Preparation of a Manuscript

General Considerations

  • The language of the manuscript must be English (either American or British standard, but not the mixture of both).
  • An article should be between 6 and 25 pages, and exceed 2000 words.
  • Please use the formatting specification, page layout and styles specified in the template.
  • Abbreviations should be defined in parentheses the first time they appear in the abstract, main text, and in figure or table captions.
  • SI Units (International System of Units) should be used. If other units are mentioned, please give their equivalent in SI.
  • Research Data and supplementary materials: Note that publication of your manuscript implies that you must make all materials, data, and protocols associated with the publication available to readers. Please disclose at the submission stage any restrictions on the availability of materials or information.

Manuscript structure

The article should be composed of Title, Author(s), Affiliation(s), Corresponding author(s) email(s), Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Main body (Materials and Methods and Results), Conclusion/Discussion, Acknowledgements, Conflicts of Interest and References. Supplementary Material (if needed).

 

Divide your article into clearly defined sections. The headings or subheadings should be numbered in order as the given style. Each heading or subheading should not exceed 3 lines. There should be at least 2 subheadings but no more than 10 subheadings under one heading. The Abstract, Acknowledgements, Conflicts of Interest and References are not included in section numbering.

Front Matter

  • Title: A good title should contain the fewest possible words that adequately describe the contents of a paper. It should be informative, meaningful and specific. When decision making model names are included, the abbreviated name rather than full name should be used. No punctuation at the end.
  • Author(s) Name: Authors' full first and last names must be provided. The initials of any middle names can be added. There should be no professional title/ranks before the author's name.
  • Author(s) affiliations: The affiliation of the author should only include Department/Faculty, University/Institute/Organization, City, Country or “Company, City, Country”. Indicate all affiliations with a superscript number immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address.
  • Corresponding author(s): Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Please write the corresponding author’s name after email address.
  • Abstract: An abstract is a short summary of your research paper, a single paragraph of 250 words maximum. A good abstract should (i) state the principal objectives and scope of the investigation, (ii) describe the methodology employed, (iii) summarize the results and (iv) state the principal conclusion. Formulas, pictures, abbreviations and in-text citations should be avoided.
  • Keywords: At least 3 words/phrases but no more than 8 should be given which identify the score of your study.

Research Manuscript Sections

  • Introduction: The primary purpose of the introduction is to provide motivation and aims of the study. It should state the objectives of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested. Authors should provide an adequate background, through reviewing the current state of a research field and citing key publications. In general, the introduction should be kept to about three to five paragraphs, clearly indicating the importance of the research problem and highlight the main conclusions how the problem can be solved or the questions answered.
  • Materials and Methods: The methods section is important for other scientists to understand what you did and be able to replicate your study. Thus, you must be very specific as to the equipment you used, its source, and provide direct references to methods. New methods and protocols should be described in detail while well-established methods can be briefly described and appropriately cited. Any modifications to existing methods should also be described. Present methods in the order the measures were obtained so as to recreate the actual flow of the experiment. For materials, include the exact technical specifications, what materials were used, quantities and source or methods of preparation. For data analysis, give the name and version of any software used and make clear whether computer code used is available.
  • Results: Provide a concise and precise description of the results, their interpretation as well as the conclusions that can be drawn. You should make a decision as to which data are the most important and present data in a hierarchical manner with the most important data in Figure form, the next important data sets in Table form and least important data in paragraph form.Use Tables and Figures to organize all the data systematically:  Tables to show exact values and Figures to show trends or relationship effect. Textual representation mentioning the key findings must be provided with each Table and Figure. Include any statistical analysis that was performed and make sure to indicate specific statistical data.
  • Discussion: Most important part of discussion is the justification of own findings. Try to present the principles, relationships and generalization shown by the results, but do not repeat results. Identify the most interesting, significant, remarkable findings that were presented in the Results section and make sure your questions/hypothesis are answered. Consider the other works in the literature that address this topic and how this work contributes to the overall field of study. It is also important to discuss the potential weaknesses and limitations of presented work. Discuss both theoretical implications, as well as practical ones.
  • Conclusion: In the Conclusion section first introduce the work and then briefly state the major results. Conclude with what might be your final statement of what your research showed, how this work contributes to the overall field of study and what is still unknown or needs to be investigated in general. Future research directions should also be mentioned.

 

Note: The Results and Discussion may be presented as separate sections, or they may be combined. Also, Results section can be separate and Discussion and Conclusion combined. We leave it up to authors choice.

Back Matter

  • Acknowledgments: Provide a brief statement acknowledging the efforts of any participants who are not included as authors of the manuscript. All sources of funding of the study should be disclosed. Clearly indicate grants that you have received in support of your research work and if you received funds to cover publication costs. If no funding has been provided for the research, please include the following sentence: "This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors."
  • Conflicts of Interest: Authors must identify and declare any personal circumstances or interest that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of reported research results. If there is no conflict of interest, please state "The authors declare no conflict of interest."
  • References: All bibliography items should be listed alphabetically by author’s name, without numeration at the end of the manuscript. Include the digital object identifier (DOI) for all references where available. Please list at least 15 references.

 

We insist on using a popular APA 7th edition reference style:

https://www.mendeley.com/guides/apa-citation-guide/

https://irsc.libguides.com/APA/JournalArticle

 

Also, we recommend using Mendeley, a free reference management software to help you automatically generate and arrange bibliography:

https://www.mendeley.com/reference-management/reference-manager

Using citation plug-ins from this product, authors only need to select the appropriate reference style when preparing their article, after which citations and bibliographies will be automatically formatted in the journal's style.

We believe that it will be very useful if authors thoroughly review manuscripts that have already been published in Global Sustainability Challenges. Such an effort would not only improve the quality of your manuscript, but would also promote awareness of the available information in Global Sustainability Challenges. Please use online databases for the literature review under Archives.

  • Supplementary Material: Unpublished material such as tables and figures that relate to the manuscript but are too lengthy to be printed with the manuscript can be submitted online as Supplementary Material. These should be in a final, viewable format such as MS word, Photos, Figures, Tables and PDF. For Photos, Figures and Tables please indicate the name and title of each element as follows Photo S1: title, Figure S1: title, Table S1: title, etc. Supplementary material such as applications and sound clips, can be published with your article to enhance it. Submitted supplementary items are published exactly as they are received (Excel or PowerPoint files will appear as such online). Please submit your material together with the article and supply a concise, descriptive caption for each supplementary file.

Equations

Please use either the Microsoft Equation Editor or the MathType add-on. The formula should be editable with no image format. The superscript and subscript should be clearly shown. All symbols and variables should be type-set in italics. The equation should be numbered in order with Arabic numerals in parentheses after each formula.

Figures, Graphs and Schemes

  • File for any kind of figures must be provided during submission in a single zip archive and at a sufficiently high resolution (minimum 1000 pixels width/height, or a resolution of 300 dpi or higher). Common formats are accepted, like: TIFF, JPEG and EPS are preferred.
  • Authors are encouraged to prepare figures, graphs and schemes in color (RGB at 8-bit per channel). There is no additional cost for publishing full color graphics.
  • All figures should be inserted into the main text close to their first citation and must be numbered consecutively in the order they appear, using Arabic numerals.
  • The captions should be editable and be written below the figures.

Tables

Please submit tables as editable text and not as images. Tables should be numbered with Arabic numerals in the order they appear in the text. Table caption should appear above the table, centered. The corresponding meaning of the symbol in the table should be given below the table using footnote. All table columns should have an explanatory heading. Use the Table option of Microsoft Word to create tables.

References

Citations in the text

Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Avoid citation in the abstract. Unpublished results and personal communications should not be in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. Citation of a reference as 'in press' implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association (APA 7th edition).

Reference List

References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically, if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters 'a', 'b', 'c', etc., placed after the year of publication.

Examples:

Reference to a journal publication:

Abbas, D. C. F. (2020). Manipulating of Audio-Visual Aids in the Educational Processes in Al-Hilla University College. International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, 24(03), 1248–1263. https://doi.org/10.37200/IJPR/V24I3/PR200875

Reference to a book:

Drury, C. (2013). Management Accounting for Business (5th ed.). Andover: Cengage Learning.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

Van de Vijver, F., & Leung, K. (2011). Equivalence and bias: a review of concepts, models, and

data analytic procedures. In D. Matsumoto & F. Van de Vijver (Eds.), Cross-cultural research methods in psychology (pp. 17-45). Cambridge University Press.

Reference to a Website:

Beard, M. (2011, March 29). The fall of the Roman Republic. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/fallofromanrepublic_article_01.shtml

Reference to a dataset:

Paris, T., Kim, J., & Davis, C. (2015). EEG responses to two contexts of AV speech presentation

[Data set]. Western Sydney University. http://doi.org/10.4225/35/54bf146fa4012

Supplementary Materials and Software Source Code

Data Availability

In order to maintain the integrity, transparency and reproducibility of research records, authors must make their experimental and research data openly available either by depositing into data repositories or by publishing the data and files as supplementary information in this journal.

Computer Code and Software

For work where novel computer code was developed, authors should release the code either by depositing in a recognized, public repository or uploading as supplementary information to the publication. The name and version of all software used should be clearly indicated.

Supplementary Material

Additional data and files can be uploaded as "Supplementary Files" during the manuscript submission process. The supplementary files will also be available to the referees as part of the peer-review process. Any file format is acceptable. However, we recommend that common, non-proprietary formats are used where possible.

References in Supplementary Files

Citations and References in Supplementary files are permitted provided that they also appear in the reference list of the main text.