Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
A scientific manuscript is the result, the visible point, of a research that sometimes has implied months, and even years of work, from the design of the same until the elaboration of the conclusions and the final or executive report. For this, the presentation of the manuscript in order to be edited in a publication of high level of excellence has to be cared in all its extremes, formal and conceptual, to avoid a «rejection» by minor issues that at least will suppose an important loss of time between its return and the new shipping, and a discredit of the authors in face of the editors, because of the lack of care in the formal presentation of the work.
The scientific journals of high international prestige count with well-studied and specific policies where it is indicated how to present their work from the formal viewpoint. In general, in the Social Sciences, the rules of the American Psychological Association (APA) is the standardized reference, although they can also offer features that are collected in the own publication, that have to be taken into account.
This type of formal oversights, so frequent in the journals indexed in bases of prestige as Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Scopus (Citescore), generate constant dismissals of works that, by formal issues, can not be revised in standardized conditions: extension of the works not adjusted, identification of authors, lack of attached prescriptive files, references without APA format or incomplete, not standardized enumerations…
Some periodic publications, as the scientific journal ‘Communicar’, count in its Guidelines section with epigraphs complementary to the general heading of «Rules» that complement and extend the information needed that the authors require to present a good manuscript, in first instance, thus avoiding rejections and returns that hinder and slow down a process, which is already dense.
In «Comunicar», in the section of «Gudelines», next to the «Rules» the authors can find other complementary materials as:
- Structure for shipping.
- How to cite according to APA standards.
- Criteria of «normalization» of the names of authors.
- International identifiers as ORCID, ResearchID.
- Management of shipping of articles.
- Models of file cards of review of the Reviewers (to be taken into account by the authors)
- Cover letter and Title page (prescriptive file of identification and assignment of rights).
- Checklist protocol.
Precisely, this last document, the «Checklist protocol» aims to, in a way of «checklist», to offer to the authors a simple system of self-checking on formal and content aspects that, collected in the standards, need to be very present for hitting from the first time and not suffering a rejection by formal issues, so unnecessary after the great effort that has meant, not only in a great way the writing of the manuscript, as do the research that supports it.
See the “Guidelines” section in “Comunicar”:
https://www.grupocomunicar.com/index.php?contenido=normas
