Author Guidelines

Before You Submit

• Your work must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere.
• Every listed author must have contributed substantially and approved the submission. All listed authors are notified by email upon submission.
• Disclose all conflicts of interest and funding sources in the manuscript.
• Obtain ethics approval and informed consent where your study requires them.
• An author account with a confirmed email address is required. Registration is free of charge.

Preparing Your Manuscript

The manuscript is uploaded as one Word document (.docx). No other format is accepted — older .doc files must be re-saved as .docx. The file may be up to 20 MB. No journal template is required: accepted manuscripts are prepared for publication in HTML and PDF by the editorial office.

• One complete file — title, abstract, keywords, main text, figures and tables (placed in the text or at the end), and references.
• Anonymised — review is double-blind, so remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgements and self-identifying references from the file, and clear the author name from the document’s properties. Author details are entered in the submission form instead.
• Supplementary material — datasets, code, extra figures or appendices may be added as a single ZIP archive of up to 10 MB.
• Structure — Introduction, Related Work, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusion are recommended, with departures where the nature of the work requires.
• References — in the order you cite them, with a DOI wherever one exists.

Details Entered in the Form

• Title — between 20 and 250 characters; specific and descriptive.
• Abstract — between 300 and 2,500 characters, written to stand alone. It is what most readers and every indexing service will see.
• Keywords — between 3 and 10. Keywords are used for indexing and article discovery.
• Domain — one of the journal’s 28 research domains, listed under Aims & Scope.
• Authors — up to 8, each with title (Dr., Prof., Mr., Ms., Mrs.), first name, last name, email, designation, organization, country and at least one CRediT contributor role, in publication order, with one corresponding author.

Authorship

List authors in the order they should appear on the published article. For each, record their institutional affiliation, country and — wherever possible — their ORCID iD, which links the article permanently to their scholarly record.

Contributions are recorded using the NISO CRediT taxonomy — 14 standard roles including Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition and Writing – review & editing. These are published with the article and included in the metadata we deposit.

Adding or removing an author after submission requires the written agreement of all parties, including the person being added or removed.

Article Types

• Research Article
• Review Article
• Short Paper
• Case Study
• Letter to the Editor

The Submission Process

Online submission comprises 4 steps. Progress is saved automatically, so a submission may be completed over more than one session.

1. Manuscript Details — The title, the abstract, your keywords (type a comma after each one) and the research domain of the work, chosen from the journal's list.
2. Authors — Every author with their title, first and last name, email, designation, organization, country and contributor roles. Drag the authors into publication order and choose one corresponding author. You are listed first automatically.
3. Manuscript Files — The manuscript as a single Word document (.docx), anonymised for double-blind review, plus an optional ZIP archive of supplementary material. Files are stored securely and shared only with the editors and assigned reviewers.
4. Review & Submit — A summary of everything you have entered, the ethics and authorship declarations, and the Submit button. Nothing reaches the editors until you press it.

What Happens Next

A manuscript reference number is issued on submission, and the status of the manuscript can be followed from the author dashboard.

1. Pending. Your manuscript is waiting for an editor to take it up.
2. With Editor. The editor carries out an initial review of scope, originality and quality. Manuscripts that are out of scope or below threshold are rejected at this point, without peer review.
3. In Review. At least 2 independent reviewers assess the manuscript under double-blind review: they do not learn who you are, and you do not learn who they are. Each chooses one outcome, and the most severe choice decides — see the Peer-Review Policy.
4. Major revision — you revise the manuscript, resubmit the full Word file, and answer every reviewer comment; it returns to peer review. Minor revision — you answer the reviewers’ queries point by point, with no new manuscript.
5. Acceptance and publication. The accepted manuscript is prepared for publication by the editorial office and assigned to the current volume and issue. Publication follows once the Article Processing Charge is settled or waived.

Authors are notified by email at each stage. Reviewers are identified to authors only as “Reviewer 1”, “Reviewer 2” and so on, and their confidential remarks to the editor are not shared with authors.

Article Processing Charge

No charge is made for submission or peer review. A single Article Processing Charge is payable only if your manuscript is accepted — ₹10,000.00 for corresponding authors in India, and $100.00 for corresponding authors elsewhere. Taxes are additional and are charged as applicable in each country's jurisdiction.

Ability to pay has no bearing on editorial decisions, and full and partial waivers are available on request. See Article Processing Charges for the full policy.

After Publication

Articles are published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence with a permanent, citable URL, in full-text HTML and PDF, with citation export in standard reference formats and JATS XML. Metadata is made available to Google Scholar, DOAJ and OAI-PMH harvesters, and each author is listed in the journal’s author index together with their published articles.

Manuscripts may be submitted online. Enquiries should be addressed to the Editorial Office at [email protected].