Submit a Cover letter You may be required to submit a cover letter with your submission.

A cover letter is a simple, brief business letter, designed to introduce your manuscript to a prospective Editor. Individual journals may have specific requirements regarding the cover letter's contents - please consult the journal's Guide for Authors before writing your cover letter. If the Guide for Authors does not specify what to include in your cover letter, you may wish to include some of the following items:

Specify special considerations that should be given to the paper (if any). A brief background regarding the research involved or how the data was collected. The Author to whom we should address our correspondence (in the event of multiple Authors, a single Corresponding Author must be named). A contact address, telephone/fax numbers and e-mail address (Elsevier has introduced a service for Authors to receive PDF proofs by e-mail). Details of any previous or concurrent submissions (Please see our Authors' Rights section for more copyright information). It is also useful to provide the Editor-in-Chief with any information that will support your submission (e.g. original or confirmatory data, relevance, topicality). The inclusion (or exclusion) of certain Reviewers. When providing the names of potential Reviewers, please supply their full contact details including an e-mail address.

Note: When your manuscript is received at Elsevier, it is considered to be in its 'final form'. Therefore, please check your manuscript carefully before you submit it to the Editor. First-time authors and authors who are new to Elsevier may be interested in additional information about the process for submitting a manuscript or the process for publishing in scholarly journals, in general. A step by step guide to getting your article published in an Elsevier journal is available on our Journal Authors Home.