Author Guidelines

Before you submit

Two checks save the most time. First, confirm your manuscript falls within the journal’s aims and scope — work outside it is declined at desk review regardless of quality. Second, download the manuscript template and write into it; most formatting requirements below are already applied there.

Manuscript types and length

Word counts exclude the abstract, references, tables and appendices. Discuss substantially longer manuscripts with the editorial office before submitting.

Structure

Empirical manuscripts should follow the standard sequence below. Conceptual and review papers may depart from it where the argument requires, but must still open with an abstract and close with references.

1. Title — informative and specific; avoid questions and declarative claims that the evidence cannot carry.
2. Abstract — 250–300 words, unstructured, self-contained. State the problem, data and method, principal findings, and what follows from them. Do not cite references in the abstract.
3. Keywords — three to eight, chosen for how a reader would search rather than to repeat the title.
4. Introduction — the problem, why it matters, and the specific contribution of this paper.
5. Literature review — positioned relative to existing work; identify the gap this paper addresses.
6. Methodology — sufficient detail for another researcher to repeat the study. State the sampling strategy, instruments and analytical approach.
7. Results — findings without interpretation. Report effect sizes and uncertainty, not significance alone.
8. Discussion — what the findings mean, how they relate to prior work, and their limitations. Be explicit about what the study cannot establish.
9. Conclusion — the contribution and its implications for research or policy.
10. Declarations — funding, competing interests, ethics, data availability.
11. References — APA 7th edition.

Formatting

Preparing for blind review

BORJSS operates double-blind peer review. Reviewers must not be able to identify the authors, so the main manuscript file must be anonymised before upload.

Remove from the main file:

• Author names, affiliations, email addresses and ORCID iDs.
• Acknowledgements and funding statements — these go on the title page.
• Self-citations phrased identifiably. Write “Khan (2023) found” rather than “in our earlier work (Khan, 2023) we found”.
• Institutional identifiers in ethics statements — write “approved by the institutional review board”, naming it only on the title page.
• Document properties. In Word: File → Info → Check for Issues → Inspect Document → remove Document Properties and Personal Information.

References

Use APA 7th edition for both in-text citations and the reference list. Every in-text citation must appear in the list, and every entry in the list must be cited in the text.

• Include a DOI for every reference that has one, formatted as https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx.
• Cite the published version rather than a preprint where one exists.
• Give a full retrieval date for web sources without a stable identifier.
• A reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) is strongly recommended; hand-formatted lists are the most common source of copy-editing delay.

Figures and tables

• Number figures and tables consecutively in the order they are first cited in the text.
• Every figure and table needs a caption that makes it intelligible without the surrounding text.
• Supply figures at a minimum of 300 dpi, as TIFF, PNG or vector PDF. Screenshots of charts are not accepted.
• Do not rely on colour alone to distinguish categories — use pattern, shape or direct labelling so the figure survives greyscale printing and colour-blind readers.
• Tables must be supplied as editable text, never as images. Do not use vertical rules.
• Reproduced material requires written permission from the copyright holder; supply it at submission and credit the source in the caption.

Required declarations

These appear before the reference list. State them explicitly, including where the answer is “none”.

• Funding — name each funder and the grant number, or state that the research received no external funding.
• Competing interests — financial or personal relationships that could be seen to influence the work. See the conflict of interest policy.
• Ethics approval — required for any research involving human participants, along with a statement on informed consent.
• Data availability — where the data underlying the findings can be obtained, or why they cannot be shared.
• AI use — disclose any generative AI used in preparing the manuscript, as set out in the AI-assisted writing policy. AI tools cannot be listed as authors.
• Author contributions — describe each author’s role using CRediT taxonomy terms.

Files to upload

Submission checklist

Confirm each item before you begin. The submission form asks you to declare most of them.

• The manuscript is original and is not under consideration at another journal.
• The submission falls within the journal's aims and scope.
• The main file is anonymised: no author names, affiliations or acknowledgements.
• A separate title page includes all author details and ORCID iDs.
• The abstract is 250–300 words and needs no reference to be understood.
• Between three and eight keywords are supplied.
• References follow APA 7th edition and every in-text citation appears in the list.
• DOIs are included for all references that have one.
• Figures and tables are numbered, captioned and cited in the text.
• Ethics approval is stated where human participants were involved.
• All named authors meet the authorship criteria and have approved the submission.
• Any use of AI tools is disclosed as required by the AI policy.