Submission of a manuscript implies

• that the work described has not been published before
• that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere
• that its publication has been approved by all coauthors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities at the institute where the work has been carried out
• that, if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatically transfer the copyright to the publisher; and
• that the manuscript will not be published elsewhere in any language without the consent of the copyright holder; and
• that the authors will retain the rights to reproduce their contributions in other form with prior information to the copyright holder.

Manuscripts should be submitted to the Managing Editor:

William Y. C. Chen
Center for Combinatorics
Nankai University
Tianjin 300071
P.R. China

Tel: (86)-22-2350-2180
Fax: (86)-22-2350-9272
ac@nankai.edu.cn

Papers should be written in English. Editorial review will proceed more rapidly if the manuscripts are submitted electronically. Papers submitted to Annals of Combinatorics should be written in an elegant and clear style. Prospective authors not expert in the language used in their papers are urged to seek proper assistance in this matter before submitting papers. If the language used in a submitted manuscript is poor, the manuscript will be immediately sent back to the author.

Each paper should be preceded by an abstract in English.

The first page of the manuscript should include

• a short running title should be provided (not to exceed 60 characters, including space).
• AMS Subject Classificiation Number(s), and
• a short list of keywords.

Illustrations and diagrams should be submitted on separate sheets and not included in the text. They should be good quality and drawn in India ink using clean uniform lines. Computer-drawn figures are acceptable provided they are of comparable quality. Lines and curves must be smooth. Letters 2 mm high are recommended. The publisher reserves the right to reduce or enlarge illustrations and diagrams. The author should indicate in the margin of the manuscript where illustrations and diagrams are to be inserted. Footnotes, other than those referring to the title of the paper, should be avoided. If absolutely necessary, they should be numbered consecutively and placed at the foot of the page on which they occur (not at the end of the article).

The list of references at the end of the paper should always be in alphabetical order, numbered consecutively and include the names and initials of all authors, or editors, years of publication, and name and location of the publisher (see examples below). Names of journal and book series should be abbreviated in accordance with Zentralblatt für Mathematik. Whenever possible, please replace all references to papers accepted for publication, preprints or technical reports by the exact name of the journal, as well as the volume, first and last page numbers and year, if the article has already been published or accepted for publication.

If a work with more than three authors or editors is cited, only the first author's or editor's name plus ''et al.'' need to be given, for example, Komor et al. Here are examples which should be observed.

Citations in the text should be by numbers in square brackets, for example [1], or Freed and Melrose [1], referring to an alphabetically ordered and numbered list. In the list of references, the following examples should be observed:

Journal article:

1. M. Haviar and H.A. Priestley, A criterion for a finite endoprimal algebra to be endodualisable, Algebra univers. 42 (1999) 183-193.

Complete book:

2. G. Grätzer, General Lattice Theory, Second edition, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1998.

Single contribution in a book:

3. K. Madlener and B. Reinert, String rewriting and Grobner bases - A general approach to monoid and group rings, in: Symbolic rewriting techiques, M. Bronstein et al., Eds., Progress in Computer Science and Applied Logic, vol. 15, Birkhäuser, Basel (1998) pp. 127--180.