Author: Rosa García-Ruiz – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Selecting the magazine that best adapts to our interests is as important as adapting to the standards of the magazine to which we will send our work.
In the same way, acceding to the scientific information of greater quality in the international databases and in the best positioned journals in the world rankings, is as important as getting to know and fulfill with the standards of publications that many magazines share.
To read researches and previous studies related with our themes as a first task, will enable us to get to write by following the scientific style that is expected from a researcher: precise, clear and brief.
Having into account all the indications that have justified in the previous posts of this School of Authors will help us in a great grade to achieve our goal of publication in the best journals.
Now, achieving this objective requires reading thoroughly and meticulously the standard of the magazine to which we will send our work. Each magazine has its own standardization, which allows us to get to know with accuracy all its details for accomplishing it rigorously. It is important to take into account that the Club of magazines JCR keeps very standardized parameters in their normative with slight or any changes regarding to the manual of style and scientific writing of the American Psychological Association (APA), towards the magazines of second and third order, that afraid of singularizing themselves write their own norms that generate additional work to the authors when transmuting from a magazine to another, with the subsequent risk that the format is what determines the contents, as if it were the bed of Procusto.
But we do not only need to focus on the standard in front of formal aspects, but also in the style of their publications, the type of contributions that are published (investigations, studies, revisions, analyses), the way of shipment of the manuscripts, the number and type of documents that is necessary to send (manuscript and cover letter), if they should have authorship data in the text or not, etc.
Regarding to the Standards of formal type, it is fundamental to respect scrupulously each of the requirements of the journal since the editorial group will value positively that we worry for having into account its normative, which is an important sign of the scientific quality in a researcher.
In rough outlines, the normative aspects that we should take care of specially in the manuscript are:
- Extension and article structure
- Extension and structure of the title and abstract
- Number and adaptation of the key words
- Number of references, updating of the same and its sources, taking into account if they follow the APA standards or not and if they offer examples of references
- Format: synopsis, numerations, type and size of the letter, margins, space between lines, italics, bold, tabulators, tables and figures, capital letters and low case letters, etc.
Comunicar Journal offers a document explaining its normative in which details each one of the aspects and values positively when the authors follow it.
Therefore, following meticulously the standards of each magazine will help us in order our article to be valued for its evaluation. If in addition we take into account the following warnings, we will advance correctly in pursuit of our objective, the publication in a scientific journal:
- Sending an article to a journal implies the submission to its formal and content requirements, for which any mistake in relation to this point, is a cause for rejection.
- Not fulfilling with the norms of a journal is symptom of various negative aspects; indifference, lack of awareness, undervaluing of the journal and its evaluative processes, in short, an article with mistakes of this nature has a limited future.
