Funding statements: exact wording, grant numbers, and where they go.

The funding statement goes in one of three places, and the journal decides which: the title page of the manuscript, a separate funding section near the acknowledgments, or the submission form only. ICMJE-style journals list sources of support among the required title page elements. PLOS ONE takes the opposite position and bans funding text from the manuscript file entirely. The same sentence one journal requires can get your paper bounced at another journal's technical check, so placement is the first thing to confirm, before you polish the wording.

What does a complete funding statement include?

A complete funding statement has four parts: the full official name of each funder, the grant or award number, the initials of the author who received it, and a sentence on the role the funder played in the work. Two sentences usually cover all four.

Written out, the shape looks like this:

This work was supported by Funder A (grant 12345 to A.B.) and Funder B (award 67890 to C.D.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Use the funder's registered name, not your lab's shorthand for it. Grant databases and funder compliance systems match on the official name and the award number, and a statement that says "the national science agency" helps nobody trace the money. One entry per grant. If two grants came from the same funder, list both numbers.

Completeness has a limit. The ICMJE recommendations warn that funding sources and affiliations that did not contribute to the work should not be listed, because listing them would be misleading. Your university pays your salary, but that is general institutional support, which ICMJE says to keep distinct from direct funding of the work itself. A scholarship that funded the PhD during which the study ran is a judgment call; many authors include it with the award number and no one objects.

Where does the funding statement go in the manuscript?

It depends entirely on the journal, and the two common answers contradict each other. ICMJE-style journals want sources of support on the title page. PLOS ONE wants funding out of the manuscript altogether.

PLOS ONE's submission guidelines are explicit: "Do not include funding sources in the Acknowledgments or anywhere else in the manuscript file; funding information should only be entered in the financial disclosure section of the submission system." The journal then builds the published funding section of your article from what you typed into that form. Nothing you write in the manuscript file feeds it.

Elsevier and Springer journals more often ask for a funding or acknowledgments paragraph inside the manuscript, sometimes on the title page so the anonymized version stays clean for reviewers. There is no shortcut around the guide for authors. Search it for "funding" and "financial disclosure" and follow what it says for that journal, not what your last journal wanted. These journal-to-journal reversals run through the whole package, from abstract word limits to reference style, and funding placement is the version of the problem that authors notice last.

The trap is sharpest when a paper transfers or gets resubmitted. A manuscript formatted for an ICMJE title page arrives at PLOS ONE carrying funding text the journal explicitly prohibits, and the technical check returns it before an editor reads a word.

How do you write a funding statement with no funding?

One sentence does it. Elsevier's guides for authors suggest this exact wording: "This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors."

That line, or a close variant, is accepted almost everywhere, and it answers the question the form is really asking: did any organization pay for this work in a way readers should know about. Do not leave the field blank, and do not write "not applicable." Editorial systems treat an empty funding field as an unanswered question, not as a declaration of independence. Unfunded is a disclosure too, and it needs a sentence.

Self-funded work sits in the same category. If you paid the article processing charge from your own pocket, say so plainly; a reader who wonders who paid for the study should never have to guess.

What is the funder-role sentence?

It is the sentence that says whether the funder influenced the science. The standard wording, which PLOS journals use across thousands of published articles, reads: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

Only write that sentence if it is true. When a sponsor designed the trial, employed two of the authors, or reviewed the draft before submission, the statement has to say exactly that, in plain terms. ICMJE goes further: if an organization was paid or contracted to help conduct the research, for example to collect or manage data, that belongs in the methods section, not just the disclosure. Editors are far more forgiving of a declared funder role than of one that surfaces in peer review.

Where the form and the manuscript disagree

The most common funding errors are not wording problems. They are mismatches between what the submission form says and what the manuscript says. A grant number appears in the acknowledgments but not in the form. The title page lists three funders and the form lists two. The form carries a typo in the award number that the manuscript got right.

These mismatches matter because the two records have different destinies. At PLOS ONE the form becomes the published funding section, so a form error goes straight into the article of record, and fixing it afterward takes a formal correction. At title-page journals, production staff reconcile the two versions by querying you, which costs a round of email at the exact moment you want the paper moving.

So run one final cross-check before you press submit: read the funding field in the form, the title page, the acknowledgments, and your cover letter in a single sitting, and confirm every funder name and award number is identical in all of them. It takes five minutes. A submission checklist should carry this as its own line item, and an automated manuscript review like Waraq can run the same comparison against the target journal's disclosure rules before the submission system does.

The funding statement is the rare part of a manuscript where originality is a liability. Copy the journal's preferred wording, put it in the one place that journal wants it, and make every copy of it agree.