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Submission: the first step in the Workflow

Scritto da Giovanni Salucci

Article’s submission is the first step in the Journals publishing workflow; we attempt to discover if there is a trend in Editorial guidelines depending on STM and HSS Journal subjects.

We decide to sample the top 10 Journals using the 2018 Scimago report, to analyze high-quality Journals. Using this rank, we studied the Instructions for Authors in the Journal’s websites:  how they should prepare the manuscript file give us a good idea about the workflow behind the scene.

We get only a first trend, of course, not statistical evidence, related to subjects and scientific Areas.

We discover five options for submission: PDF only, PDF or Word; Word only; Word or Latex; Latex only.

 

This slide shows the distribution of formats agreed at submission for around 20 subject, equally divided among STM (Blue) and  HSS (Red). We notice the extensive use of MS Word for Medicine and Religious Studies; an extensive use of Latex in Maths and Astrophysics.

Then we aggregate data by Area; we find as expected, the trend that MS Word is the main format in HSS, while we have a segmentation in STM where each subject could have strict format. This trend is confirmed if we analyze if each Journal suggest to use a specific  template or not.

 

To confirm these trends, we should amply the number of Journals and Subjects to analyze.

We believe these results give us a lesson about the scenario of Journal’s Publishing: it is very unlikely that a unique production workflow would fit all circumstances.

Autore

Giovanni Salucci

Vive a Firenze, CEO di Progettinrete, si occupa di editoria accademica, di innovazione nei processi editoriali delle university press e di tutto ciò che riguarda la definizione dei flussi, la raccolta, gestione, archiviazione, indicizzazione, ricerca e distribuzione dell’informazione. Dal 2021 è docente di Laboratorio di editoria digitale all'Università di Firenze.