Author Guidelines

All submissions will be assessed by an editor to determine whether they meet the aims and scope of this journal. Those considered to be a good fit will be sent for peer review before determining whether they will be accepted or rejected. Those potential papers submitted to Schole journals will go through a strict peer review process (double-blind) before publication.

An editor may desk reject a submission if it does not meet minimum standards of quality. Before submitting, please ensure that the study design and research argument are structured and articulated properly. The title should be concise and the abstract should be able to stand on its own. This will increase the likelihood of reviewers agreeing to review the paper.

Before submission for publication, please kindly check the following basic information of the journal:

Frequency (quarterly): March, June, September, December

Review Speed:

Submission to first decision: 2 weeks

Submission to publication: 4 weeks

Authors are required to prepare and format their papers and other supplementary files to comply with the guidelines below.

Content requirements:

(1) At least 6000 words in length (excluding references)

(2) Address current academic issues and debates

(3) Present cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research

(4) Offer innovative perspectives and methodologies

Due to the journal's preference for publishing lengthy research papers, if your paper is less than 6000 words, it may be desk rejected. We encourage authors to submit papers that integrate theory with empirical evidence.

Our templates are recommended to prepare the submission files.

Templates (Downloadable after logging in as author or reviewer)

- Title Page Template  

- Manuscript Template (without author information)

The title page should include:

Article title

Author name(s)

Affiliation(s)

Acknowledgements

Conflict of Interest Statement

Corresponding author's address (full address is required)

Corresponding author's email address

The anonymized manuscript should contain the main body of your paper including:

References

Figures

Tables

Acknowledgements

Funding Statement

It is important that your anonymized manuscript does not contain any identifying information such as author names or affiliations.

Requirements for submission files

Three separate files (manuscript without author information, title page, and cover letter) are essential for every new submission, whereas another core file is added for resubmission of revision file, that is, response/rebuttal letter. In other words, four files, namely, manuscript without author information, title page, cover letter, and response/rebuttal letter, are collectively known as the revision file. Supplementary files and/or confidential accessory files are optional.

Please note that all information in the title page, except for the manuscript title, should remain unchanged from submission to acceptance before publication. Therefore, authors should make sure that all information is accurate before making submission.

Author metadata during submission

Authors must provide all details of author information, including but not limited to full name, affiliation and email address in the author metadata column of the submission system during the submission process. Schole requires the above-mentioned details to exactly comply with those on the title page of the submission, including the author order of the authorship list. Authors’ ORCID ID, if available, is encouraged to be provided.

Language

Schole encourages manuscripts to meet American English standards for publication. Submissions should be clear and concise; otherwise, obscure and unclear submissions will be returned to authors.

If authors wish to improve the quality of the manuscript for a better chance of publication, Schole recommends the language-editing services, which does not guarantee that it will be accepted for publication.

Letter capitalization

Sentence case capitalization in all submissions are required. In sentence case, Lowercase is used for most major and minor words (except proper nouns, including name of organizations and name of guidelines, because they are always capitalized for the first letter of each word, except for minor words, such as conjunctions and short prepositions). The first letter of the first word should always be uppercase.

Manuscript title

The title should be concise and informative with no more than 50 words, which presents the main result or conclusion of the research. Abbreviations, acronyms and jargons should be avoided within the title. Witty or creative titles are welcome, but they should be relevant to the research. However, unambitious or vague titles are not ideal. In extreme cases, the editorial office may veto a title and propose an alternative.

Abstract

You are required to provide a concise and factual abstract. The abstract should briefly state the purpose of your research, principal results and major conclusions. Some guidelines:

Abstracts must be able to stand alone as abstracts are often presented separately from the article.

Avoid references. If any are essential to include, ensure that you cite the author(s) and year(s).

Avoid non-standard or uncommon abbreviations. If any are essential to include, ensure they are defined within your abstract at first mention.

Keywords

You are required to provide 1 to 7 keywords for indexing purposes. Keywords should be written in English. Please try to avoid keywords consisting of multiple words (using "and" or "of").

We recommend that you only use abbreviations in keywords if they are firmly established in the field. Semi-colons are used to separate keywords (i.e. term1; term2; term3).

Abbreviations and acronyms

Authors should use minimum abbreviations and acronyms. Non-standard abbreviations and acronyms should be avoided unless they appear at least four times, and must be defined upon their first appearance in the main text. A list of non-standard abbreviations at the end but before the acknowledgments is preferred.

Sections in article

Please see the Article Template for detail.

References

We recommend preparing the references with a bibliography software package, such as EndNote, ReferenceManager or Zotero to avoid typing mistakes and duplicated references. Include the digital object identifier (DOI) for all references where available. We recommend that authors export reference information of standards from WOS. Every reference should appear in the text in the following format: (1) Place effects are larger for young and White voters (Cantoni and Pons, 2022). (2) Angelucci et al. (2022) study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medie-val period.

Angelucci, Charles, Simone Meraglia, and Nico Voigtländer. 2022. "How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act." American Economic Review 112, no.10: 3441-3487. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20200885

Bastos, Paulo, Joana Silva, and Eric Verhoogen. 2018. "Export Destinations and Input Prices." American Economic Review 108, no.2: 353-392. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20140647

Acknowledgments*

This part should appear in the title page and back matter file. This is a short text to acknowledge the contributions of specific colleagues, institutions, or agencies that provided non-financial support to help the authors.

Funding statement*

This part should appear in the title page and back matter file. Authors must disclose any funding sources who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article. The role of sponsors, if any, should be declared in relation to the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing of the report and decision to submit the article for publication. If funding sources had no such involvement this should be stated in your submission.

List funding sources in this standard way to facilitate compliance to funder's requirements:

Funding: This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number zzzz]; and the United States Institutes of Peace [grant number aaaa].

It is not necessary to include detailed descriptions on the program or type of grants, scholarships and awards. When funding is from a block grant or other resources available to a university, college, or other research institution, submit the name of the institute or organization that provided the funding.

If no funding has been provided for the research, it is recommended to include the following sentence:

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflict of interest*

Authors are required to disclose any actual and potential conflicts or competing interests with any institutions, organizations or agencies that may damage the integrity of research results at submission. Personal, financial, and professional affiliations or relationships can be regarded as conflicts of interest. If authors failed to disclose conflicts or competing interests, the manuscript would be rejected.

Author contributions*

This section should be included in original research articles and review articles. We adopt Contributor Roles Taxonomy CReDiT. The model uses 14 pre-defined contributor roles: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization; writing–original draft; writing–review & editing. 

Supplementary files

We encourage the use of supplementary materials such as applications, images and sound clips to enhance research. Some guidelines:

Cite all supplementary files in the manuscript text.

Submit supplementary materials at the same time as your article. Be aware that all supplementary materials provided will appear online in the exact same file type as received. These files will not be formatted or typeset by the production team.

Include a concise, descriptive caption for each supplementary file describing its content.

Provide updated files if at any stage of the publication process you wish to make changes to submitted supplementary materials.

Do not make annotations or corrections to a previous version of a supplementary file.

Switch off the option to track changes in Microsoft Office files. If tracked changes are left on, they will appear in your published version.

We recommend you upload research data to a suitable specialist or generalist repository.  

Supplementary figures and tables should be submitted in a single and separate supplementary file, and should be numbered, for example, Figure S1 and Table S1. All tables must be editable (preferably created from Microsoft Word).

The supplementary material can be uploaded as:

data sheet (Word, Excel, CSV, CDX, FASTA, PDF or Zip files)

presentation (PowerPoint, PDF or Zip files)

image (CDX, EPS, JPEG, PDF, PNG or TIF/TIFF),

table (Word, Excel, CSV or PDF)

audio (MP3, WAV or WMA)

video (AVI, DIVX, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, MPG or WMV).

Video

This journal accepts video material and animation sequences to support and enhance your scientific research. We encourage you to include links to video or animation files within articles. Some guidelines:

When including video or animation file links within your article, refer to the video or animation content by adding a note in your text where the file should be placed.

Clearly label files ensuring the given file name is directly related to the file content.

Provide files in one of our recommended file formats. Files should be within our preferred maximum file size of 150 MB per file, 1 GB in total.

Provide "stills" for each of your files. These will be used as standard icons to personalize the link to your video data. You can choose any frame from your video or animation or make a separate image.

Provide text (for both the electronic and the print version) to be placed in the portions of your article that refer to the video content. This is essential text, as video and animation files cannot be embedded in the print version of the journal.

We publish all video and animation files supplied in the electronic version of your article.

Research data and data statement

You are encouraged to:

Deposit your research data in a relevant data repository.

Cite and link to this dataset in your article.

If this is not possible, make a statement explaining why research data cannot be shared.

Ensuring data is available may be a requirement of your funding body or institution. If your data is unavailable to access or unsuitable to post, you can state the reason why (e.g., your research data includes sensitive or confidential information such as patient data) during the submission process. This statement will appear with your published article on this journal.

Revision and response/rebuttal letter

Rebuttal letter is a response to reviewers’ and editors’ comments after an author or researcher submits their work for publication. For the comments of major revision or minor revision, authors should revise the manuscript in comply with the comments and resubmit the revision file, including the manuscript, title page and back matter, cover letter, and response/rebuttal letter, before the due date.

Authors are required to point out the specific revisions in the response/rebuttal letter. It is highly recommended to clarify explanations about the revisions with page number and line number. If authors disapprove reviewers’ comments, they should make clear their points with persuasive evidence and reasonable arguments.

Withdrawal of submissions   

Once accepted, the withdrawal of submissions is generally not allowed.

This journal has established a withdrawal observation database. For authors with a withdrawal record in this journal, we will carefully consider their future submissions during the subsequent submission process.  

Authorship and contributorship

Schole calls the attention of authors to read our author policies carefully before submission. It is required that authors should prepare and format their papers and other supplementary files to comply with Guidelines for Authors.

Schole would not consider a paper for publication if it has been published or is currently under consideration for publication in other journals. Multiple submissions and redundant publications of a paper are prohibited. In the cover letter, authors must state that the manuscript is not under consideration for publication elsewhere or has appeared elsewhere in a manner that could be considered as a prior or duplication of the same work.  

Authorship  

The authorship of a manuscript belongs to the authors have contributed substantially to the following:

a) The conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.

b) The drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

c) The final approval of the version to be submitted.

d) The agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Those who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgments, e.g., anyone who provided research or writing assistance. 

Corresponding authors

The corresponding authors take primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and ensure that all the journal’s requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly satisfied.

Contributorship

Schole journals list contributors in two ways. Firstly, we publish a list of authors' names at the beginning of the paper and, secondly, we list contributors (some of whom may not be included as authors) at the end of the paper in Acknowledgments section.

We adopt Contributor Roles Taxonomy CReDiT. The model uses 14 pre-defined contributor roles: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; software; supervision; validation; visualization; writing–original draft; writing–review & editing.

The editors of this journal generally will not consider changes to authorship once a manuscript has been submitted. It is important that authors carefully consider the authorship list and order of authors and provide a definitive author list at original submission.

Changes to authorship

All authors must be listed in the manuscript and their details entered into the submission system.

Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should only be made prior to acceptance, and only if approved by the journal editor.

Requests to change authorship should be made by the corresponding author, who must provide the reason for the request to the journal editor with written confirmation from all authors, including any authors being added or removed, that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement.

Only in exceptional circumstances will the journal editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors post acceptance.

Publication of the manuscript may be paused while a change in authorship request is being considered.

Any authorship change requests approved by the journal editor will result in a corrigendum if the manuscript has already been published.

Any unauthorised authorship changes may result in the rejection of the article, or retraction, if the article has already been published.

Use of AI or AI-Assisted Writing

When it comes to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technology in manuscript preparation, Schole follows the position statement of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) . Tools such as ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) do not meet authorship criteria and thus cannot be listed as authors on manuscripts. In situations where AI or AI-assisted tools have been used in the preparation of a manuscript, this must be appropriately declared with sufficient details at submission via the cover letter. Furthermore, authors are required to be transparent about the use of these tools and disclose details of how the AI tool was used.

The use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing must be declared by adding a statement at the end of the manuscript when the paper is first submitted. The statement will appear in the published work and should be placed in a new section before the references list. Here is an example:

Title of new section: Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process.

Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the published article.

The declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools, such as tools used to check grammar, spelling and references.

Authors are fully responsible for the originality, validity, and integrity of the content of their manuscript, including any material contributed by AI or AI-assisted tools, and must ensure that this content complies with our publication ethics policies.

Please note: to protect authors' rights and the confidentiality of their research, this journal does not currently allow the use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies such as ChatGPT or similar services by reviewers or editors in the peer review and manuscript evaluation process. We are actively evaluating compliant AI tools and may revise this policy in the future.

Use of inclusive language in Research

Inclusive language acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equal opportunities. Authors should ensure their work uses inclusive language throughout and contains nothing which might imply one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual preference, disability or health condition.

We recommend avoiding the use of descriptors about personal attributes unless they are relevant and valid. Write for gender neutrality with the use of plural nouns ("clinicians, patients/clients") as default. Wherever possible, avoid using "he, she," or "he/she."

No assumptions should be made about the beliefs of readers and writing should be free from bias, stereotypes, slang, reference to dominant culture and/or cultural assumptions.

These guidelines are meant as a point of reference to help you identify appropriate language but are by no means exhaustive or definitive.

Anonymity

Identifying images/video/details which authors do not have specific permission to use must be removed from the manuscript. Please note that the use of coloured bars/shapes to obscure the eyes/facial region of study participants is NOT an acceptable means of anonymisation.