Manuscript Type
LingTera accepts two manuscript types: Research Articles and Secondary Research. All submissions must fall within the journal’s scope of applied linguistics and offer a clear contribution to knowledge, theory, methodology, or practice.
1. Research Articles
Research Articles report original empirical investigations addressing language-related questions or problems. Studies may employ qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods.
Manuscripts should address a clearly defined research problem, engage with relevant scholarship, explain the research methods, and present findings supported by appropriate evidence. The discussion should interpret the findings in relation to previous research and explain their contribution to the field.
Research Articles should generally include an Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References. Results and Discussion may be combined where appropriate.
2. Secondary Research
Secondary Research examines existing studies or publication data through explicit, transparent, and systematic methods to generate new insights into applied linguistics. Accepted approaches include:
- Systematic literature reviews: Identify, evaluate, and synthesise relevant studies to address clearly defined research questions using documented search, selection, and analysis procedures.
- Meta-analyses: Statistically combine quantitative findings from existing studies to estimate overall effects and investigate variation across studies.
- Qualitative research syntheses: Systematically identify and integrate findings from qualitative studies to develop interpretations of experiences, perspectives, processes, or contexts.
- Scoping reviews: Systematically map the breadth, characteristics, and distribution of research within a domain, identifying key themes and gaps in the evidence.
- Methodological syntheses: Systematically examine research designs, instruments, analytical techniques, or reporting practices across studies to evaluate methodological patterns and inform future research.
- Bibliometric reviews: Analyse systematically assembled publication metadata, such as citations, authorship, keywords, and publication patterns, to investigate the development and structure of a research field.
- Historical reviews: Trace theoretical, methodological, or substantive developments within a research domain over time. Manuscripts must use explicit and systematic procedures for identifying, selecting, and analysing relevant publications.
For all approaches, authors must state the research questions or objectives and explain the information sources, search strategies, eligibility criteria, selection procedures, data extraction or coding, and synthesis or analytical methods. Quality appraisal or risk-of-bias assessment should be included where appropriate to the approach and purpose.
Manuscripts should provide a substantive synthesis that advances understanding beyond summaries of individual studies. They should generally include an Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References, with adjustments appropriate to the approach.
General narrative reviews, descriptive literature summaries, and other reviews without explicit and systematic methodological procedures are not accepted.
Requirements for All Submissions
All manuscripts must be original, must not be under consideration by another journal, and must comply with LingTera’s Author Guidelines and the applicable manuscript template.
General narrative reviews and descriptive summaries of literature are no longer accepted.
