Submissions

Author Guidelines

Instruction for Authors

Manuscript Styles

All styles will be considered for publication if the topics are within the journal’s scope and focus. 

• Review articles. Authors could apply meta-analysis or systematic review methods (e.g., PRISMA), and the number of references used should be between 60-80. 
• Commentaries or reflections on previous research. This manuscript should contain research-based advice for practitioners or future researchers.
• Short communications. This style should describe work that may be of a preliminary nature but merits immediate publication.

Manuscripts should not be less than 5 pages of double-spaced texts (1500 words) or exceed 30 pages of double-spaced texts (or 9,000 words), including the title page, abstract, tables, appendices, and notes, but excluding all necessary references and figures (for an approximate total length of no more than 40 pages). 

APA Style

Please follow the 7th Edition of the APA Style Guide. The reference list should appear at the end of the manuscript and includes only literatures that are cited in the main text. We highly recommend the authors use a reference management tool such as Mendeley, EndNote, or Zotero to avoid inconsistency in the in-text citation and bibliography formatting. Examples of reference lists and in-text citation format are provided in the manuscript template and some of the examples are also provided below. 

Fonts

Use the same font throughout the text of the paper, 11-point Arial.

See the APA Style website (https://apastyle.apa.org) for further discussion of font and accessible typography.

Margins

Use 1-in. (2.54-cm) margins on all sides (top, bottom, left, and right) of the page.

Paragraph Alignment

Align the text to the left and leave the right margin uneven (“ragged”). Do not use full justification, which adjusts the spacing between words to make all lines the same length (flush with the margins). Do not manually divide words at the end of a line, and do not use the hyphenation function to break words at the ends of lines. Do not manually insert line breaks into long DOIs or URLs; however, breaks in DOIs or URLs applied automatically by a word- processing program are permissible.

Paragraph Indentation

Indent the first line of every paragraph 0.5 in. For consistency, use the tab key or the automatic paragraph-formatting function of your word-processing program. The default settings in most word-processing programs are acceptable. The remaining lines of the paragraph should be left-aligned.

Exceptions to these paragraph indentation requirements are as follows:

• For professional papers, the title (in bold), byline, and affiliations on the title page should be centered.
• Section labels should be centered and bold.
• The first line of the abstract should be flush left not indented.
• The entirety of a block quotation should be indented from the left margin 0.5 in. If the block quotation spans more than one paragraph, the first line of the second and any  subsequent  paragraphs  of  the  block  quotation should be indented another 0.5 in., such that those first lines are indented a total of 1 in.
• Level 1 headings should be centered and in bold, and Level 2 and 3 headings should be left-aligned and in bold or bold italic, respectively.
• Table and figure numbers, titles, and notes should be flush left.
• Reference list entries should have a hanging indent of 0.5 in.
• Appendix labels and titles should be centered and bold.

Double-blind peer review

This journal follows a double-blind reviewing procedure. This means that the author will remain anonymous to the reviewers throughout peer review. It is the responsibility of the author to anonymize the manuscript and any associated materials.

• Author names, affiliations and any other potentially identifying information should be removed from the manuscript text and any accompanying files (such as figures of supplementary material);
• A separate Title Page should be submitted, containing the title, author names, affiliations, and contact information of the corresponding author. Any acknowledgments, disclosures, or funding information should also be included on this page;
• Authors should avoid citing their own work in a way that could reveal their identity.

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.

Online Submission

Please follow the hyperlink “Make a new submission” and upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions given on the screen.

Source Files

Please ensure you provide all relevant editable source files at every submission and revision. Failing to submit a complete set of editable source files will result in your article not being considered for review. For your manuscript text please always submit in common word processing formats such as .docx or LaTeX.

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 the 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.

Abstract

Please provide an abstract of 150 to 250 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references.

Keywords

Please provide 4 to 6 keywords that can be used for indexing purposes.

MainText
Text Formatting
Manuscripts should be submitted in Word.

Use a normal, plain font (e.g., 11-point Arial) for text.
Use italics for emphasis.
Use the automatic page numbering function to number the pages.
Do not use field functions.
Use tab stops or other commands for indents, not the space bar.
Use the table function, not spreadsheets, to make tables.
Use the equation editor or MathType for equations.
Save your file in .docx format (Word 2007 or higher) or doc format (older Word versions).
Manuscripts with mathematical content can also be submitted in LaTeX. 

Headings
Please use no more than three levels of displayed headings.

Abbreviations
Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter.

Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section on the title page. The names of funding organizations should be written in full.

References
Citation
Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses. Some examples:

Negotiation research spans many disciplines (Thompson, 1990).
This result was later contradicted by Becker and Seligman (1996).
This effect has been widely studied (Abbott, 1991; Barakat et al., 1995; Kelso & Smith, 1998; Medvec et al., 1999).
Authors are encouraged to follow official APA version 7 guidelines on the number of authors included in reference list entries (i.e., include all authors up to 20; for larger groups, give the first 19 names followed by an ellipsis and the final author’s name). However, if authors shorten the author group by using et al., this will be retained.

Reference list
The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should only be mentioned in the text.

Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last names of the first author of each work.

Journal names and book titles should be italicized.

If available, please always include DOIs as full DOI links in your reference list (e.g. “https://doi.org/abc”).

Journal article

Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185

Article by DOI

Hong, I., Knox, S., Pryor, L., Mroz, T. M., Graham, J., Shields, M. F., & Reistetter, T. A. (2020). Is referral to home health rehabilitation following inpatient rehabilitation facility associated with 90-day hospital readmission for adult patients with stroke? American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHM.0000000000001435

Book

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.

Book chapter

Dillard, J. P. (2020). Currents in the study of persuasion. In M. B. Oliver, A. A. Raney, & J. Bryant (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (4th ed., pp. 115–129). Routledge.

Online document

Fagan, J. (2019, March 25). Nursing clinical brain. OER Commons. Retrieved January 7, 2020, from https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/53029-nursing-clinical-brain/view

Tables

• All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Tables should always be cited in the text in consecutive numerical order.
• For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table, and placed it on the top of the table. Refer to the APA 7th Ed. manual for table title formatting.
• Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption. The authors must obtain permission for reusing copyrighted tables from published papers.
• Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

Artwork and Illustrations Guidelines

Electronic Figure Submission

• Supply all figures electronically.
• The authors must obtain permission for reusing copyrighted figures from published papers.
• Indicate what graphics program was used to create the artwork.
• For vector graphics, the preferred format is EPS; for halftones, please use TIFF format. MS Office files are also acceptable.
• Vector graphics containing fonts must have the fonts embedded in the files.
• Name your figure files with "Fig" and the figure number, e.g., Fig1.eps.
• Do not use faint lines and/or lettering and check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible at the final size.
• All lines in the figures should be at least 0.1 mm (0.3 pt) wide.
• Scanned line drawings and line drawings in bitmap format should have a minimum resolution of 1200 dpi.
• Vector graphics containing fonts must have the fonts embedded in the files.

Color Art of Figure

• Color art is free of charge for online publication.
• If black and white will be shown in the print version, make sure that the main information will still be visible. Many colors are not distinguishable from one another when converted to black and white. A simple way to check this is to make a xerographic copy to see if the necessary distinctions between the different colors are still apparent.
• If the figures will be printed in black and white, do not refer to color in the captions.
• Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

Figure Lettering

• To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).
• Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).
• Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.
• Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.
• Do not include titles or captions within your illustrations.

Figure Numbering

• All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Figures should always be cited in the text in consecutive numerical order.
• Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).
• If an appendix appears in your article and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text. Do not number the appendix figures,"A1, A2, A3, etc." Figures in online appendices [Supplementary Information (SI)] should, however, be numbered separately.

Figure Captions

• Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.
• Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type, placed on the bottom of the figure. Refer to the APA 7th Ed. manual for caption formatting.
• No punctuation is to be included after the number, nor is any punctuation to be placed at the end of the caption.
• Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption; and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.
• Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Figure Placement and Size

• Figures should be submitted within the body of the text. Only if the file size of the manuscript causes problems in uploading it, the large figures should be submitted separately from the text.
• When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.
• For large-sized journals, the figures should be 84 mm (for double-column text areas), or 174 mm (for single-column text areas) wide and not higher than 234 mm.
• For small-sized journals, the figures should be 119 mm wide and not higher than 195 mm.

Permissions

If you include figures that have already been published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format. Please be aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that Springer will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions. In such cases, material from other sources should be used.

Accessibility

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your figures, please make sure that

• All figures have descriptive captions (blind users could then use a text-to-speech software or a text-to-Braille hardware)
• Patterns are used instead of or in addition to colors for conveying information (colorblind users would then be able to distinguish the visual elements
• Any figure lettering has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1

Terminology

• Please use the standard mathematical notation for formulae, symbols etc.:Italic for single letters that denote mathematical constants, variables, and unknown quantities Roman/upright for numerals, operators, and punctuation, and commonly defined functions or abbreviations, e.g., cos, det, e or exp, lim, log, max, min, sin, tan, d (for derivative) Bold for vectors, tensors, and matrices.

After acceptance

Upon acceptance, your article will be exported to Production to undergo typesetting. Once typesetting is complete, you will receive a link asking you to confirm your affiliation, choose the publishing model for your article as well as arrange rights. There is no payment of any associated publication cost required.

Once you have completed this, your article will be processed and you will receive the proofs.

Offprints

Offprints can be ordered by the corresponding author.

Color illustrations

Online publication of color illustrations is free of charge. For color in the print version, authors will be expected to make a contribution towards the extra costs.

Proof reading

The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the Editor.

After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

Online First

The article will be published online after receipt of the corrected proofs. This is the official first publication citable with the DOI. After the release of the printed version, the paper can also be cited by issue and page numbers.