Bergey's Manual offers a comprehensive overview of prokaryotic taxa recognized in the literature characterized through traditional culture techniques and, more recently, through metagenomics. The primary focus of Bergey's Manual chapters is to summarize the accumulated knowledge for each taxon, covering its current classification, metabolism, ecology, genomics and other features of interest. This page provides useful information for authors preparing chapters and links to valuable tools. For more information and to answer additional questions, see the BMSAB Contributor Guidelines below or contact your editor.

Chapter Templates
To assist authors in preparing new chapters, we have created downloadable templates that ensure consistency and high-quality content. When following these templates, BMSAB chapters can also serve as the defining publication for names for validation in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Why Use These Templates?
Our templates assist authors in effectively structuring their chapters. They cover essential information, including formatting, style, cross-references, and permissions for reusing previously published BMSAB materials, all while avoiding redundancy. There are three templates provided for different types of chapters. Please consider the templates as guides and delete sections that are not relevant to your taxon or add sections to include important information.

What Do the Templates Include?
In addition to general publishing guidelines, the templates include examples of descriptions for both lower and higher taxa. When dealing with taxa that have a high number of subcategories, consider offering a general overview of phylogeny and ecology based on the authors' research and other relevant literature.

Phylum Chapters:
This template is for description of phyla and subordinate higher taxa, excluding genus chapters. Especially appropriate for smaller underrepresented phyla, it combines the description of the phylum and the classes, orders, and families that are contained therein into one chapter.

Higher Taxa Chapters:
These describe taxa from above the genus level up to but not including the phylum. This template is most appropriate for complex groups with many well-described higher taxonomic ranks where each class, order and family are individual chapters.

Genus Chapters:
To prevent redundancy, Bergey's Manual does not publish species chapters. However, genus chapters can include detailed species descriptions.

Thank you for your valuable contributions!