Author Guidelines for download *.pdf

The journal publishes research articles, book reviews and news (or possibly texts in other sections) concerning current scientific knowledge in the field of social education. The texts must be original manuscripts not published previously and not granted by the author to be published elsewhere. The editor’s office accepts manuscripts in Czech, Slovak, English and other languages – with English translation.

Manuscripts are submitted as attachments to an email addressed to editorsoced@utb.cz or upon logging into the journal website interface (the log in link is in the bottom left screen corner).

In the first phase, the author uses a template for abstracts and sends it to the editorial board for its consideration. Full-text request follows. On this basis, the author sends the full-text according to the instructions given below within the particular deadline.

To simplify authors’ work, a full-text template containing a published research article is available and information that author declares that this is the original study and text in this form has never been published or submitted for publication. Along with the template authors use title page. This document contains the authors’ affiliation (full-text does not indicate authors and affiliation), ORCID ID and contact information for potential reviewers. Please note that the publisher has the exclusive right to decide whether the proposed reviewers will be addressed or not. An example of the published article can be found here.

The review process of the article manuscripts is mutually blind and lasts from one to two months, based on the received reviews. The aim of the blind review process is to reduce the possible biases of the reviewers. The reviewers are members of the journal editorial board and part-time journal fellows. Reviews of books and news articles are reviewed by the editor of the appropriate section.

The papers are checked by anti-plagiarism software Crossref Similarity Check before publication of an article. Editorial board has the exclusive right to have a final decision on publishing the manuscript, or suspend/exclude manuscript in any stage of the review process based on generally deductible reasons. However, the authors of manuscripts have no legal claim to the publication of their manuscripts at any stage of the review process.

Based on the publication of the study the author concludes a Licence Agreement requiring the written signature of the publisher and author of a study published in the SocEd. Licence agreement is a bilateral legal act between the parties with a certain degree of confidentiality with regard to its content (including the identities of the contracting parties).

Ethics and malpractice statement is publicly available in the section About us.

Call for papers

Editorial policies

REVIEW PROCESS

• In case you are interested in the review process your contribution would go through, please refer to the for reviewers section.
• A graphic depiction of the review process is to be found here.
• Current and previous published issues can be found on the journal homepage or by clicking here.

We process manuscripts in several steps

Step 1: Basic Check

The editors check a received manuscript to determine whether it fits the journal’s aim and scope. Manuscripts out of the journal’s scope are rejected. Articles published fully or partly in other publications/websites are not reviewed or accepted.

Step 2: Similarity Check

Please be aware that we check all submitted manuscripts for plagiarism. We use plagiarism-detection system to check for similarity to previously published documents. All manuscripts containing plagiarism (≥30%), including self-plagiarism (>6%), are rejected. Also we evaluate a formal form of the manuscrip: usage of the official template and APA citation standards.

Step 3: Peer Review

We use a double-blind system for peer review; both reviewers’ and authors’ identities remain anonymous. The submitted manuscript is peer reviewed by at least two expert. In some rare cases, according to the recommendations from editors and reviewers, a second round of peer review may be initiated. Please see section for reviewers.

Step 4: Acceptance/Rejection Decision

The decision to accept an article is based on the assessment given by reviewers and editors. However, we may reject a manuscript even after the review process if the editors think it is not suitable for publication.

Authorship

SocEd recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Authorship order should be based on the contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status.

Acknowledgements

Those who do not meet the authorship criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgments section placed prior to References section. To facilitate the anonymous review process, the authors provide any personal acknowledgements separately to the main full-text.

Funding

SocEd requires all authors to acknowledge funding under a separate heading entitled ‘Funding’ placed prior to References section. To facilitate the anonymous review process, the authors provide any funding informations separately to the main full-text.

Where no specific funding has been provided authors state that: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

SocEd requires all authors to acknowledge detailed declaration of any conflicting interest. To facilitate the anonymous review process, the authors provide any declarations separately to the main full-text. 

Research ethics and patient consent

Medical research involving human subjects, including research on identifiable human material and data must be conducted according to the WMA Declaration Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects. Papers reporting human studies must state in the Methods section that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided approval. Authors are also required to state in the Methods section whether participants provided informed consent to participate in the research and whether the consent was written or verbal. SocEd recommends all authors to refer to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Protection of Research Participants.

Research data

SocEd is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of published research. Where relevant, SocEd encourages all authors to share their research data in a suitable public repository subject to ethical considerations and where data is included, to add a data accessibility statement in their paper. To facilitate the anonymous review process, the authors provide any data access separately to the main full-text.

Crossmark Policy

CrossMark is a multi-publisher initiative from the Cross-Ref organisation to provide a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of a document. By applying the CrossMark logo, the Sociální pedagogika | Social Education journal (ISSN 1805-8825) is committing to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur. Clicking on the CrossMark icon will inform the reader of the current status of a document and may also provide additional publication record information about the document.

For more information on CrossMark, please visit the CrossMark site www.crossref.org/crossmark

Correction and Retraction Policies

SocEd journal’ policy on corrections is to replace the original article with a corrected version. If the corrected version is replaced before the correction notice appears in an issue of the journal, a data supplement correction notice is posted. Once the correction notice is published, it is linked to the corrected version of the article and the data supplement correction notice is removed.

For retraction notices, when the retraction notice is published, the PDF version of the retracted article is removed and replaced with the retracted information. For the html version, explanatory language is included at the beginning of the Web page.

DOI: 10.7441/soced.CrossMark.Policy

Articles

The structure of the manuscript corresponds to the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). More information on the citation standard can be found, for example, here.

Articles are to be focused theoretically, synoptically or empirically. The recommended maximum length is 45,000 characters including spaces covering all parts. Tables, pictures and charts should be prepared in colour. There must be no more than 10 keywords.

In case the article is of an empirical nature, it is assumed the author will submit the full version of the research tool used in the research. This also applies when the tool is not a part of the article (it is unpublished). If not stated otherwise, the research tool is subject to the article review process (for the internal research review).

The author may publish a maximum of one separate contribution/article per year or two as a co-author in the journal.

The end of the article requires the following text:
The author proclaims that this is an original article unpublished previously in the present form and not submitted for publication elsewhere.

Structure of the published article

• Title of the contribution in preferred language and in English.
• Name and surname of the author (authors) excluding academic titles and the affiliation with the address and the author’s email address.
• Abstract in in preferred language and in English (max. 1,500 characters including spaces) suggesting the structure of the text.
• Keywords in preferred language and in English.
• Introduction.
• Body of the text.
• Conclusion.
• Bibliography.
• Supplementary information on the originality of the text; please include the following text: The author proclaims that this is an original article unpublished previously in the present form and not submitted for publication elsewhere.

An example of the published article can be found here.

Abstract (max. 1,500 characters including spaces) characterizing the structure of the text. Avoid authorship comments, supplementary information, personal interpretations and evaluations of the document (i.e., avoid formulations such “in the article I positively evaluate a system that I consider to be very interesting”; instead, use “the article evaluates a system”). The characteristic features of an abstract are accuracy, lucidity, clarity, conciseness, exactness, and objectivity. The abstract introduces the structure of the argumentation and the construction of the text. In the case of an empirical study, the abstract contains theoretical points of departure, the research aim, methods, sample and major results.

An empirically-based article must contain the following main sections:

• research aims
• research questions and / or hypotheses
• research methods
• research sample
• results and interpretations (including results limitations)

It is recommended that the appendices contain the full version of the used research tools.

Individual titled sections of the article are numbered as follows:

• 1.
• 1.1
• 1.2
• etc.

SocEd journal invites authors to respect the publishing recommendations made by the American Psychological Association, which for these purposes has issued Publication Manual (Publication Manual of the APA, 7th edition, 2020). Please read the manual before publishing / reviewing manuscripts for the SocEd journal.

The pattern of the articles citations published in SocEd can be found here.

Formatting

All the requirements for text formatting are included in the article template.

• In the text, a work is referred to as follows: Průcha (2012) or (Průcha, 2012) or (Průcha, 2012, p. 51).
• The work of three or more authors is referred to as follows: Klusák et al. (2012).
• Literature contains only works referred to in the text.
• The works are listed alphabetically by the author’s surname, and they are not numbered. APA guidelines (American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition) are used for literature editing.

Examples

Monographs:

• Tollingerová, D., Knězů. V., & Kulič, V. (1966). Programované učení. Praha: SPN.

Citations of monograph chapters or proceedings contributions:

• Doyle, W. (1996). Curriculum and Pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (p. 486–516). New York: Macmillan.

Journal article:

• Schubert, W. H. (1980). Recalibrating educational research: Towards a focus on practice. Educational Researcher, 9(1), 17–24.

Electronic sources:

• Šlégrová, A. (2006). Měření matematické gramotnosti v rámci mezinárodního výzkumu OECD PISA v roce 2003. E-pedagogium, 6(4), 70–77. Available at http://www.upol.cz/fakulty/pdf/epedagogium
• Johnsen, E. B. (2001, November 11). Textbooks in the kaleidoscope. Available at z http://www-bib.hive.no/tekster/pedtekst/kaleidoscope/index.html

Further instructions on the APA citation style to be found here.
Literature sources must contain doi details provided these are available.

Book Reviews

The maximum extent is 9,000 characters including spaces, i.e., 5 normpages (one normpage being 1,800 characters with spaces).
The book under review cannot be older than four years (unless otherwise stated by the editor’s office). The editor’s office prefers analytical reviews to descriptive ones. Only reviews by authors who are not employed in the same workplace as the book author are accepted. A book written by a member of the editor’s office or the editorial board must not be reviewed for the journal by another member of the editor’s office or the editorial board.

News

The extent of a news item is 9,000 characters including spaces, i.e., 5 normpages (one normpage being 1800 characters including spaces).
News items should describe activities and events related to the field of social education.

Expert Essay

The extent is 27,000 characters including spaces, i.e., 15 normpages (one normpage being 1,800 characters including spaces).
An expert essay deals with events in the field of Social Pedagogy. It is not subject to a review process and is only commented on by the editor’s office. Although welcomed as part of individual journal issues, expert essays cannot be classified as research articles.

The journal uses a CC BY licence. This licence enables the broad public to disseminate, revise, add to and create new works based on the author’s work, including for commercial uses, provided that the author of the original work is referenced. This licence is recommended for maximum sharing and use of licensed materials (more here). The main principle is unlimited online access to scientific information enabled by the auto-archiving of the articles in open access journals.

Social Education as a Field of Study

The authors are invited to submit contributions to a new section describing social education as a field of study, which is implemented at individual workplaces of Czech and foreign universities. For this purpose, the editors have developed guidelines for authors.

Manuscripts are submitted as attachments to an email addressed to editorsoced@utb.cz or upon logging into the journal website interface (the log in link is in the bottom left screen corner). For further information see section Guidelines for Authors on this page (above).

Required information for completing submission

Authors will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors and identify who is to be the corresponding author. The affiliation listed in the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper.

Permissions

Authors should ensure that have obtained all necessary permissions from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere.

Further information

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the SocEd editorial office as follows:

Sociální pedagogika | Social Education Managing Editor, Jitka Vaculíková: editorsoced@utb.cz.