Author Guidelines

Submission Guidelines

Welcome to the International Journal of Sciences and Emerging Technologies (IJSET). To facilitate a smooth review and publication process, please adhere to the following guidelines when preparing and submitting your manuscript.

1. Manuscript Preparation:

• Paper Size: A4 (210 mm x 297 mm)
• Margins: 1 inch (2.54 cm) on all sides
• Font: Times New Roman, 12-point font size for the main text
• Line Spacing: Single-spaced
• Text Alignment: Justified
• Page Numbers: Do not include page numbers in your manuscript

2. Title Page:

• Title: Centered, bold, and 14-point font size
• Author(s) Name(s): Centered, 12-point font size
• Affiliations: Centered, 10-point font size
• Corresponding Author: Include email address and phone number

3. Abstract and Keywords:

• Abstract: A single paragraph, up to 250 words, summarizing the key points of the research. Place it below the title and author information.
• Keywords: Provide 4-6 keywords or phrases that describe the main topics of the paper, placed below the abstract.

4. Main Sections:

• Introduction: Describe the problem, background, and objectives of the research.
• Methodology: Detail the methods and procedures used in your research.
• Results: Present the findings of your study clearly and concisely.
• Discussion: Interpret the results and discuss their implications.
• Conclusion: Summarize the key findings and their significance.

5. Figures and Tables:

• Resolution: Ensure high resolution (300 dpi recommended)
• Format: JPEG, PNG, or TIFF for images; editable formats for tables
• Placement: Figures and tables should be inserted close to where they are first mentioned in the text
• Captions: Provide captions below figures and above tables

6. References:

• Citation Style: Follow the IEEE citation style required by the journal
• Reference List: Include a numbered list of references at the end of the manuscript

7. Equations and Mathematics:

• Equations: Centered, with numbers in parentheses on the right-hand side
• Math Fonts: Use appropriate fonts and symbols for clarity

8. Appendices and Acknowledgments:

• Appendices: Include supplementary material or additional data in separate sections after the references, if necessary
• Acknowledgments: Place any acknowledgments or funding information before the references section

9. Submission:

• File Format: Submit your manuscript in PDF format
• Naming Convention: Name the file with the format “FirstAuthorLastName_ArticleTitle.pdf”
• Submission Portal: Manuscripts should be submitted through the journal's submission portal https://ijset.pk/index.php/IJSET/about/submissions.

10. Ethical Considerations:

• Originality: Ensure that your manuscript is original work and has not been published elsewhere
• Approval: Confirm that all co-authors have approved the manuscript and its submission
• Conflicts of Interest: Disclose any potential conflicts of interest

For any questions or further assistance, please contact us at editor_ijset@superior.edu.pk.

A comprehensive template can also be downloaded from here. (Click File, Download, Microsoft Word)

Ethics and Malpractices

It is the joint obligation of authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers to adhere to the ethical guidelines in letters and spirit to maintain the credibility and integrity of scientific records for our next generation. Ethical virtues are very precious, timeless and inevitable to ensure the right choices in ethical dilemmas thus leading to transparency and establishing/maintaining the professional standards. Keeping in view the importance of publication ethics, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) has provided Ethical Guidelines for Journals and instructed its all recognized/accredited journals to adopt these guidelines with true essence. These guidelines describe in detail the responsibility of authors, reviewers and editors related to HEC recognized/accredited and funded journals.

As International Journal of Management and Emerging Sciences (SJME) is an HEC recognized/accredited journal and also fully funded by HEC, that’s why it is obligatory for all stakeholders involved in the publishing of SJMEto uphold the highest standards of ethics and take measures to identify, address and prevent the malpractices. Authors, editors, and reviewers of SJME are responsible to follow and enforce these ethical guidelines:

Ethical Guidelines for Authors (issued by HEC)

Reporting Standards

• It is the author(s) responsibility to ensure that the research report and data contain adequate detail and references to the sources of information to allow others to reproduce the results.
• The fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statement constitutes unethical behavior and will be unacceptable.

Originality and Plagiarism

• It is the author(s) responsibility to ascertain that s/he has submitted an entirely original work, giving due credit, under proper citations, to the works and/or words of others where they are used.
• Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is not acceptable.
• Material quoted verbatim from the author(s) previously published work or other sources must be placed in quotation marks.
• As per HEC policy, in case the manuscript has been found to have a similarity index of more than 19% it will either be rejected or left at the discretion of the editor for purposes of conditional acceptance.

 Declaration

• Authors are required to provide an undertaking/declaration stating that the manuscript under consideration contains solely their original work that is not under consideration for publishing in any other journal in any form.
• Authors can submit a manuscript previously published in abstracted form, e.g. in the proceedings of an annual meeting, or a periodical with limited circulation and availability e.g. reports by government agencies or university departments.
• The manuscript that is co-authored must be accompanied by an undertaking explicitly stating that each Author has contributed substantially towards the preparation of the manuscript to claim the right to authorship.
• It is the responsibility of the corresponding author that s/he has ensured that all those who have substantially contributed in the manuscripts have been included in the author list and they have agreed to the order of authorship.

 Multiple, Redundant and Current Publication

• Authors should not submit manuscripts describing essentially the same research to more than one journal or publication except it is a re-submission of a rejected or withdrawn manuscript.
• Authors can re-publish previously conducted research that has been substantially altered or corrected using more meticulous analysis or by adding more data.
• The authors and editor must agree to the secondary publication, which must cite the primary references and reflect the same data and interpretation of the primary document.
• Concurrent submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal is unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

 Acknowledgment of Sources

• A paper must always contain a proper acknowledgment of the work of others, including clear indications of the sources of all information quoted or offered, except that what is common knowledge.
• Author(s) must also acknowledge the contributions of people, organizations and institutes who assisted the process of research, including those who provided technical help, writing assistance or financial funding (in acknowledgment).
• It is the duty of the author(s) to conduct a literature review and properly cite the original publications that describe closely related work.

 Authorship of the Work

• Authorship of the work may only be credited to those who have made a noteworthy contribution in conceptualization, design, conducting, data analysis and writing up of the manuscript.
• It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to include the name of only those co-authors who have made significant contributions to the work.
• The corresponding author should ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Others who have participated in the certain substantive aspect of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution to an “Acknowledgement” section.

 Privacy of Participants

• Authors must respect the privacy of the participant of research and must not use any information obtained from them without their informed consent.
• The authors should ensure that only information that improves the understanding of the study is shared.
• Authors must ensure that in instances where the identity of the participant needs to be revealed in the study, explicit and informed consent of the concerned party is obtained.
• In the event of the demise of a participant, consent must be obtained from the family of the deceased.

 Data Access and Retention

• If a question arises about the accuracy or validity of the research work during the review process the author(s) should provide raw data to the editor.

 Images

• The author(s) should ensure that images included in an account of the research performed or in the data collection as part of the research are free from manipulation,
• The authors must provide an accurate description of how the images were generated and produced.

 Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

• The potential and relevant competing financial, personal social or other interest of all author(s) that might be affected by publication of the results contained in the manuscript must be conveyed to the editor.
• Author(s) should disclose any potential conflict of interest at the earliest possible stage, including but not limited to employment, consultancies, honoraria, patent applications/registrations, grants or other funding.
• All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed alongside a brief overview of the role played if any by the responses during the various stages of research.

 Copyright

Authors may have to sign an agreement allowing the journal to reserve the right to circulate the article and all other derivative works such as translations.  

 Manuscript Acceptance and Rejection

• The review period can last between 1-2 months or longer and during this period author has reserved a right to contact the editor to ask about the status of the review.
• Once the review process has been completed, the author will be informed about the status of the manuscript which could either be an acceptance, rejection or revision. In the event of rejection, the Author reserves the right to publish the article elsewhere.
• In case of revisions, the author must provide an exposition of all corrections made in the manuscript and the revised manuscript will, then, go through the process of affirmation of revisions and be accepted or rejected accordingly.
• In case of dissatisfaction over the decision of rejection, the author can appeal the decision by contacting the editor.

Peer Review Policy

IJSET is a peer reviewed journal in which the editor forwards each paper to referees who are expert in that particular field. It is only by collaboration with our reviewers that editor can ensure that the manuscripts IJSET publish are among the most important in their disciplines of research. We appreciate the time that referees devote to assessing the manuscripts we send them, which helps ensure that IJSET publish only material of the very highest quality. In particular, many submitted manuscripts contain large volumes of additional (supplementary) data and other material, which take time for referees to evaluate. We thank our referees for their continued commitment to our publication process and to help recognize this effort we provide each IJSET referee with an official refereeing activity certificate. Peer review is commonly accepted as an essential part of scientific publication. But the ways peer review is put into practice vary across journals and disciplines.

General information

The following types of contribution to IJSET are peer-reviewed: Articles, Letters, Brief Communications, Matters Arising, Technical Reports, Analysis, Resources, Reviews, Perspectives and Insight articles. Correspondence and all forms of published correction may also be peer-reviewed at the discretion of the editor. Other contributed articles are not usually peer-reviewed. Nevertheless, articles published in these sections, particularly if they present technical information, may be peer-reviewed at the discretion of the editor.

Criteria for publication

IJSET receive many more submissions than they can publish. Therefore, we ask peer-reviewers to keep in mind that every paper that is accepted means that another good paper must be rejected. To be published in IJSET , a paper should meet four general criteria:

• Provides strong evidence for its conclusions.
• Novel (we do not consider meeting report abstracts and preprints on community servers to compromise novelty).
• Of extreme importance to researchers in the specific field.
• Ideally, interesting to researchers in other related disciplines.

In general, to be accepted, a paper should represent an advancement in that particular field and/ or can provide a new gateway for further research. There should be a discernible reason, why the submitted work deserves to be published IJSET.

The review process

All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff. To save time for authors and peer-reviewers, only those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. Those papers judged by the editors to be of insufficient general interest or otherwise inappropriate are rejected promptly without external review (although these decisions may be based on informal advice from specialists in the field).

Manuscripts judged to be of potential interest to our readership are sent for formal review, typically to two or three reviewers, but sometimes more if special advice is needed (for example on statistics or a particular technique). The editors then make a decision based on the reviewers’ advice, from among several possibilities:

• Accept, with or without editorial revisions
• Invite the authors to revise their manuscript to address specific concerns before a final decision is reached
• Reject, but indicate to the authors that further work might justify a resubmission
• Reject outright, typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems

Reviewers are welcome to recommend a particular course of action, but they should bear in mind that the other reviewers of a particular paper may have different technical expertise and/or views, and the editors may have to make a decision based on conflicting advice. The most useful reports, therefore, provide the editors with the information on which a decision should be based. Setting out the arguments for and against publication is often more helpful to the editors than a direct recommendation one way or the other.

Editorial decisions are not a matter of counting votes or numerical rank assessments, and we do not always follow the majority recommendation. We try to evaluate the strength of the arguments raised by each reviewer and by the authors, and we may also consider other information not available to either party. Our primary responsibilities are to our readers and to the scientific community at large, and in deciding how best to serve them, we must weigh the claims of each paper against the many others also under consideration.

We may return to reviewers for further advice, particularly in cases where they disagree with each other, or where the authors believe they have been misunderstood on points of fact. We therefore ask that reviewers should be willing to provide follow-up advice as requested. We are very aware, however, that reviewers are usually reluctant to be drawn into prolonged disputes, so we try to keep consultation to the minimum we judge necessary to provide a fair hearing for the authors.

When reviewers agree to assess a paper, we consider this a commitment to review subsequent revisions. However, editors will not send a resubmitted paper back to the reviewers if it seems that the authors have not made a serious attempt to address the criticisms.

We take reviewers’ criticisms seriously; in particular, we are very reluctant to disregard technical criticisms. In cases where one reviewer alone opposes publication, we may consult the other reviewers as to whether s/he is applying an unduly critical standard. We occasionally bring in additional reviewers to resolve disputes, but we prefer to avoid doing so unless there is a specific issue, for example a specialist technical point, on which we feel a need for further advice.

Plagiarism Policy

Plagiarism Policy

International Journal of Sciences and Emerging Technologies (IJSET ) evaluates submissions on the understanding that they are the original work of the authors. Reuse of text, data, figures, or images without appropriate acknowledgement or permission is considered plagiarism, as is the paraphrasing of text, concepts, and ideas. This includes copying sentences or paragraphs verbatim from someone else’s work, even if the original work is cited in the references. The ORI module “Avoiding Plagiarism, Self-Plagiarism, and Other Questionable Writing Practices: a Guide to Ethical Writing” can help authors identify questionable writing practices. All allegations of plagiarism are investigated in accordance with COPE guidelines detailed below:

1. COPE guidelines on suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript
2. COPE guidelines on suspected plagiarism in a published paper
3. ICMJE Recommendations

In accordance with the guidelines of Higher Education Commission (HEC), IJSET observes Zero Tolerance to plagiarism. 

1. HEC plagiarism policy
2. How HEC deals plagiarism
3. HEC policy
4. HEC little-book of plagiarism