For authors

Ethical Guidelines

The Author should be held fully responsible for precision and reliability of the data provided in the article manuscript submitted to the Journal’s editorial board, namely:

– the submitted paper has not been published in another journal and is not currently under review thereby;

– publication of the article is approved by all the co-authors and the organization where the research was done;

–  if there is no conflict of interest, it is required to state “No conflict of interest to be declared.”

Copyright

1. The Authors reserve their copyright for the submitted paper and grant to the Journal the right of its first publishing.
2. The Authors should have the right to post the submitted paper on the Internet (e.g. in the educational institution databank or on a personal website) both prior to and during its review by the Journal as this can facilitate fruitful discussion and improve the submitted paper’s citation rate. (See ‘The Effect of Open Access’).

Names and e-mail addresses will not be disclosed to other persons and organizations.

Article Review Stages

Stage 1 The submitted article is examined by the copy editor for compliance with formal requirements and can be returned to the Author for refinement.

Stage 2 (Review). The article is sent to the Journal’s editors and independent reviewers for double-blind peer review. The peer review duration should not exceed two (2) months.

The article is accepted or rejected based on the reviewers’ reports and the Chief Editor’s decision. All the submitted articles undergo software-aided plagiarism check.

The principal reasons for article rejection include a significant amount of borrowings, resubmission of the same research results and lack of academic novelty.

A license agreement should be signed with every author whose article is accepted for publication following the review. The Author’s submitting materials to the Journal’s editors should be construed as such Author’s acceptance of the publishing rules and approval of the submitted materials becoming available open access according to the Journal’s Creative Commons CC BY license.

Principal Formal Requirements to the Articles

Manuscript Text Layout Guidelines

The manuscript should be submitted in electronic form via the website online submission form. Only texts in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx formats are accepted.

1. The text (including notes and footnotes) should be Times New Roman size 14 pt for the main text, and 10 pt for notes and footnotes. The vertical spacing should be 1.5. Later, the text will be paginated to comply with the journal’s layout.
2. Pictures, tables and diagrams should be numbered consecutively from the beginning of the article and have their own short titles with source specification (for the data cited from other sources). Their exact position within the text should be clearly specified. It is imperative that they be cited in the article’s main text in italics, e.g.: (Fig. 4), (Table 3), (Chart 1).

2.1. Pictures, photographs and diagrams should be submitted by separate files, have *jpeg (or *jpg) or *tiff extension, and feature sufficient resolution for pagination purposes. All the figures must be numbered and titled in italics below the respective figure.

3. Equations should be numbered. For processing, please use MS Equation or MathType tools.

For example:                                    a2+b2=c2                                      (1)

4. All the abbreviations and acronyms should be expanded upon their first appearance in the text.

General Requirements to Citation

Article Formatting Guidelines

The article should be structured under IMRAD (Introduction, Methods and Materials, Results and Discussion) standard. The article covering theoretical research should have a Theoretical Basis section instead of the Methods and Materials one. The IMRаD format should not be applied to surveys.

The article size including its text, figures, tables with their titles and labels, list of references, diagrams, illustrations, and appendices (if any) should be within the range of 4,000 to 8,000 words.

The Author Details should include their last, first and middle name (if applicable), academic degree and rank, job title and the full name of the institution, mailing address, phone number and e-mail account. Please also provide data on the author’s ORCID, Scopus Author ID and Research ID (if available).

Title 

The title is what the article will be searched by and it should contain up to 10 words which provide a comprehensive description of the research topic. A title should:

–  emphasize the purpose and subject of the research;

– be indicative of the content;

– contain no abbreviations apart from the commonly known ones;

– inspire the readers’ interest.

Abstract 

Abstracts should be concise and descriptive, and contain no broad terms, digits, tables, pictures, subtitles, numbered lists or any data not mentioned in the article.
The abstract should be logically arranged and structured according to the following pattern:

– relevance of the research;

– objectives;

– methods utilized;

– main results;

– conclusions.

It is important to specify what categories of readers could find the article useful. The abstract is a powerful promotion tool as it helps other researchers to decide whether the rest of the article is worth their attention. It should have 100–150 words (for Maths and Chemistry) to 200–250 words (for other disciplines).

Keywords

The keywords are words or combinations of 2-3 words that assist search engines in subject indexing, and readers in conducting network searches. They are used for indexing and searching. A total of 8-10 keywords should feature utmost precision and relevance to the article’s distinctive properties.

Introduction 

The manuscript’s main text begins with Introduction stipulating the problem to be studied and describing the research strategy. The researcher should proceed from the general to the specific (a top-down approach), namely, give an account of the earlier research on the subject, set forth the principal objectives, and summarize the hypothesis(es) of the article.

1) Why is this problem important? 2) How does this study relate to the preceding work on the subject? 3) Which are the primary and secondary hypotheses and objectives of the research? 4) What is the correlation between the study’s hypotheses and the research design? 5) What are the theoretical findings and practical conclusions? The Introduction should demonstrate the results and reasoning of the work performed, and should contain at least five (5) citations.

It is imperative to offer a brief summary on the related publications presuming that the reader is familiar with the main objective. The description should also inform the readers if there are other aspects to the research which were mentioned in earlier studies and explain how the current handling of the supporting materials is different from that employed in earlier research. At the same time, the citations should involve only the publications related to the research problem and not those having only general significance. On describing the objective and the reference sources, the author should elucidate their approach to solution of the issue.

Methods and Materials. This section should describe how the research was being done. Different research types require different methods. However, a comprehensive description of the implemented methods is instrumental in evaluation of the findings’ reliability and justification, which is crucial in ensuring repeatability of the results. When the manuscript is an update of a current or an earlier research which contains a detailed description of the employed methods then it should be sufficient to provide a reference to such source while offering the submitted manuscript only a brief outline of the methods. It is important to clearly state in the submitted writing whether it is experimental research or a theoretical study. It is imperative to specify the tools, materials and equipment involved in the experiment.

Results

It is one of the most important sections where the research results should be specified and compared with those yielded by other studies. The results should be arranged as pictures, diagrams, or tables and consist of clearly defined data elicited by the research.

Discussion

Once the results are produced, the conclusions which they imply can be evaluated and construed, especially in relation to the original hypotheses. Emphasis should be given to the theoretical and practical outcomes (if the discussion is relatively short the authors might combine it with the Results section under the Results and Discussion heading). The Discussion should open with a statement supporting or rejecting new original hypotheses. The reasoning behind the rejection should be based on the results achieved. The similarities and discrepancies with the results and writings of other researchers should be used for confirmation and refinement of the findings.

Giving due regard to the merits of the research, the author should as well mention its shortcomings to be rectified and give an account of practical and theoretical value of the experiment’s results. Then the researcher draws conclusions and describes further research opportunities. Contrary to the Introduction, the researcher now shall proceed from the specific to the general (a bottom-up approach).

Conclusions

The Conclusions is the section where the research gets briefly summarized showing the academic significance of the obtained knowledge and the possible ways of the latter’s practical application. It is important to offer recommendations for the researchers performing studies in the same field.

Acknowledgments 

This section is where the researcher lists the grants and other funding sources, and thank the colleagues who were assisting with the research or manuscript, or offered constructive criticism. It is also necessary to mention all the existing special authorship arrangements if the authors’ contributions to the research are equal.

References  

The reference list should contain at least 20 sources (up to 40 in surveys and discussions). The reference list can include only the sources cited in the article’s text (enclosed in square brackets). The self-citing ratio should not exceed 30%.

Only peer-reviewed sources can be included in the reference list, such as articles published in academic journals or monographs cited in the text.

The papers which have been accepted for publishing but not yet published should be cited as “forthcoming”. The authors need to obtain a written permission to cite such documents and a confirmation of their being accepted for publishing. The data from unpublished sources must be marked as “unpublished data or documents”, the authors being also obliged to obtain a written permission to use such sources.

It is recommended to use the sources published within the recent 3-5 years.

At the end of the reference entry, the Author shall specify the source’s DOI (Digital Object Identifier, the unique digital identification with CrossRef Registration Agency), if any.

THE REFERENCE LIST MUST NOT INCLUDE:

1. Conference abstracts, textbooks and workbooks. Conference papers can be listed as reference only provided that they are available on the Internet and can be found by search engines, in which case specification of their URL and access date in DD.MM.YYYY form is required, e.g.: URL: http://www.fa.ru/org/div/edition/upravnauki/Pages/author.aspx (last visited: 06.06.2018);
2. Laws and regulations (statutes, bylaws, official instructions, etc.);
3. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other kinds of reference books;
4. Reports, statements, memos, minutes of meetings.

All such sources should be specified by footnotes.

REFERENCE LIST REQUIREMENTS

The reference list should be arranged in compliance with the Vancouver style (The entries should appear as one numerical sequence in the order of their citation in the body of the article, tables and pictures; the citations should be enclosed in square brackets [1], [2], [3]).

When several sources are cited the numbers should be separated by commas without spaces, e.g. [5,6] .

If there are more sources, the reference numbers should be specified as a range, e.g. [20-22].

The citation referring to the article as a whole is arranged as [1]; the reference to a particular page is cited as [1, p. 15].

Proper citation can be ensured by using both the International Database services and citation management software.

The Scopus database offers a Create Bibliography option. The major reference management software products nowadays include Mendeley (supported by Elsevier) and EndNote (since 2016 supported by Clarivate Analytics) and more.

 Below is an example of the Vancouver style reference to an English-language article:

Marx W. Tracking historical papers and their  citations. European Science Editing. 2012;38(2):35–37.

It is imperative to mention every author. The sequence in which the authors’ names are presented in the source must not be amended. The author’s last name should be specified first and followed by the author’s initials with no comma between the last, first and patronymic names, and no space between the first and patronymic names.
For example:

Clarke A., Gatineau M., Grimaud O., Royer-Devaux S., Wyn-Roberts N., Bis I.L., Lewison G.

A bibliometric overview of public health research in Europe. The European Journal of Public Health. 2007:17(Suppl. 1):43–49. DOI:10.1093/eurpub/ckm063.

  Attention:
For articles written in graphic symbols OTHER than Latin – that is, in Cyrillic (including Russian), Chinese characters, etc., the reference should be translated or transliterated. A reference can include both transliterated elements (e.g. the authors’ names and journals’ titles) and translated ones (articles’ titles). Transliteration can be aided with https://translit.ru online service with BSI option chosen in the settings.
The titles of Russian journals included in REFERENCES should be transliterated and followed by “=” symbol which introduces the journal’s English title, if any. Absent the translated title, such entry mentions only the transliterated title.
Here are some examples of Russian-language articles citation:

Taran P. Globalization and labor migration: the need for policies based on human rights. Age of Globalization. 2010;(1):66−88. (In Russ.).

Dudin M.N., Lyasnikov N.V., Sidorenko V.N. Optimization of demographic processes within the framework of migration policy and ensuring economic security of the country’s regions. MIR (Modernizatsiya. Innovatsii. Razvitie). 2015;(1):4–14. (In Russ.)

Online sources citation examples

Title of the online source [Internet]. Title of the homepage; 2016 [updated October 19, 2016; cited October 30, 2016]. Available at: http://www.example.ru.

No arbitrary abbreviations of journal titles are accepted. If the journal does not provide the official abbreviation of its title the recommended abbreviations may be checked with the ISSN List of Title World Abbreviations (LTWA) available at http://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-theltwa/; if no recommended abbreviation options have been retrieved the title should be given in full; it is strongly recommended to avoid abbreviating a journal title in any way other than that suggested by the journal itself.

On the International Database, papers are automatically cited by the first author’s name, journal title, year, issue, and the article page numbers. A single misprinted letter or digit is enough to entail a reference loss most difficult to rectify.