Author Guidelines

Before you submit

• The work must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere.
• Every listed author must have contributed substantially and approved the submission. All listed authors are notified by email upon submission.
• All conflicts of interest and sources of funding must be disclosed.
• Ethics approval and informed consent must be obtained where the study requires them.
• An author account with a confirmed email address is required. Registration is free of charge, and one account serves every journal of the publisher.

Preparing your manuscript

The manuscript is uploaded as one Word document (.docx). No other format is accepted — older .doc files must be re-saved as .docx. The file may be up to 20 MB. No journal template is required: accepted manuscripts are prepared for publication in HTML and PDF by the editorial office.

• One complete file — title, abstract, keywords, main text, figures and tables (placed in the text or at the end), and references.
• Anonymised — review is double-blind, so remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgements and self-identifying references from the file, and clear the author name from the document’s properties. Author details are entered in the submission form instead.
• Supplementary material — datasets, code, extra figures or appendices may be added as a single ZIP archive of up to 10 MB.
• Structure — Introduction, Related Work, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusion are recommended, with departures where the nature of the work requires.
• References — in the order they are cited, with a DOI wherever one exists.

Details entered in the form

• Title — between 20 and 250 characters; specific and descriptive.
• Abstract — between 300 and 2,500 characters, written to stand alone. It is what most readers and every indexing service will see.
• Keywords — between 3 and 10. Keywords are used for indexing and article discovery.
• Domain — one of the journal’s 14 research domains, listed under Aims & Scope.
• Authors — up to 8, each with title (Dr., Prof., Mr., Ms., Mrs.), first name, last name, email, designation, organization, country and at least one CRediT contributor role, in publication order, with one corresponding author.

Authorship

Authors are listed in the order in which they should appear on the published article. For each, the institutional affiliation, country and — wherever possible — their ORCID iD are recorded, linking the article permanently to their scholarly record.

Contributions are recorded using the NISO CRediT taxonomy — 14 standard roles including Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition and Writing – review & editing. These are published with the article and included in its deposited metadata.

Adding or removing an author after submission requires the written agreement of all parties, including the person being added or removed.

Article types

• Research Article
• Review Article
• Short Paper
• Case Study
• Letter to the Editor

The submission process

Manuscripts are submitted online through the author dashboard, in four stages. A submission is received by the editorial office only once the final stage has been completed.