Guidelines

Before you start

For queries relating to the status of your paper pre-decision, please get in touch with the Editor or Journal Editorial Office. For queries after acceptance, please contact the Journal Editorial Office. These details can be found in the Editorial Team section.

Author responsibilities

Our goal is to provide you with a professional and courteous experience at each stage of the review and publication process. Some responsibilities fall to you as the author. We expect that you will:

  • Respond swiftly to any queries during the publication process.
  • Be accountable for all aspects of your work. This includes investigating and resolving any questions about accuracy or research integrity.
  • Treat communications between you and the journal editor as confidential until an editorial decision has been made.
  • Read about our research ethics for authorship. These state that you must:
    • Include anyone who has made a substantial and meaningful contribution to the submission (anyone else involved in the paper should be listed in the acknowledgements).
    • Exclude anyone who has not contributed to the paper, or who has chosen not to be associated with the research.
    • In accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools, Large Language Models cannot be credited with authorship as they are incapable of conceptualising a research design without human direction and cannot be accountable for the integrity, originality, and validity of the published work. The author(s) must describe the content created or modified as well as appropriately cite the name and version of the AI tool used; any additional works drawn on by the AI tool should also be appropriately cited and referenced. Standard tools that are used to improve spelling and grammar are not included within the parameters of this guidance. The Editor and Publisher reserve the right to determine whether the use of an AI tool is permissible.
  • If your article involves human participants, you must ensure you have considered whether or not you require ethical approval for your research, and include this information as part of your submission. Find out more about informed consent.

 Policy on AI Usage

Journal’s overarching principles of AI usage:

1) Authors and peer reviewers are responsible and accountable for the accuracy and integrity of their work.

2) AI tools and technology must be used responsibly and transparently.

3) AI tools and technology should not replace human involvement in the publication process, but instead supplement it.

Copywriting (creating, drafting, or writing) any part of a submission using generative AI tools and technology to generate new material is not permitted.

Copy-editing (correcting, editing, formatting, modifying, or refining) all or part of an author’s original work using generative AI tools and technology is permitted, provided the content is improved in structure and clarity of language and grammar, and users adhere to the following overarching principles.

The journal’s full policy, including examples of use cases, can be found on our Publishing Ethics page.

Research and publishing ethics

Our editors and employees work hard to ensure the content we publish is ethically sound. To help us achieve that goal, we closely follow the advice laid out in the guidelines and flowcharts on the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) website.

We have also developed our research and publishing ethics guidelines. If you have not already read these, we urge you to do so – they will help you avoid the most common publishing ethics issues.

A few key points:

  • Any manuscript you submit to this journal should be original. That means it should not have been published before in its current or a similar form. Exceptions to this rule are outlined in our pre-print and conference paper policies.  If any substantial element of your paper has been previously published, you need to declare this to the journal editor upon submission. Please note that the journal editor may use Crossref Similarity Check to check the originality of submissions received. This service compares submissions against a database of 49 million works from 800 scholarly publishers.
  • Your work should not have been submitted elsewhere and should not be under consideration by any other publication.
  • If you have a conflict of interest, you must declare it upon submission; this allows the editor to decide how they would like to proceed. Read about conflict of interest in our research and publishing ethics guidelines.
  • By submitting your work to JBSE, you are guaranteeing that the work is not in infringement of any existing copyright.
  • By submitting your work to JBSE, you are guaranteeing that the work is not in infringement of any existing copyright.
  • If you have written about a company/individual/organisation in detail using information that is not publicly available, have spent time within that company/organisation, or the work features named/interviewed employees, you will need to obtain permission by using the consent to publish form; please also see our permissions guidance for complete details. If you need to obtain permission from the company/individual/organisation, consent must be given by the named individual in question or their representative, a board member of the company/organisation, or a HR department representative of the company/organisation.
  • You have an ethical obligation and responsibility to conduct your research in adherence to national and international research ethics guidelines, as well as the ethical principles outlined by your discipline and any relevant authorities, and to be transparent about your research methods in such a way that all involved in the publication process may fairly and appropriately evaluate your work. For all research involving human participants, you must ensure that you have obtained informed consent, meaning that you must inform all participants in your work (or their legal representative) as to why the research is being conducted, whether their anonymity is protected, how their data will be stored and used, and whether there are any associated risks from participation in the study; the submitted work must confirm that informed consent was obtained and detail how this was addressed in accordance with our policy on informed consent.  
  • Where appropriate, you must provide an ethical statement within the submitted work confirming that your research received institutional and national (or international) ethical approval, and that it complies with all relevant guidelines and regulations for studies involving humans, whether that be data, individuals, or samples. Specifically, the statement should include the name and location of the institutional ethics review committee or review board, the approval number, the date of approval, the details of the national or international guidelines followed, and any other relevant information. You should also include details of how the work adheres to relevant consent guidelines, and confirm that informed consent was secured for all participants. The details of these statements should ensure that author and participant anonymity are not compromised. Any work submitted without a suitable ethical statement and, where required, details of informed consent for all participants will be returned to the authors and will not be considered further until appropriate and clear documentation is provided. The journal reserves the right to reject work that lacks sufficient evidence of informed consent from human participants and, where required, ethical approval.

Third-party copyright permissions

Before article submission, you need to ensure you have applied for and received written permission to use any material in your manuscript that a third party has created. Please note that we are unable to publish any article with pending permissions. The rights we require are:

  • Non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the article or book chapter.
  • Print and electronic rights.
  • Worldwide English-language rights.
  • To use the material for the life of the work. That means there should be no time restrictions on its re-use, e.g., a one-year licence.

We are a member of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) and participate in the STM permissions guidelines, a reciprocal free exchange of material with other STM publishers.  In some cases, this may mean that you do not need permission to reuse content. If so, please highlight this at the submission stage.

Please take a few moments to read our guide to publishing permissions to ensure you have met all the requirements, so that we can process your submission without delay.

Open access information

This is a sponsored, open-access journal, also known as diamond open access. Because it is published in partnership with an organisation, your article will be published with open access. Still, you will not have to pay an APC (article processing charge) - publication is free. Your article will be published with a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 user licence, which outlines how readers can reuse your work.

You can find out more about our open access routes and read our FAQs on our open research page. 

Find out about open

Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines

We are a signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, a framework that supports the reproducibility of research by promoting transparent research practices. That means we encourage you to:

  • Cite and fully reference all data, program code, and other methods in your article.
  • Include persistent identifiers, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), in references for datasets and program codes. Persistent identifiers ensure future access to unique published digital objects, such as a piece of text or datasets. Persistent identifiers are assigned to datasets by digital archives, such as institutional repositories and partners in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS).
  • Follow appropriate international and national procedures with respect to data protection, rights to privacy, and other ethical considerations whenever you cite data. For further guidance, please refer to our research and publishing ethics guidelines. For an example on how to cite datasets, please refer to the references section below.

Prepare your submission

Manuscript requirements

Before you submit your manuscript, you must read and follow the guidelines below. You will also find some valuable tips in our " How to Structure Your Journal Submission " guide.

Format

Article files should be provided in Microsoft Word format

While you are welcome to submit a PDF of the document alongside the Word file, PDFs alone are not acceptable. LaTeX files can also be used, but only if an accompanying PDF document is provided. Acceptable figure file types are listed further below.

Article length/word count

Articles should be up to a maximum of 8000 words in length. This includes all text, such as the structured abstract, references, text in tables, figures, and appendices. Manuscripts surpassing the word limit may be evaluated under exceptional circumstances, subject to valid justifications. In such instances, authors must explicitly state in the cover letter the compelling reasons necessitating an extension beyond the specified word limit. Articles exceeding 10,000 words will not be considered for publication and will be promptly returned to the author.

Article title

A concisely worded title should be provided.

Biographies and acknowledgements

If you want to include these items, save them in a separate Microsoft Word document and upload the file with your submission. Where they are included, a brief professional biography of not more than 100 words should be supplied for each named author.

Author details

The names of all contributing authors should be added to the ScholarOne submission; please list them in the order in which you would like them to be published. Each contributing author will need their own ScholarOne author account, from which we will extract the following details:

  • Author email address (institutional preferred).
  • Author name. We will reproduce it exactly, so any middle names and/or initials they want featured must be included.
  • Author affiliation. This should be where they were based when the paper's research was conducted.

In multi-authored papers, ALL authors who have made a significant contribution to the paper must be listed. Those who have provided support but have not contributed to the research should be featured in an acknowledgements section. You should never include people who have not contributed to the paper or who do not want to be associated with the research. Read about our research ethics for authorship.

Research funding

Your article must reference all sources of external research funding in the acknowledgements section. You should describe the role of the funder or financial sponsor in the entire research process, from study design to submission.

Structured abstract

All submissions must include a structured abstract, following the format outlined below.

These four sub-headings and their accompanying explanations must always be included:

  • Purpose
  • Design/methodology/approach
  • Findings
  • Originality

The following three sub-headings are optional and can be included, if applicable:

  • Research limitations/implications
  • Practical implications
  • Social implications

The maximum length of your abstract should be 250 words in total, including keywords and article classification (see the sections below).

Keywords

Your submission should include up to 12 appropriate and short keywords that capture the principal topics of the paper.

Please note that while we will always try to use the keywords you have suggested, the in-house editorial team may replace some of them with matching terms to ensure consistency across publications and improve your article’s visibility.

Article classification

During the submission process, you will be asked to select a paper type; the options are listed below. If you do not see an exact match, please choose the best fit:

  • Research Article
  • Review Article

You will also be asked to select a category for your paper. The options for this are listed below. If you do not see an exact match, please choose the best fit:

Research paper. Reports on any research undertaken by the author(s), including:

  • The construction or testing of a model or framework
  • Action research
  • Testing of data, market research, or surveys
  • Empirical, scientific, or clinical research
  • Papers with a practical focus

Viewpoint. Covers any paper where the content is dependent on the author's opinion and interpretation. This includes journalistic and magazine-style pieces.

Technical paper. Describes and evaluates technical products, processes, or services.

Conceptual paper. Focuses on developing hypotheses and is usually discursive. Covers philosophical discussions and comparative studies of other authors’ work and thinking.

Case study. Describes actual interventions or experiences within organizations. It can be subjective and does not generally report on research. Also covers a description of a legal case or a hypothetical case study used as a teaching exercise.

Literature review. This category should only be used if the primary purpose of the paper is to annotate and/or critique the literature in a particular field. It could be a selective bibliography providing advice on information sources, or the paper may aim to cover the main contributors to the development of a topic and explore their different views.

General review. Provides an overview or historical examination of some concept, technique, or phenomenon. Papers are likely to be more descriptive or instructional (‘how to’ papers) than discursive.

Headings

Headings must be concise and clearly indicate the required hierarchy. 
The preferred format is for first-level headings to be in bold, and subsequent sub-headings to be in medium italics.

Notes/endnotes

Notes or endnotes should only be used if necessary. They should be identified in the text by consecutive numbers enclosed in square brackets. These numbers should then be listed and explained at the end of the article.

JEL Codes

Each manuscript has to provide at least 3 JEL Codes for manuscript classification. The JEL Code is available here. Please note that our journal only accepts JEL codes at the secondary level.

All figures (charts, diagrams, line drawings, webpages/screenshots, and photographic images) should be submitted electronically. Both colour and black-and-white files are accepted.
Figures
There are a few other important points to note:

  • All figures should be supplied at the highest resolution/quality possible, with numbers and text clearly legible.
  • Acceptable formats are .ai, .eps, .jpeg, .bmp, and .tif.
  • Electronic figures created in other applications should be supplied in their original formats. They should also be either copied and pasted into a blank MS Word document or submitted as a PDF file.
  • All figures should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals and have clear captions.
  • All photographs should be numbered as Plate 1, 2, 3, etc., and have clear captions.
  • All figure/table captions should include the necessary credit line, acknowledgement, or attribution if you have been permitted to use the figure/table; if the figure/table is the property of the author(s), this should be acknowledged in the caption.

References

All references in your manuscript must be formatted using one of the recognised Harvard styles. You are welcome to use the Harvard style adopted by the Journal - we have provided a detailed guide below. Want to use a different Harvard style? That is fine, our typesetters will make any necessary changes to your manuscript if it is accepted. Please ensure you check all your citations for completeness, accuracy, and consistency.

Harvard referencing style

References to other publications in your text should be written as follows:

  • Single author: (Adams, 2006)
  • Two authors: (Adams and Brown, 2006)
  • Three or more authors: (Adams et al., 2006) Please note, ‘et al' should always be written in italics.

A few other style points. These apply to both the main body of text and your final list of references.

  • When referring to pages in a publication, use ‘p.(page number)’ for a single page or ‘pp.(page numbers)’ to indicate a page range.
  • Page numbers should always be written out in full, e.g., 175-179, not 175-9.
  • Where a colon or dash appears in the title of an article or book chapter, the letter that follows that colon or dash should always be lowercase.
  • When citing a work with multiple editors, use the abbreviation ‘Ed.s’.

At the end of your paper, please supply a reference list in alphabetical order using the style guidelines below. 

Submit your manuscript

There are several key steps you should follow to ensure a smooth, trouble-free submission.

Double-check your manuscript.

Before submitting your work, it is your responsibility to check that the manuscript is complete, grammatically correct, and free from spelling or typographical errors. A few other important points:

  • Give the journal aims and scope a final read. Is your manuscript definitely a good fit? If it is not, the editor may decline it without peer review.
  • Does your manuscript comply with our research and publishing ethics guidelines?
  • Have you cleared any necessary publishing permissions?
  • Have you followed all the formatting requirements laid out in these author guidelines?
  • Does the manuscript contain any information that might help the reviewer identify you? This could compromise the blind peer review process. A few tips:
    • If you need to refer to your own work, use wording such as ‘previous research has demonstrated’, not ‘our previous research has demonstrated’.
    • If you need to refer to your own, currently unpublished work, do not include this work in the reference list.
    • Any acknowledgments or author biographies should be uploaded as separate files.
    • Carry out a final check to ensure that no author names appear anywhere in the manuscript. This includes figures or captions.

If your submission is accepted

Copyright

All accepted authors are sent an email with a link to a licence form.  This should be checked for accuracy, for example, whether contact and affiliation details are up to date and your name is spelled correctly, and then returned to us electronically. If there is a reason why you cannot assign copyright to us, you should discuss this with your journal content editor. You will find their contact details in the editorial team section above.

Proofing and typesetting

Once we have received your completed licence form, the article will be sent directly into production. We will carry out editorial checks, copyediting, and typesetting, and then return proofs to you (if you are the corresponding author) for your review. This is your opportunity to correct any typographical errors, grammatical errors, or incorrect author details. We cannot accept requests to rewrite texts at this stage.

When the page proofs are finalised, the fully typeset and proofed version of record is published online. This is referred to as the EarlyCite version. While an EarlyCite article has yet to be assigned to a volume or issue, it does have a digital object identifier (DOI) and is fully citable. It will be compiled into an issue according to the journal’s issue schedule, with papers added in chronological order of publication.

How to share your paper

Visit our author rights page to find out how you can reuse and share your work.

To find tips on increasing the visibility of your published paper, read about how to promote your work.

Correcting inaccuracies in your published paper

Sometimes errors are made during the research, writing, and publishing processes. When these issues arise, we can either withdraw the paper or issue a correction notice. Find out more about our article withdrawal and correction policies.