Instructions for Authors

Authors are welcome to submit contributions at any time throughout the year. When submissions are accepted, they will be included in the first available regular issue after the completion of the copy-editing stage. Information Research publishes three regular issues every year (alongside special issues and conference proceedings). Note that Information Research does not charge publication fees.

As part of the submission process, authors are required to comply with the journal’s house rules and style guide. When authors fail to comply with the journal’s house rules, their contribution will be rejected without review. When authors fail to comply with the journal’s style guide, they may be asked to revise their contribution at any stage in the process. This is necessary to ensure that all contributions in Information Research are presented in the same way, while also reducing the work of our copy-editors – who perform a considerable amount of work for the journal on a purely voluntary basis.

To save yourself time, increase your chances of a favourable review, and help speed up the publication process of your research, consider following the guidelines below while writing (or otherwise preparing your text for submission).

The journal’s house rules

Contributions can only be considered for publication in Information Research when they comply with the following rules.

The contribution:

  1. May not have been published previously;
  2. May not be under consideration by another journal;
  3. May not contain any form of plagiarism;
  4. Must fall within the scope of the journal;
  5. Must be written in English, and be of a linguistic level that does not pose a potential hindrance to the reviewers’ understanding of its contents;
  6. Must comply with our journal’s Open Data policy (when applicable);
  7. Must comply with our journal’s Policy for Ethical Oversight;
  8. Must be submitted through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) Website, and be anonymised for peer review (see below);
  9. Must use the provided Word template; and
  10. Must include a structured abstract (see template).

Note that contributions can only be written in languages other than English when they are included in the conference proceedings of multilingual conferences. In such cases, the editors of the conference proceedings take full responsibility for the copy-editing (and linguistic accuracy) of all contributions.

In cases where authors do not hold the copyright for materials that are included in their contribution (e.g., figures), they must make sure that such materials are properly produced, and that they have obtained the necessary permissions before publication.

The journal’s style guide

The recommended length for papers published in Information Research is approximately 7,000 to 8,000 words (excluding abstract, references, and appendices). Since the journal has a wide target audience, you should clearly situate your research in the wider context of information research, and refrain from using jargon or obscure abbreviations without explicit explanation.

Information Research adopts the British English spelling (also referred to as International English), following The Oxford guide to style (Ritter, 2002). As an online-first alternative, with easier navigation and mostly equivalent information, we recommend Richard Dobb’s Grammar and Style in British English. For citations and references, the journal refers to the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7th ed. 

In addition to these resources, authors should pay special attention to a number of key stylistic features, described below. It is especially when contributions do not adhere to these guidelines that a submission is likely to be returned to the author for revision. Note that in those few cases where our instructions deviate from the style guides, our guidelines take precedence.

Guidelines for writing your text

Do not use contractions. e.g., ‘don’t’ becomes ‘do not’; ‘it’s’ becomes ‘it is’, etc.

Minimise the use of ad hoc abbreviations. When they are necessary, be sure to use the fully expanded form upon first use, followed by the parenthesised abbreviation. e.g.,: ‘In the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), …’.

Minimise the use of capital letters. Do not use capitals to designate research methods, theories, disciplines, etc. Do not capitalise the first letter of every word in a referenced book or paper title (see: APA). Do not use capital letters for the words in the title of your paper or for headings and subheadings.

Use bias-free language. Like APA, Information Research endorses the use of they/them as a generic singular third-person pronoun. Note that the use of this pronoun can often be avoided by simply rephrasing the sentence, and that bias-free alternatives for nouns and verbs are usually available (e.g.,: staff rather than manpower). For more information (incl. other biases), refer to the APA’s extensive guidelines on the issue.

Do not use footnotes. If the point made is important to your argument, include it in the text. If the point is non-essential, remove it.

When emphasising text, use italics generally, and bold face if you need to emphasise something in an italicised section. Do not use quotation marks as a means of emphasis or to highlight an unusual word. e.g.,: ‘Schutz’s treatment of the life-world …’.

Quotations of fewer than 40 words should appear in-text, surrounded by ‘single quotation marks’. (Note that since this is a punctuation issue, we follow The Oxford guide to style here; not APA)  When a quotation ends a sentence, the final quotation mark comes before the full stop. For example:

As John Doe suggests: ‘this is our practice’.

In most cases, the placement of the in-text reference can resolve this issue. For example:

As John Doe suggests: ‘this is our practice’ (Doe, 2024, p. 123).

Quotations of 40 words or more should appear as a separate, indented paragraph without quotation marks.

Always reference precise locations for direct quotations in the in-text reference. When the quoted material does not include page numbers, follow the APA guidelines. When summarising or listing relevant works, page numbers can be omitted.

Tables and figures should be included in the text, as per the instructions in the Word template. Figures should also be submitted as separate .jpg or .png files, with a maximum width of 750px.

To include mathematical formulas, convert these to MathJax and upload them separately as a plain text file. Failing that, include the formula as a figure and submit the relevant image files (in .jpg or .png, with a maximum width of 750px).

Guidelines for formatting your references

To format in-text references and the reference list, follow the APA Style guide (7th ed.).  The APA Style blog also includes many examples of references across various types of resources to model references on.

Note that several easy-to-use reference managers are available to simplify this process (e.g., Zotero, EasyBib, or EndNote).

Alongside this general guideline, the journal introduces a small number of targeted guidelines, listed below. Wherever these instructions deviate from the APA style guide, our instructions take precedence.

Make every effort to locate an open access version of materials you reference. References to such online resources should always include a DOI or URL (see also below).

Make every effort to find and include a DOI for each reference. Even if you used a print copy, a DOI for the work may be available. This is especially true for more recent publications. If a resource has both a DOI and a URL, the DOI suffices. For more information on DOIs, please refer to the APA guidelines.

When referencing entire websites, do not include them in your reference list. Instead, place the URL of the website’s home page in parentheses immediately after the site referred to in the text. e.g.,: ‘… as shown on the website of the Guardian newspaper (http://www.guardian.co.uk), …’.

When referencing a specific web page, include it in the list of references as per the APA guidelines. Remember that referencing a specific web page is required whenever you quote directly from a website.

Archive every URL mentioned in your reference list except for DOIs or resources that are already archived in an official repository such as: institutional research repositories, Zenodo.org, arXiv.org, Researchgate.net, the Internet Archive, etc. This is essential to guard against link rot, since Web content frequently moves location or disappears from the Web. Web pages should be archived using the Wayback Machine (or a similar service), and their references should include the archived link. For example:

Enwald, H. P. K, Kortelainen, T., Leppäluoto, J., Keinänen-Kiukaanniemi, S., Jämsä, T., Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Herzig, K-H. & Huotari, M-L. A. (2013). Perceptions of fear appeal and preferences for feedback in tailored health communication: an explorative study among pre-diabetic individuals. Information Research, 18(3), paper 584. http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-3/paper584.html (Archived by the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20190810135356/http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-3/paper584.html)

You are free to use a link shortening service (e.g., Bitly) to shorten the archived link.

Guidelines for anonymising your submission

The journal uses the double blind review process, i.e., neither the reviewer nor the author is aware of the other's identity. To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

  1. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
  2. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.

Guidelines for writing your abstract

Information Research requires that all papers provide a full, informative, structured abstract. This is helpful for our editors, reviewers, and readers, but also improves the findability of your contribution — which may lead to more frequent citations. Please refer to our Word template for a detailed description of how to format your structured abstract.