Submissions

Author Guidelines

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

EDITORIAL POLICY

Due to an increasing influx of manuscripts, we will no longer be able to examine and correct manuscripts for language and style. All manuscripts are expected to be free from language errors must be formatted strictly following APA style. Manuscripts that are not entirely formatted in APA style and/or do not reflect an expert use of the English language will not be considered for publication and will not be sent to any of the journal reviewers for evaluation. Moreover, due to the increasing number of incoming manuscripts, we may not be able to inform an author within a reasonable time about a manuscript's rejection due to style and/or language, which may result in unintentional delays. In such a case we do not assume any responsibility. It is completely the author’s responsibility to comply with the rules and check for any errors. Thus, all necessary actions should be taken before a manuscript is submitted.

We highly recommend that non-native speakers of English have manuscripts proofread by a copy editor before submission. During submission, including a note from a copy editor may significantly reduce the review time of your manuscript. However, proof of copy editing does not guarantee acceptance of a manuscript for publication in the IJPCE Journal.

When necessary the authors should receive get help from a copy editor for English Language proofreading including grammar, sentence structure, content clarity, formatting, punctuation, and spelling.

Alternatively, authors may also use services from the following companies:

Editage, Enago, or Elsevier Language Services.

IJPCE Journal publishes only original scholarly works. We do not accept and will not publish manuscripts which are derivative of an author's previous work. Please do not submit your manuscripts simultaneously or separately to both IJPCE Journal and another journal. In such cases the responsibility solely rests with the author(s).

HOW TO PREPARE MANUSCRIPTS

Figures and tables should have their positions clearly marked and be provided on separate sheets that can be detached from the main text.

Manuscript Presentation

This journal accepts and publishes English-language manuscripts only; either British or American English may be used, but the dialect used should be followed consistently throughout the manuscript.

A manuscript should average about 8-15 journal pages (about 11.500 words), with shorter ones being more advisable. However, this does not impose an absolute page limit on manuscripts; longer manuscripts of merit can be published in the journal.

It is the responsibility of the author to ensure before submission that the manuscript is in its most refined condition and that the following have been considered:

Will the reader be able to understand and evaluate all stages of your research study or methodological/theoretical contribution or the position you are stating in your manuscript?
Is the expression of ideas and wording understandable, plain, self-contained, precise,and full?
In its current state, is your manuscript written in the shortest possible way? Do you have any redundancies, repetitions, and/or unsupported generalizations? Is everything in the manuscript relevant and necessary for the reader to understand your point?
Do you have data or references for all of the general statements you included in your manuscript?
Have you clearly explained and highlighted the place and importance of the research problem in the literature? Are your purposes clear and understandable? Do sufficient links exist between the research problem and the method employed in the study? Do you explain the reason for the choice of methods and their suitability to the problem?
Do you make explicit your theoretical/conceptual framework?
Do you include the validity and reliability measures of the instruments utilized? Do you explain how you took precautions towards threats to validity and reliability?
Do you include references for the instruments you employed? If you are presenting a new research instrument, questionnaire, achievement test, interview protocol, etc., do you include it entirely in the manuscript for the reviewers and the readers to be able to evaluate it?
Do you present the entire results emerging from the study? Have all the results presented emerged from the current study? Do you discuss the results in terms of the literature and contributions to the literature?

Layout
General Principles

Please submit your manuscript as a Microsoft Word file in .docx, .doc or .rtf formats by allowing 1” margins all around, 1.5 spacing, using 12-point Times New Roman, and numbering pages consecutively starting with the first page. 

The first page should contain the following:

• Running head (shortened title)

• Title

• Abstract

Please provide a short abstract of 150 words maximum. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references.

• Keywords

Please provide four to six key words or short phrases in alphabetical order.

• State of the literature

Please summarize the state of the literature and what is already known in three bullet points using a maximum of 100 words. Do not provide any quotations or citations here from earlier works, as this should be done within the paper. Do not plagiarize. The three points made in this section will help the reader understand the current state of the literature and the need for your paper. Hence, the purpose is to help situate your work within the current literature in the field.

• Contribution of this paper to the literature

Please summarize the ways your paper contributes the existing literature in three bullet points using a maximum of 100 words. You can also emphasize the originality and the significance of your work in terms of research questions, employed methods, and/or findings and results. However, do not give any implications in this section. The purpose of this section is to help the readers to be able to compare and contrast your work to previous work, if any exists, and to understand how your work advances the scholarship in the field.

Quotations

Quotations of less than 40 words should be incorporated into the text using double quotation marks. Quotations longer than 40 words should be in a freestanding block of text without quotation marks, per APA style.

Section Headings

First-, second-, third-, and fourth-order headings should be clearly distinguishable.

Appendices

Supplementary material should be collected in an Appendix and placed before the Notes and References.

Notes

Please use end notes rather than footnotes. Notes should be indicated by consecutive superscript numbers in the text and listed at the end of the article before the References. A source reference note should be indicated by means of an asterisk after the title. This note should be placed at the bottom of the first page.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section before the References.

References

References should follow American Psychological Association (APA, Seventh Edition) style and the DOI number, if any, must be included.

Figures

All photographs, graphs, and diagrams should be referred to as figures and should be numbered consecutively (1, 2, etc.). Multi-part figures should be labeled with lower case letters (a, b, etc.). Please insert keys and scale bars directly in the figures. Relatively small text and great variation in text sizes within figures should be avoided as figures are often reduced in size. Figures may be re-sized to fit with in the column(s) of the journal. Provide a detailed legend (without abbreviations)for each figure, refer to the figure in the text, and note its approximate location in the margin. Please place the legends in the manuscript after the references.

High quality (300 dpi or higher) original digital files in one of the common file formats such as jpeg, tiff, or png must be submitted as separate files and not embedded in the text. Charts and graphs must include a separate MS Excel file along with the text file so that changes can be made in their appearance.

Tables

Each table should be numbered consecutively. In tables, footnotes are preferable to long explanatory material in either the heading or body of the table. Such explanatory footnotes, identified by superscript letters, should be placed immediately below the table. Please provide a caption (without abbreviations) for each table, refer to the table in the text, and note its approximate location in the margin. Finally, please place the table captions after the figure legends in the manuscript.

Peer Review Policy

IJPCE operates a double-blind peer reviewing process. The manuscript should not include authors' names, institutional affiliations, contact information, or reference lists. All submitted manuscripts are reviewed by the editors and section editors, and only those meeting the aims and scope of the journal will be sent for outside review. Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two referees.

Proofs

Proofs will be sent to the corresponding author. One corrected proof, together with the original edited manuscript, should be returned to the publisher within three days of receipt by e-mail (pdf version).

Permission

It is the author's responsibility to obtain written permissions for any quotation from unpublished materials, and for all quotations in excess of 250 words in one extract or 500 words in total from any work still in copyright. Written permissions are also required for inclusion of figures, tables or poems from unpublished or copyrighted materials.

Copyright

Authors maintain the copyright of their manuscripts published in IJPCE. Terms and conditions of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) apply.

Conditions for Publishing

IJPCE operates fully in the open access format. The scientific community and the general public have, for free, unlimited and immediate access to all content published in our journal as soon as it is published on the Internet. This effectively removes the barriers for timely distribution of the articles and ensures that they can be read by as many as possible.

Submitting Paper

Manuscripts for IJPCE should be submitted online.