Author Guidelines

Submission

Only original research articles will be considered for publication. In particular, Scholarly Research Exchange does not publish Literature Review Articles, Methodology Reports, Case Reports, Letters to the Editor, Meeting Reports, Book Reviews, etc.

Manuscripts should be submitted by one of the authors of the manuscript using the Authors Area of the Scholarly Research Exchange web site. Only Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files are accepted for the manuscript file. All tables and figures should be integrated into the manuscript file. Additional supplementary material (e.g., datasets, images, audio, video) can be submitted in any format (if there is more than one supplementary file, they should be compressed into a single zip file). There is no page limit on submitted manuscripts. The submitting author takes responsibility for the manuscript during submission and peer review. If for some technical reason submission through the Scholarly Research Exchange web site is not possible, the author can contact support@syrexe.com for support.

Terms of Submission

Papers must be submitted on the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis) and are not currently under consideration by any other journal. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that the article's publication has been approved by all the other co-authors. It is also the authors' responsibility to ensure that the articles emanating from a particular institution are submitted with the necessary approval of that institution. It is a condition of submission of a manuscript that the authors permit editing of the manuscript for readability. All enquiries concerning the publication of accepted articles should be addressed to editorial@syrexe.com.

Peer Review

Scholarly Research Exchange uses a transparent peer review system, in which authors interact directly with reviewers during the course of the peer review process. After submitting a manuscript, the submitting author will be asked to provide the names of up to 10 proposed reviewers, along with their email addresses. These proposed reviewers should be acting within the research field of the submitted manuscript, and they should be well-regarded experts in the field. These reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institution as the submitting authors, and should not have had any input into the submitted manuscript, or have had any collaboration with any of the authors during the last 3 years. The proposed reviewers should also be geographically dispersed (e.g., they should be based in at least 2-3 different countries).

Once an author has entered one or more potential reviewers for their manuscript, the Editorial Office will evaluate the appropriateness of each of the reviewers. This evaluation will be based on both the subject appropriateness of the proposed reviewer, as well as their seniority within the field. While there is no strict formula used to evaluate the seniority of proposed reviewers, the main criteria will include an evaluation of the reviewer's publication history, including the number of citations that these publications have received, as well as the academic affiliation and position of the reviewer. Typically it should take one to two working days for proposed reviewers to be evaluated by the Editorial Office.

Once proposed reviewers have been approved by the Editorial Office, they will be sent a review request by email. If a proposed reviewer agrees to evaluate the submitted manuscript, he/she will be added as a reviewer and the manuscript's authors will be notified. Additional reviewers can be suggested by an author at any stage of the review process; however, no more than 10 reviewers may be assigned to a manuscript at a given time. In addition to the reviewers that are suggested by a manuscript's authors, the journal's Editorial Office may identify potential reviewers and invite them to review the submitted manuscript. Authors will be informed of the identities of all reviewers who agree to submit a review report on their manuscript.

Once reviewers have submitted their review report, the report will be sent to the submitting author. Included within this review report is a section for the reviewer to rank the manuscript on a scale from zero to five stars, with the following meanings:

	Outstanding Quality
	Minimum Publishable Quality
	Erroneous or Useless

If a submitted manuscript receives at least two review reports with a ranking of one or more stars, and the average of all the reviewers' rankings is at least one star, then the submitting author will have the ability to have the article published without any further review. However, at any stage in the review process authors may choose to resubmit a revised version of their article, in which case the reviewers will be asked to review this updated version of the article. Once an article has been accepted, the identities and evaluations of the reviewers, as well as any written reviewer commentaries, will be displayed alongside the published article. Only the evaluations and commentaries from the last round of review (in the case that the author submitted a revised version of the manuscript) will be displayed.

Units of Measurement

Units of measurement should be presented simply and concisely using System International (SI) units.

Title and Authorship Information

The following information should be included

Abstract

The manuscript should contain an abstract. The abstract should be self-contained and citation-free and should not exceed 150 words.

Introduction

This section should be succinct, with no subheadings.

Acknowledgments

All acknowledgments (if any) should be included at the very end of the paper before the references and may include supporting grants, presentations, and so forth.

References

Authors are responsible for ensuring that the information in each reference is complete and accurate. All references must be numbered consecutively and citations of references in text should be identified using numbers in square brackets (e.g., “as discussed by Smith [9]”; “as discussed elsewhere [9, 10]”). All references should be cited within the text; otherwise, these references will be automatically removed.

Preparation of Figures

Each figure should be supplied in a separate electronic file. All figures should be cited in the paper in a consecutive order. Each figure is subject to resizing to fit into the column's width of (80 mm) or the full text width (165 mm) for consistency and clarity. The labels of the figures are also subject to resizing to be of minimum 8pt according to the journal's in-house specifications.

Electronically supplied figures are acceptable in the following formats:

Preparation of Tables

Tables should be cited consecutively in the text. Every table must have a descriptive title and if numerical measurements are given, the units should be included in the column heading. Vertical rules should not be used.

Proofs

Corrected proofs must be returned to the publisher within 2-3 days of receipt. The publisher will do everything possible to ensure prompt publication. It will therefore be appreciated if the manuscripts and figures conform from the outset to the style of the journal.

Copyright

Open access authors retain the copyrights of their articles, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.

While the advice and information in this journal are believed to be true and accurate on the date of its publication, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.