuss key robotics research findings and outstanding challenges that are of broad interest to the community. Viewpoints are currently only by invitation of the Editor. They can be up to 3500 words (not including abstract, references, and figure legends). Longer Viewpoints may be considered at the Editor’s discretion. They should have a short pithy title, an abstract of no more than 50 words, no more than 30 references, and one or two figures (with figure legends) or tables. Viewpoints are sent for peer review. If you are interested in writing a Viewpoint, please send a presubmission inquiry that includes title, author list and affiliations, and abstract to [email protected]. Detailed information about preparing a Viewpoint is available here.
Focus articles are short, timely pieces that spotlight new research findings (often published in Science Robotics or other journals) or policy issues of interest to the robotics community that are of immediate importance. Focus articles cannot exceed 1000 words total (not including abstract, references, and figure or table). They should have a short snappy or newsy title, a one-sentence abstract, no more than 10 references, and one figure or table (with caption). For editor-invited Focus articles, authorship will be limited to only those invited, with a maximum of one additional co-author. Detailed information about preparing a Focus article is available here.
eLetters Brief online comments can be submitted on research or commentary articles published in Science Robotics. eLetters are submitted on the Science Robotics website, evaluated, and posted with the article if accepted. Authors are identified and must agree to our terms and conditions. Science Robotics does not publish Letters as separate articles.
Submission
Primary research articles or other unsolicited articles may be submitted online at https://cts.sciencemag.org.
For submission, you will need the following:
- Authors: Names, institutions, and e-mail addresses for all authors, including selection of at least one to be corresponding author.
- Manuscript Information:
- The article type you are submitting
- The title of your manuscript (125-character maximum for Research Articles)
- Funding sources
- A cover letter (preferably .docx format) that includes
- Reference to any presubmission discussions with editors
- The title of the paper and a statement of its main point
- Any information needed to ensure a fair review process, including related manuscripts submitted to other journals
- Names of colleagues who have reviewed the paper
- A statement that none of the material has been published or is under consideration elsewhere, including the Internet
- For investigations on humans, a statement indicating that informed consent was obtained after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained
- For authors using experimental animals, a statement that the animals' care was in accordance with institutional guidelines
- Note where data are available, or will be deposited and whether there are any restrictions on data availability such as an MTA
- Information on any Reference material or additional data files uploaded to the Auxiliary files section (see below)
- Reviewers: Names, affiliations, and e-mail addresses of up to five potential referees and up to five excluded reviewers
- Upload Documents: During submission, you will upload a combined PDF containing the main text, figures, tables, and supplementary materials. You may also upload the manuscript, a cover letter, the Supplementary Materials file, and any auxiliary files. Science Robotics prefers to receive a single complete file that includes all figures and tables in Word’s .docx format (Word 2007, 2010, or 2008 or 2011 for a Mac). If you are using LaTeX, please convert your paper into a Word docx. If this is not possible, please use our LaTeX template (available here). Some conversion approaches are available here: http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html. The Supplementary Materials should be submitted as a single separate file in .docx or PDF format. The main manuscript file and the Supplementary Materials file each have a 25MB size limit.
- LaTeX source and output, supplementary multimedia, and/or large data files that cannot be included in the main Supplementary Materials file should be uploaded as Auxiliary Supplementary Materials and Other Supporting Files at our submission site. There is a 25-MB combined size limit on auxiliary files and a limit of 10 auxiliary files. LaTeX source and output files should be compiled into a single .zip or tar.gz file before upload. Video clips should be in mp4 format. Quicktime (.mov) files are acceptable provided the h.264 compression setting is used. Where possible please use HD frame size (1920x1080 pixels). Animated GIFs are not accepted. For audio files, WAV AIFF, AU, or m4a are preferred. MP3 or AAC files are acceptable, but a bit rate of at least 160 kb/s must be used. Authors should submit movie and audio with clearly identifiable accompanying captions and credit information.
- Other items that are required at submission and should be uploaded to the Auxiliary files section are:
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- Reference Material: Authors must supply Science Robotics with a copy of any of their papers that are related to the Science Robotics manuscript and are under consideration or in press at other journals. This condition applies at all times while the Science Robotics manuscript is under consideration. If a related paper is submitted elsewhere while the Science Robotics paper is under consideration, please contact your editor.
- Data files required for review of your manuscript.
- Written permission from any author who is not an author of your manuscript but whose work is cited as in press. Permission must allow distribution of in-press manuscripts or relevant data to reviewers. A copy of an email is sufficient. We do not allow citation to in press manuscripts at publication—these would need to be replaced by the published reference.
- Any relevant MTAs
The Editorial and Publishing teams at AAAS/Science have evaluated the work of the companies listed below and have found them to be effective outlets for language editing services.
Please note that AAAS takes no responsibility for and does not endorse these services. Use of these services shall have no influence on the acceptance of a manuscript for publication by AAAS. Further, any questions or concerns about the services provided by the companies above should be sent to the companies directly.
Manuscript Selection
Science Robotics is committed to thorough and efficient evaluation of submitted manuscripts. Papers are assigned to an Editorial Board member who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. Submitted papers may also be rated for suitability by members of the Science Robotics Advisory Board. Authors of papers that are not selected are notified promptly, within about 1 week.
Research papers that are selected for in-depth review are evaluated by at least two outside referees. Reviewers are contacted before being sent a paper and asked to return comments within 1 to 2 weeks for most papers.
Authors are notified of decisions by email, and the status of the manuscript can be tracked at https://cts.sciencemag.org. Membership in AAAS is not a factor in selection of manuscripts for publication. Science journals treat all submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Science journals also instruct and expect our Editors, Advisors and reviewers to treat manuscripts as confidential material. Our peer review process is confidential and identities of reviewers are not released.
AAAS publishes five other journals: Science, Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, Science Immunology, and our open access, interdisciplinary journal Science Advances. Papers submitted to Science Robotics but not accepted for publication may, in some cases, be eligible for publication in one of these five journals. If a manuscript is rejected from Science Robotics with the option of transfer, we would be happy to transfer your submission from Science Robotics with no reformatting required. Editors at the second journal may use the information gathered during evaluation at Science Robotics to expedite review, including reuse of the reviews, provided reviewers agree. The transfer can only include documents that were part of the review process at Science Robotics. Once transfer is complete, you will have the opportunity to upload a response to the reviews where appropriate. If you do not wish to have reviews obtained by Science Robotics available for consideration at another Science journal, you must start a new submission.
Press Services
Our Press Office may identify specific Science Robotics articles as particularly newsworthy and highlight them in our embargoed press package for registered journalists. If you are a journalist wishing to receive our embargoed press package or an author wanting information regarding press outreach on your embargoed Science Robotics paper, please contact the Science Robotics Press Package (“RoboPak”) Team at [email protected].