Writing Rules

Manuscript Submission

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Permissions

Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

How to Submit

Manuscripts should preferably be submitted in the original file format. Please follow the hyperlink “Submit manuscript” on the right to open an e-mail to the editor and attach the files.

Please ensure you provide all relevant editable source files. Failing to submit these source files might cause unnecessary delays in the review and production process.

Submission Types

In addition to original investigations, the journal publishes reviews, commentary, letters to the editor and debate on topics of current interest.

Original Article

Studies that are of high scientific quality and that are of interest to the diverse readership of the journal. Manuscripts should include an abstract and appropriate experimental details to support the conclusions. Original Articles should be no more than 5000 words and should not include more than 6 display items (tables and/or figures) or more than 60 references.

Reviews

Review articles have a word limit of 8000 words excluding abstract, references, tables and figures. Review articles are limited to 120 references. Authors of review articles shall be established, recognized experts in the field.

Systematic and Meta-Analytic Reviews

Systematic and Meta-analytic reviews attempt to provide a penetrating overview of primary research on a particular research question by identifying, choosing, synthesizing and evaluating all high-quality research evidence relevant to the question or topic of the review in order to answer it. Key points:

1. Systematic reviews seek to find, categorize, and report all evidence that fits previously established eligibility criteria in order to address a specific research question.

2. The goal of systematic reviews is to reduce bias by using clearly defined, systematic methods to evaluate the quality of studies included in the review.

These methods should be followed and additionally there should be evidence (reputable publications, the more the better) that at least one of the authors is him/herself proficient/a recognized expert in the content area of the review. Also, these reviews should arrive at meaningful conclusions that resolve important controversies. These conclusions should be based on more than a small handful of studies. A conclusion that more research is needed is not sufficient. Systematic reviews may include a meta-analytic component.

Meta-analysis involves the synthesis of several studies into a single statistical analysis with the goal of developing a single quantitative estimate or summary effect size. Similarly to comments above for systematic reviews, appropriate methods for meta-analysis should be followed and additionally there should be evidence (reputable publications, the more the better) that at least one of the authors is him/herself proficient/a recognized expert in the content area of the meta-analysis. Just as for systematic reviews, meta-analyses should arrive at meaningful conclusions that resolve important controversies. These conclusions should be based on more than a small handful of studies. A conclusion that more research is needed is not sufficient.

Commentary/Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor is a commentary on articles that have been published in the journal within the previous 6 months. They should contain no more than 1000 words of text, no more than one display item (figure or table) and a maximum of 15 references.

Commentary articles do not have an abstract. If the letter is accepted for publication, a copy will be sent to the author of the original article with an invitation to submit a rebuttal that will be published with the letter.

Commentary/letter responses will be held to the same length and reference requirements.

Title Page

Please make sure your title page contains the following information.

Title

The title should be concise and informative.

Author information

The name(s) of the author(s)

The affiliation(s) of the author(s), i.e. institution, (department), city, (state), country

A clear indication and an active e-mail address of the corresponding author

If available, the 16-digit ORCID of the author(s)

If address information is provided with the affiliation(s) it will also be published.

For authors that are (temporarily) unaffiliated we will only capture their city and country of residence, not their e-mail address unless specifically requested.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Abstract

Please provide a structured abstract of 150 to 250 words which should be divided into the following sections:

Background (stating the main purposes and research question)

Methods

Results

Conclusion

A sample Manuscript Template  is available at JESPAR main page.