November 2024
Byline addresses should indicate the institution(s) where the research was done. Affiliations not connected with the research in the paper should not be included. These addresses (usually consisting of department, institution, city, state and/or country) can be presented in two ways:
Contact footnotes to an author's name or address are intended to facilitate locating or communicating with an author, for example, by indicating that an author's address has changed, either temporarily or permanently (Present address: …; Permanent address: …), providing an email address, noting preferred pronouns, or identifying an author as a Collaboration spokesperson. Footnotes giving the email address of one or more authors to whom post-publication correspondence should be addressed are strongly encouraged (Contact author: author@email). If more than one contact author is provided, place each on a separate line.
Information concerning financial support (funding agencies or programs) is inappropriate in bylines and footnotes and should be listed in the Acknowledgment section.
Acknowledgments are a simple statement of thanks at the end of a manuscript. They can recognize named individuals who contributed scientifically to the research of the paper and cite the funding agencies that provided financial support for the work. Acknowledgments to people precede those of financial support.
Not all types of acknowledgments are appropriate. For example, we do not include acknowledgments to those who may have helped in the preparation of the manuscript itself (administrative assistants, etc.) or to those who contributed general encouragement or moral support (family, friends, etc.) or services that were not directly a part of the research (grant coordinators, budget directors, etc.). We also do not include notices of fulfillment of requirements for theses.
Examples of suitable acknowledgments are thanks to other scientists for scientific guidance given in discussions or by the communication of results, mention of technical assistants who helped in the actual research, and citations of funding agencies that sponsored the work. Acknowledgments to individuals should be a simple statement of thanks for help received and not a dedication or a memorial.
Use of an AI-based writing tool may be noted in the acknowledgments. Please see APS’s policy on Appropriate Use of AI-Based Writing Tools.
Memberships, positions, titles, and awards may be mentioned in acknowledgments only if they are sources of funding for the research presented and the financial support is stated explicitly. For example, use “A. B. acknowledges support as a Guggenheim Fellow” but not “A. B. is a Guggenheim Fellow.”
A one-sentence Indigenous Land statement may be included in the Acknowledgments only if required by the authors’ institution(s). We will edit longer statements to one sentence.
Author contribution statements can be placed in a separate paragraph after the Acknowledgment section. Statements of equal contributions may be given here (e.g., “A.B. and C.D. contributed equally to this work.”), as well as a list of brief individual responsibilities (e.g., “A.Z. and B.Y. conceptualized the work; C.X. conducted the experiments.”). As an option, “These authors contributed equally to this work” may be set as a byline footnote, with an appropriately chosen byline footnote indicator.