Ask everyONE: Missing author data at submission

This post is by Yael Franco, a publications assistant for PLoS ONE. She helps assign Academic Editors to manuscripts, assists authors, reviewers and editors with email and phone queries, and handles press inquiries.

Sometimes when you submit a manuscript as an author, before you can proceed to build the PDF of the manuscript, an error message will appear noting, “required author data is missing”.
This error message refers to the beginning portion of your online submission where you are asked to enter co-author information. To go back to this section please click on the “Add/Edit/Remove Authors” box on the left-hand side of your screen in the “Edit Submission” page. To correct this error, please remember to include the missing author data marked by an asterisk (*).  This can include institution, department, or country.

To find answers to more commonly asked questions please check out our Most Common Questions page. If you have a more immediate question though, please contact us directly at plosone [at] plos.org.