Dear authors,
Please read the descriptions of AJUR’s submission and review processes below in their entirety. If questions remain, please consult our Q&A page. The links for the mentor’s approval and manuscript submission forms are at the bottom of this page.
We accept new work in all fields and reviews/interpretations in creative fields if they demonstrate sufficient novelty & contribution to the field. Graduate students and faculty are encouraged to co-author AJUR publications. International submissions are welcome. There is no submission or processing cost to authors to publish in AJUR. There are no submission deadlines. There are no word limits; however, the manuscript should be of a typical article length in your discipline. Your article should not have been submitted or published anywhere else.
- Please review our journal’s style guidelines at the following links: AJUR’s style (pdf) or AJUR’s style (docx download).
- Strictly comply with the AJUR’s style expectations: make sure that all required sections are included and formatting requirements fulfilled.
- Please check the current issue for examples of published papers and adjust your manuscript accordingly.
Submission Guidelines:
1) You will be submitting information about your manuscript and the manuscript files (editable and pdf) using a Google form. Note that your mentor should read, edit, and approve your manuscript (using a separate Google form) prior to your submission. You will be requested the following information in the form (prepare it carefully and have it handy for submission):
- a) Your name, affiliation; your academic and permanent e-mail; phone, and mailing address (college or home);
- b) Your research mentor’s name, affiliation, address, and institutional e-mail address;
- c) Names and emails for all co-authors;
- d) Attach a single-spaced, single-column draft in MS Word (include a docx file and a pdf) or LaTex (include an editable link and a pdf prepared using the template provided at this link https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/ajur-style/kqyqpgczhgzg):
- Strictly comply with the AJUR’s style (AJUR’s style (pdf) or AJUR’s style (docx download) expectations: make sure that all required sections are included and formatting requirements fulfilled.
- e) A list of seven potential reviewers for your manuscript (include full name, institution, and email information for each). You may not contact these reviewers directly. Potential reviewers should be faculty and experts in the field of the manuscript. They may not be your or your mentor’s former or current collaborators/ associates (from your institution)/ co-authors/ teachers/ mentors/ mentees. We recommend that you take time in choosing reviewers carefully; e.g., picking the most distinguished colleagues from R01 institutions may be an unsuccessful strategy due to demands on their time; seeking assistance from colleagues at a similar institutional level seems to work efficiently.
2) Please ask your faculty research sponsor/mentor to review the submission guidelines at http://ajuronline.org/submissions/, then review and edit your manuscript, help you with listing seven potential reviewers, and then fill in a separate form using their institutional e-mail account giving permission for your work to be reviewed and published in AJUR and assuring the editor that this work has been edited by him/her and that it has not been submitted to other venues. The editor will not respond to your submission unless the faculty sponsor’s/mentor’s form is already submitted.
AJUR’s Authorship Policy:
The authorship list should be carefully and purposefully discussed among study personnel prior to the manuscript’s submission. Only individuals who contributed substantively to the study design, produced results presented, participated in the manuscript writing and review, and agreed to the manuscript’s contents are entitled to be co-authors. All other individuals should be duly noted in the acknowledgment section. Gratuitous authorship is not allowed. Once an article is accepted for publication, the list of authors cannot be changed. The communicating author shall be responsible for interacting with the subject editor, the editor of AJUR, and should be available to respond to questions from interested parties in the future.
AJUR’s Reference Style:
Do not use references in your abstract. In your text, cite references by a superscripted bolded number in order of appearance (after punctuation if applicable). At the end of the manuscript, arrange and number (1., 2., etc.) citations in order of appearance. Follow the reference style strictly as described in AJUR’s style documents (AJUR’s style (pdf), AJUR’s style (docx download)), including DOI links. Cite papers that have been accepted for publication as In Press. Reference accuracy is critical.
Review Information:
The proposed editorial review workflow for an excellent article in AJUR is as follows:
- The editor reviews the submission for completeness and fit for the journal and sends it to the subject editor within a week; the editor is cc’d on all communications, keeps all documents, and ensures that the review process proceeds according to the schedule. Incomplete submissions will be sent back to the authors for improvements.
- The subject editor reviews the submission for the quality of content; the subject editor may reject the paper as inadequate or request some or substantial changes made to the manuscript prior to sending it out to reviewers; the subject editor will find three expert reviewers for the paper; the list of potential reviewers will be used if other options are exhausted; the editor and authors are continuously informed of the progress.
- Reviewers are asked to make comments on the quality of the paper in two to four weeks; reviewers are asked to be fair yet supportive of a resubmission whenever possible. The subject editor then will make a recommendation to the editor: the publication will be either accepted/ sent back to authors for improvements/ rejected; comments will be sent back to authors by the subject editor. Authors must comply or explain why they disagree with reviewers’ comments. The updated manuscript and a separate document addressing all reviewers’ comments need to be submitted to the editor and subject editor within a month. The subject editor’s job is to make sure that the content of the article is brought up to the level of a national refereed journal’s standards: the IRB/IACUC permission should be granted prior to any work being done and should be noted in the methods section; the methodology used should be appropriate; proper controls should be included, and reproducibility demonstrated; proper statistical methods should be used; sufficient novelty & contribution to the field is expected.
- It is typical for the subject editor to send authors a direct note congratulating authors on having a review completed and making a recommendation to the editor to publish or decline the paper with clear reasons provided. If the recommendation is positive, the editor will provide a set of editorial requests and the potential publication timeline.
- Once the finalized paper is received, AJUR’s copy editor will make editorial corrections/comments. The copy editor checks for the quality of writing, the proper sentence and paragraph structure, and the reference completeness and style. Then the layouts are prepared. The editor will reach out to get the authors’ approval on layouts. The last check and the last check on changes are made at that time. Typically, these actions take place in the last two weeks before the printing deadline. The manuscript is then printed in the next quarterly edition of AJUR, placed on the AJUR’s website, submitted to EBSCO and Crossref for indexing, and sent for the paper print.
The review process takes longer if authors are requested to improve their manuscripts at any stage of the review. Up to a month is allocated to authors for each round of modifications. The review of any changes might take up additional time, as described in each step above. We will assist authors in getting copyright permits when needed. Please note that the review process often slows down during academic finals and US holidays. From submission to publication, it may take anywhere from three months to a year to get one’s manuscript accepted and published.
If questions remain, please see our Q&A page first. To reach the editor of AJUR, please send a note to the journal’s Editor-in-Chief: ajur.new.submissions[at]gmail.com
The link for the mentors’ form for the manuscript’s approval: https://forms.gle/f4en7YN3Z3tR1a816
The link for the manuscript’s submission: https://forms.gle/Lht6MJLaUx2vcPqt7