Article Submission Guidelines

Find submission help at http://help.informingscience.org/Author/

Publication Fees. No Charge for Article Submission and no charge for publication for ISI members.

InSITE 2022: Informing Science + IT Education Conferences (InSITE 2022) is a publication of the Informing Science Institute (ISI), and so does not charge for submitting papers to the journal.  ISI members pay no publication fee for accepted papers published during their membership. ISI annual, five-year, and lifetime membership fees can be found at http://Member.InformingScience.org.

Non-members can join once their paper is accepted to avoid paying an article publication charge (APC) or pay a small APC, currently 75 USD, which is the same amount as basic membership. This fee allows ISI to provide readers with free access to papers.

ISI is a truly scientific organization, not a commercial enterprise masquerading as a professional organization. We believe in the free dissemination of high-quality research. The low fees are needed to provide us with the funds to pay our costs. We have no paid employees. ISI is a registered non-profit. Donations and membership fees paid to it may be tax-deductible.

Open Access

This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the article or to use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Papers accepted for publication are published under a Creative Commons license and bear the following notice: (CC BY-NC 4.0). This article is licensed to you under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Copyright is retained by the authors. We encourage readers to use, reuse, and build upon the material in the Journal for non-commercial purposes as long as proper attribution is given when appropriate or necessary. This license does not permit you to use this material for commercial purposes.

Ethical Considerations: Intellectual Property, Plagiarism, and Use of Human Participants.

When submitting a paper to a journal published by the Informing Science Institute, the author is required to assert and confirm that the paper does not contain any copyrighted material except as noted in the paper through proper citation, that the paper is not currently under review by any other publication outlet, that once the paper enters the review process for this journal the author will not submit the paper for publication consideration to any other publication outlet, and that the paper contains no plagiarized material. Take care to give proper attribution to all material from other sources since plagiarism is a serious academic offense. ISI journals conduct an online search of submissions to uncover if the material provided has previously been published using iThenticate. The full ethics policy can be found here.

Authors are required to comply with all rules for human participants in research set forth by their institution and applicable governmental agencies. We recommend that authors include in the body of the paper relevant details about ethics or IRB approval for the use of human participants in their research. If IRB or ethics approval is not required, this may be stated in the body of the paper.Where reviewer or editor concerns are raised in this area, authors are expected to provide documentation of this compliance. Authors are referred to the ISI Ethics Policy for more details on the use of human participants in research.

Archiving

The journal's published articles are archived by Portico.

An author may choose to deposit all versions of their articles in an institutional or other repository of the author's choice without embargo.

Formatting

Papers that have been approved for publication after review must be formatted as nearly camera-ready prior to final acceptance.  We prefer that authors do their own formatting.  However, for those with the budget and without the time, for a fee of $250 we will hire a fellow ISI member on your behalf to do the routine formatting to bring the layout into the standard format we use.  Keep in mind that formatting is not the same as copy editing. The formatter does not restructure or clarify your wording. We encourage those who are not familiar with writing in journal English to take on a co-author or to hire their own copy editor competent to help with journal papers.  Authors are encouraged to make their own arrangements prior to submitting their paper.  Some universities provide these services for their researchers. ISI members can use the Peer Directory to locate ISI members interested in becoming co-authors. If your paper is accepted pending final formatting, let your editor know if you wish to hire a formatter.  The editor will note this in the "paper's notes" and the publisher will have you pay the fee before hiring the formatter.

Our 5 "C"s

Similar to the APA style manual guidelines (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 376-377), we seek to publish papers that do the following:  

• contribute significantly to the content area covered by the journal,
• communicate with clarity and conciseness, and
• conform to the journal’s style guidelines,
• communicates a clear and concise contribution that
• conforms to our style.

Check ISI Journals for Current Relevant Research

Be sure that your submission benefits from relevant current research by checking at http://isjournals.org or http://www.informingscience.org/Publications . Enter keywords for your research into the search box to see to determine if there is current research that can strengthen your submission.

Peer Review Process - Timeframe for Review

Typically, within three weeks from when you submit your paper, the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Michael Jones will conduct a desk review for suitability and the paper review system will contact the corresponding author with news of whether or not the submission will be advanced to the first round of reviews (or is being rejected as not suitable for publication in the journal). (If you do not hear from the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Michael Jones in a month, feel free to contact Prof. Michael Jones at  organizer@insite.nu.) Recognize that these suggested timeframes may be unattainable when the Editor-in-Chief has higher priority work constraints.

If the submission is desk accepted by the Editor-in-Chief for the first round of reviews, an Editor and a panel of reviewers will be assigned to blind review the submission. This is a double-blind peer review in which the reviewers do not know the submission author's identity and the author is never privy to the names of the reviewers.

Typically the first round of review concludes approximately 6 weeks later with the Editor sending the corresponding author a letter regarding acceptance. Whether or not the paper will be advanced for further review or publication, at the conclusion of the review, the Editor provides the author with a development letter using the input of the reviewers.  The decision may be to reject, conditionally accept pending specified revisions, or accept the paper. Most commonly papers that are accepted require several rounds of revision. Since the submission may require several rounds of review and most of this time is determined by how promptly the author responds, there is no meaningful average time between submission and publication or rejection. While most rejections occur within one week of submission, submissions may be rejected at any point during the review cycle.

Format for Accepted Papers

Before your paper is accepted for publication, you will be required to submit an almost camera-ready copy of your paper. The paper should be formatted according to the guidelines for accepted papers, using the ISI Journal Format template. This document is an MS Word template that contains the Style Set for publications and the instructions for applying these styles to your document. If you do not use MS Word, just print the document and follow its instructions.

Papers published in our journals follow the APA Guidelines, 7th edition and a summary of these guidelines can be found at http://help.informingscience.org/APA/

Because the contents of a paper may shift during formatting, make figures so they can be moved and/or resized easily. As explained in the detailed guidelines, this can best be done by saving a figure as an image.

After the paper has been accepted, in addition to adding the name, affiliation, city, and country for each author at the beginning of the paper, at the end of the paper in the Author section, add a brief paragraph or two about each author. Please insert a head-and-shoulders photo of each author beside the biographical information.

Prior to final acceptance, the Editor will instruct the author to return a fully formatted paper for final review. When satisfied that the paper meets Informing Science standards, the Editor will send it to the Informing Science publisher, who will do the final formatting and quality control.

Articles appear online as soon as they are published.

How to Submit Your Manuscript

Authors submit their manuscripts electronically using the submission and review system. All manuscripts must be the authors' original, unpublished work. The manuscript must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. 

We check all submissions for plagiarism using iThenticate.  Please see our Ethics policy; we take plagiarism seriously.

Article Formatting Instructions

Download Template for a cleaner copy of these instructions

Formatting Guidelines for Papers Published in Informing Science Institute journals

[Do not enter author information until after paper is accepted.]

Name of the First Author*	Affiliation, City, Country	Email@Address
If there are additional authors, put names in separate rows	Affiliation, City, Country	email

* Corresponding author

Aim/Purpose	[In a sentence or two, explain the need for this paper. What is the problem?]
Background	[Explain in a sentence or two in what way does this paper address the problem?]
Methodology	[Mention for the reader the methods used in the paper. Briefly describe any research sample.]
Contribution	[How does this paper contribute to the body of knowledge?]
Findings	[List the paper’s major findings]
Recommendations for Practitioners	[Enter any recommendations for practitioners]
Recommendations for Researchers	[Enter recommendations your paper makes for researchers]
Impact on Society	[What are the larger implications of the paper’s findings?]
Future Research	[Now that this paper has advanced our understanding, what research should follow]
Keywords	Place three or more keywords here, separated by commas

 

If you are not using Word as your word processor, print this document and read more about the required formatting guidelines. However, if you are using Word, you can (and should) save time by using this file to attach the correct paragraph formatting to your paper. This file contains not only instructions for you, but also instructions for Word on how to format paragraphs as Heading 1, Heading 2, and such.

Different versions of Word have different ways of saving these formatting styles on your computer.  First, open this document on your computer.

• If you are using Word 2010, select the Home tab, click on Change Styles and then Style Set. Scroll to the bottom of the list of styles and select Save as Quick Style Set. Save these styles as a Quick Style Set giving it a meaningful name.
• If you are using Word 2013 or later, select the Design tab and click on the pull down arrow at the right of the display of designs. Select Save as New Style Set. Save these styles and give it a meaningful name.

To attach the styles to a blank document or one that you have already created, do the following. Open the document.

• If you are using Word 2010, select the Home tab, click on Change Styles and then Style Set. The name you gave the style set should appear in the list. Click on it to attach it to your file.
• If you are using Word 2016, select the Design tab and click on the pull down arrow at the right of the display of designs. The Style Set you saved should appear under Custom. Click on the name to attach it to your document.

If you don’t want to save the styles, save this document under a new name. Delete from the top of page 2 to the end. You will have the correct formatting for the first page and the paragraphs, as well as the paragraph styles and can copy and paste your document into it.

Prepare your manuscript in Microsoft Word or export it from a different word processor into RTF format, following the specifications that we show here.

For papers that deal with data analysis, make the data available to readers via a link you place in your paper to a website where you store your data, if at all possible.  We can help.

When you submit your paper for review, make sure that you have anonymized your paper by removing all references to yourself or your institution. Make sure these are removed from the document properties as well. To have your paper reviewed, you need first to submit a “blinded” version (without author or affiliation information) that can be blind reviewed. After your paper is accepted, add the author information.

While there are no regulations on length, it will be exceptional for an article to exceed 20,000 words.

Language and Grammar Consistency

We publish papers written in English. If you have questions on English grammar or punctuation, search the web for guidance. You can find an excellent guide at http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar  

While we prefer the use of U.S. spelling, we also accept other versions of English as long as they are used consistently throughout the paper.

Use of the singular “they”

When the gender of a person is unknown, the use of the singular “they” is accepted. Do not use expressions such as “s/he” or “his or her.” For example, “Each student submitted their art portfolio to the committee” is correct. If using the singular “they” as a generic third-person pronoun seems awkward, try rewording the sentence or using the plural, such as “All students submitted their art portfolios to the committee” or “The art portfolio of each student was submitted to the committee.” More information about this is at https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/singular-they and https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/singular-they 

First Page Layout

To put the first page of your document in the proper format, copy the content of the first page from this file into your document and fill in the abstract information.

Author information (added after paper has been accepted)

Once the Editor has accepted your paper, insert the full name, the affiliation (University or Company), City, Country, and email address for each author on the first page. Insert additional rows if there are more than two authors.

In the Author section at the end of the paper, add a short biography and a head-and-shoulders photo (if available) for each author.

What to put in the abstract

The abstract is a brief summary of the contents of the article; it should give enough information to make the reader want to learn more about your research. But it needs to be concise. In each of the boxes on the first page, enter one or two brief sentences appropriate for your paper. Omit citations from the abstract; citations for the paper’s sources do appear in the body of the paper.

If any of the abstract subtopics do not apply to your paper, put NA in that box.

Body of Paper

Introduction or background

All papers should begin with an introduction that sets the stage for the discussion. For some disciplines, it more appropriate to use Background as an alternative first section.

Body

The body is a collection of multiple sections describing the main content of the paper. You should use up to three levels of headings to categorize content as deemed necessary: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3.

Conclusion

This section summarizes the paper, presents challenges, suggests future study, and so on to create a lasting impression of the paper.

Appendix

If there is an appendix, place it after the References and before the Author information. If there is more than one appendix, add a letter after “Appendix.”

If you have used a questionnaire in a study, include a copy of it as an appendix.

References

Following the conclusion is a list of all references used in the body of the paper. The current APA formatting guidelines are used to make internal citations within the body as well as provide the complete alphabetic list of reference citations at the end of the paper. (See the Entering References section for more details.) The References list contains only works cited in the paper and all works cited in the paper must be listed in the References section.

Author Information with Picture

After the paper is accepted, for each author of the paper, please provide a one or two paragraphs that describe the author’s background relevant to this article. If you have one, insert a head-and-shoulder photo to the left of the paragraphs about each author or send it separately and we will insert it.

To make it easier to read the paper online, use single column formatting for the paper.

Page Size

Set the paper size to Letter, which is 8 1/2 by 11 inches.

Margins

Set the top and bottom margins to 1 inch and the right and left margins to 1.25 inches.

Headers and Footers

Insert page numbers in the footer. We will add the remaining information for the headers and footers.

Hyphenation

Hyphenate the text in the document. To turn on hyphenation:

• Select Language on the Layout or Page Layout menu.
• Select Hyphenation.
• Check Automatically hyphenate document.

Footnotes

The journal does not allow for footnotes or endnotes. Insert your clarifications within the body of the paper. The editors will remove most footnotes and place the material within the text.

If you have not attached these styles to your paper, use Word’s default paragraph styles for your document, making just the changes indicated below.

Headings

Do not number headings. Enter the headings with no outline numbers or letters in front of them.

Paper title

Use the Paper Title for the title of your paper. It is centered with a border under it. The font for this style is Garamond, 16 point, Bold, and Small Caps.

The paragraph formatting is Centered with a 6 point space after it and an underline border at the bottom. The “Keep with Next” property is selected.

Capitalize the first letter of every major word. Do not use all upper case.

First level headings

Use the Heading 1 style for the title and for major headings. The font for this style is Garamond, 16 point, Bold, and Small Caps.

The paragraph formatting has a 12 point space before and 6 point space after it and an underline border at the bottom. The “Keep with Next” property is selected.

Capitalize the first letter of every major word for both the title and first level headings. Do not use all upper case.

Second level headings

Use the Heading 2 style for second level headings. The font for this heading is Garmond, 14 point, Bold, Italic and Small Caps. The space before the paragraph is 6 point and the space after is 3 point. The “Keep with Next” property is selected.

Capitalize the first letter of every major word in second level headings. Do not use all upper case.

Third level headings

Use the Heading 3 style for third level headings. The font for this heading is Garamond, 12 point, Bold. The space before the paragraph is 3 point and the space after is 3 point. The “Keep with Next” property is selected.

Capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in this heading.

Text Paragraphs

Use the Normal style for paragraphs of text. The paragraph is single-spaced with no indentation and has a 6-point space after it. The font for this style is 11 point Garamond. Do not put blank lines between paragraphs.

Other types text of paragraphs

Fourth level. Three levels of headings are enough for most papers. If you need another level, such as for this paragraph, use the Normal style and place the heading at the beginning of the paragraph in bold font.

Lists. Use Word’s automatic bullet or number formats for lists.

References: Use a 10 Garamond point font with a hanging indent of 0.25 inches.

Other. Use other formats only when absolutely necessary.

A table is data presented in tabular format with rows and columns. A figure is any other pictorial representation of data such as graphs or drawings. Each figure or table must be numbered and have a brief caption that describes it. Every figure or table must be referenced in the body of the paper. Table 1 is an example of a table and Figure 1 is an example of a figure.

Table 1. Example of a table

ID#	LAST	FIRST	CATALOG #	CATEGORY	QUANTITY	AMOUNT	COMMISSION
S00001	Golden	Rod	M00002	Multiple	2	$250.00	$12.50
S00001	Golden	Rod	M00012	Hiking	1	$50.00	$2.50
S00001	Golden	Rod	M00028	Multiple	1	$95.00	$4.75
S00002	Red	Rose	M00038	Multiple	1	$35.00	$1.92

 

Figure 1. Example of a figure

The caption for tables is placed above the table; the caption for figures is placed below the figure.

Since all accepted papers need to be reformatted before publication, it is important that all figures and tables can be easily resized and/or moved. Since tables and figures may be moved during the final formatting, do not use “above” or “following” when referring to them; just give the table or figure number. Also, do not use automatic numbering of tables and figures as these can become corrupted when figures have to be rearranged. Tables and figures may be inserted directly into the paper or placed on a separate page at the end of the paper.

There are two ways to submit figures.

1. insert the figure, formatted as an image that can be resized. It is best if it is inserted directly into the paper with “in line” wrapping.
2. send figures as PowerPoint slides in a separate file and, within the paper, indicate where they are to appear,

Do not send figures formatted as separate text boxes or groups of images on the page.

We will publish your paper under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License and the author retains the copyright.

By submitting the paper, as author you certify the following:

1. You hold copyright for this submission, and
2. You warrant that you have not infringed on any copyright and assume full liability in case of copyright dispute.

Copyright Issues for Figures

There are three common sources of figures.

1. Figures you have copied from another source, including a web site. You must contact the holder of the copyright for the image and get permission to use it. Cite the source and add “used with permission.”
2. Figures that you create based on another’s work. You do not need to get permission, but include in the citation “adapted from” or “based on” and give the source.
3. Figures that are your original work. Since you hold the copyright for these, there are no copyright issues.

References are to follow the current American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines except that we require the full URL for papers obtainable online for those that do not have a DOI. We have placed a summary of these guidelines on the web at https://www.informingscience.org/Uploads/APA_7ed.pdf

If you are unsure of APA format, use a free APA Citation Generator, such as, Free APA Citation Generator [Updated for 2024] (mybib.com) (https://www.mybib.com/tools/apa-citation-generator),  We highly discourage submitting a paper that has Endnotes embedded. Have Word convert these to text before you submit.

List the sources alphabetically at the end of the paper under “References” using a Heading 1 style. Place entries in alphabetical order according to the last name of the first author. Within the text of your paper, cite sources by placing the author’s last name and the date in parentheses.

Reference list. In the reference list, when a work has up to (and including) 20 authors, list all authors (last name followed by initials). Place a comma after the last name of each author and after that author’s initial(s). Place an ampersand (&) before the last author. If there are more than 20 authors, provide last names and initials of first 19 authors, insert three ellipsis points, and add the last author’s name. Follow the authors by the date, the title, and the source.

In-text citations. If a work has two authors, include both authors in each in-text citation (Boyd & Cohen, 2003). If the work has three or more authors, in all in-text citations place only the first author followed by et al. (Gill et al., 2019).

DOIs and URLs in Reference list. When citing sources from the Web, include the year of publication or the most recent update. End the entry with a DOI if it has one. If it does not have a DOI, end the entry with the URL. Do not end the path statement or a DOI with a period. DOIs can be found by going to https://search.crossref.org/references and entering the reference entry. DOIs begin with https://doi.org/ followed by numbers and letters that identify the document, for example, https://doi.org/10.28945/2714

(Leave this blank when submitting for review.)

Include one or two short paragraphs about each author. Please include a head and shoulder photo of each author. You should include this photo and bio when you are asked to upload your final, formatted, camera ready copy.  However, if you need to, you can send the photos by email to Publisher@InformingScience.org as separate attachments and we will insert them for you.