JIS manuscript submission template
Notes for Authors
1. Editorial Policy
The Journal of Information Science is an international peer-reviewed journal of high repute covering topics of interest to all those researching and working in the sciences of information and knowledge management. The Editors welcome material on any aspect of information science theory, policy, application or practice that will advance thinking in the field.
Information Science is a broad based discipline which has a potential impact in almost every sphere of human activity in the emerging information age.
There have been significant advances in information technology and information processing techniques over recent years and the pace of innovation shows no sign of slowing. However, the application of these technologies is often sub-optimal because theoretical understanding lags behind.
The Journal seeks to achieve a better understanding of the principles that underpin the effective creation, organization, storage, communication and utilization of information and knowledge resources. It seeks to understand how policy and practice in the area can be built on sound theoretical or heuristic foundations to achieve a greater impact on the world economy.
Articles written from a theoretical or applied perspective are welcomed. However, theoretical articles should consider the possible application of the proposed theory in other fields of research, commerce, education or government.
Conversely, articles focusing on applied information science topics should seek to highlight the underlying theoretical principles and show how their application has been novel or lead to unusual or exemplary results.
Correspondence to: Adrian Dale - Editor
E-mail: Information.Science@creatifica.com
2. Subject Coverage
Material on all aspects of information science will be considered for publication including:
- information processing and management
- information flow and communication
- knowledge structuring and organization
- information literacy and information education
- information seeking behaviours
- economic impact of information and knowledge
- information and knowledge policy formulation
- legal and political issues relating to information
- meta data and structured vocabularies
- search, navigation and retrieval techniques
- information architecture
- information and knowledge audit
- content management
3. Originality and Copyright
Submission of an article is understood to imply that the work is original, unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
The author will be responsible for obtaining copyright clearance of any material abstracted from other sources. The source of such material must be acknowledged in the text.
Upon acceptance of an article by the Journal, the author(s) will be asked to transfer the copyright to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
4. Refereeing
For the first round of reviewing the journal adheres to a rigorous double-blind reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are concealed from both parties unless this proves impossible because of extensive self-citation or other identifying features in the text. For the final round of reviewing before acceptance, the manscript is not anonymised unless the Editor judges that there are likely to be any conflicts of interest between reviewer and authors.
Editorial Review Process: All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Editor and only those papers that meet the scientific and editorial standards of the journal, and fit within the aims and scope of the journal, will be sent for outside review.
Peer Review Process: Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two referees but for most (especially technical) papers four reviews are sought.
For highly technical papers Authors are requested to suggest the names, affiliations and contact information of up to four qualified but independent individuals who may be suitable to serve as referees on a technical panel to supplement the Editorial Board input. The Editors are under no obligation to use all or any of these individuals as reviewers.
All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible with reviewers asked to provide responses in 21 days. An editorial decision is generally reached within 6 weeks of submission unless the paper is highly specialised in which case longer may be required to find reviewers who are prepared to contribute.
5. Manuscript Preparation
The average length of papers is 5000 - 7500 words (8-12 printed journal pages). Brief Communications of 1500 words or less are also welcomed on particularly topical issues in the field.
Manuscripts must be written in English, and must be prepared using the Microsoft Word template available from the Editor or online HERE . This template helps the author prepare the manuscript in a format that looks best on the printed page and speeds up the refereeing and publication process. If the author doesn't have Microsoft Word available, then the Editor is happy to discuss alternative formats.
Diagrams need to be of a quality suitable for high resolution printing at 600-1200dpi preferably in grey scale. If colour is essential, then it can only appear in colour in the electronic version. Scanned images are not normally suitable but bit map screen dumps can be reproduced in a readable form if they spread across the full width of the page.
All diagrams should be captioned "Figure nn. Title" and referred to by number in the text. Tables should also be captioned "Table nn. Title". Both should be positioned in the text where the author feels is appropriate but the Editor reserves the right to re-organize the layout to suit the printing process.
Diagrams and images imported from other packages should also be included in their original file format attached to the submission e-mail with an explanation of the format used. This is important to ensure that the highest quality can be achieved in typesetting.
To aid readability and usability, extensive appendix material should normally be avoided unless it is essential to the understanding of the article. As the article will be available electronically on the publisher's web service, appendix material can be referenced online rather than being reproduced in full. Questionnaires would not normally be reproduced unless they were core to the arguments presented. Authors would normally be expected to reference a persistent on-line copy of these materials.
Algorithms, XML schema, thesauri and taxonomies can be included in full or in part in support of the article. The author would then also be encouraged to reference a persistent on-line copy of this material to aid readers in understanding and using the resources.
Mathematical expressions should be clear and unambiguous. Articles with extensive mathematical expressions should be accompanied by a PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) copy of the article to ensure that the expressions are correctly transcribed during typesetting.
6. Abstracts, Footnotes and Keywords
The abstract should be clear, descriptive, self explanatory and normally not longer than 150 words. Remember that it will be used in the various abstracting and indexing services covering the Journal and is often the only thing that a reader will see of your paper before making the choice to order a copy.
Keywords will be added to your paper at the copy editing stage but the author is encouraged to apply relevant keywords based on their own experience.
Footnotes should be used only if absolutely essential to improve the readability of the text.
7. References
All publications cited in the text must be presented in a list of references following the text of the manuscript in a standard format. The references must be numbered and listed in the order of appearance in the text - not alphabetically. Non-compliant manuscripts will be returned to the author for correction.
For a book:
[1] T.A. Hanson and J.M. Day (eds), Managing the Electronic Library: a Practical Guide for Information Professionals (Bowker-Saur, London, 1998).
For a journal article:
[2] A.S. Duff, Daniel Bell's theory of the information society, Journal of Information Science 24(6) (1998) 373-394.
For a paper in an edited volume:
[3] G.M. Banik, Keys to opening the end-user market. In: M.E. Williams (ed.), National Online Meeting 1996: Proceedings of the 17th National Online Meeting, (Learned Information, New York, 1996).
For an unpublished paper:
[4] A.B. Jones, Information in theory and practice (Unpublished manuscript, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1977).
For an electronic resource:
[5] J. Scheeres, Argentina Mulls Open Source Move (2001). Available at: www.wired.com (accessed 11 May 2003).
8. Article Submission
Papers should be submitted by e-mail attachment to the Editor, or a member of the Editorial Board. They will be happy to advise quickly on the suitability for publication and provide further information to authors.
Getting Maximum Readership and Exposure for Your Article
To make sure that your article gets the maximum readership and exposure, we allow Google and other search engines to index its full-text, we actively encourage people to sign up for contents alerting, we enable free citation-linking and we offer free access periods. In preparing your article for publication, there are things you can do to help maximise its readership and give it the maximum impact in the communities you want it to reach. These fall under the heading of 'discoverability'.
'Discoverability': Making Sure Your Article is Easy to Find
The vast majority of readers find articles online by searching rather than browsing. Most searching is done using clusters of keywords, or key phrases (e.g. 'youth justice', rather than simply 'youth'). Including key phrases which people searching are likely to use should make your article more discoverable.
To ensure that your article comes up when search engine users look for it, you should:
- Try to make the title of the article as clear as possible in describing its content
- Ensure that the abstract spells out clearly what the article covers and mentions any terms that people searching for such an article might be likely to use
- Make sure that you include appropriate key phrases or key words
There are no exact rules on the right numbers of keywords or phrases, but up to 5 key phrases or 6-8 key words is probably about right. It is worth including at least one key word or phrase which describes the broad discipline within which the article sits, e.g. sociology, management studies, materials science.
Important words or phrases should appear in the title and be repeated in the abstract and key words/phrases, but it is good to have a reasonable spread of terms as well as making sure the major ones are emphasized. If you are working in a discipline where there is a recognised standard vocabulary (or 'taxonomy'), you should ensure that the term you use fit with that vocabulary. In the case of life science and medical topics, we recommend the use of the National Library of Medicine's 'MeSH' terms, used for indexing articles on MEDLINE/PubMed, which provides a consistent way to retrieve information that might use different terminology for the same concepts. More information can be found at http:/www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html
Users are likely to make their decision to read your article based on the title and maybe the abstract - make sure these give a clear picture of its content.
A good test is to type some of the key words or phrases you are intending to use into a search engine such as Google, to see if what comes out at the top of the listing of results is what you expect.
English Language Editing Services: Please click here for information on professional English language editing services recommended by SAGE.
If you wish your article to be freely available online immediately upon publication (as some funding bodies now require), you can opt for it to be included in SAGE Open subject to payment of a publication fee. Manuscript submission and refereeing procedure is unchanged. On acceptance of your article, you will be asked to let SAGE know directly if you are choosing SAGE Open. For further information, please
visit http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sageopen.sp
