Instructions for authors

Papers must be written in English. Submit a paper to the managing editor by e-mail: info[at]virtusinterpress.org, olha.lytvynenko@virtusinterpress.org; and a copy to the co-editor at giovanna.mariani[at]unipi.it. This will help to communicate with authors during the whole process of paper submission. You will receive the letter confirming we received your submission within three days, if that does not happen, please contact us again.

The paper must be submitted in a form of MS word or LaTeX file.

Upon acceptance of a paper, authors will be asked to provide the publisher the possibility to publish the paper and disseminate it after publishing. Also, the authors are free to upload their papers to various repositories, use them in the educational process, in their research etc.

The journal is published by the rolling model. This means, that as soon as a paper is accepted for publication, we initiate typesetting procedures. After the approval of the paper layout by the corresponding author, we add the paper to the current issue of the journal online. There are 4 issues of the journal per year. At the end of each season, we close the formation of the issue and publish contents of it online. After this, we publish the issue in print and start forming the next issue. Such model allows us to meet modern requirements of the research community for the timely publications. The authors, whose papers are accepted earlier do not need to wait for the complete issue to be formed, but their paper will be published online straight after the acceptance.

Authors, who submit their papers to the Journal automatically agree that their manuscripts will be checked for plagiarism with the Crossref Similarity Check Powered by iThenticate to ensure originality of their submissions.

According to the policy of the journal the formatting is made by the representatives of Publishing House “Virtus Interpress”. Our skilled typesetters will ensure that your manuscript is formatted according to the style guide of the journal. It allows researchers to save valuable time by having a skilled expert format their manuscript. All figures and tables are moved to the correct location in the manuscript, and figure titles and legends are standardized according to the journal’s specifications. At the same time, we have established standards of article structure, which are listed below.

Publication ethics

Submissions to the journal should be original unpublished work and should not be under review with any other journal. The authors should follow the international standards of responsible research publication promoted by Committee on Publication Ethics. The detailed requirements are available in Chapter “Publication ethics”. Manuscript reviews are blind so authors names need to be removed from all submitted manuscripts.

Language

Please write your text in good English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these). Other languages are not acceptable.

Format

Submissions should be sent in *.doc, *.docx, *.rtf, *.tex or any other editable format. We also accept papers in *.pdf. The submission should consist of the entire paper without author affiliations or acknowledgments and a one-page document with that information included.

Cover page

The cover page of the manuscript should contain

• Title – concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems.
• Name(s) and institutional affiliation(s) of the author(s) – please clearly indicate the given name(s) and family name(s) of each author and check that all names are accurately spelled. Present the authors’ affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author’s name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and, if available, the e-mail address of each author.
• Name, postal address, phone number, and e-mail address of the corresponding author – clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication. Please note that in the journal we indicate only the postal address of the corresponding author. It is our policy to protect authors from illicit and spam e-mails. Contact e-mail of the authors can be obtained from the editorial office with the previous agreement of the author.
  ORCID ID distinguishes you and ensures your research outputs and activities are correctly attributed to you, improves recognition and discoverability for you and your research outputs and a lot more. We ask at least corresponding authors of the manuscripts to provide their ORCID identifier during the submission process.
• Abstract – In order to enhance the readability of the manuscript, please provide an abstract for each submission. The Abstract is a summary of the content of the journal manuscript; a time-saving shortcut for busy researchers and a guide to the most important parts of your manuscript’s written content. In most cases the abstract is the only part of your article that appears in indexing databases so it will be the most accessed part of your article; making a good impression will encourage researchers to read your full paper. During peer review, referees are usually only sent the abstract when invited to review the paper. Therefore, the abstract needs to contain enough information about the paper to allow referees to make a judgement as to whether they have enough expertise to review the paper and be engaging enough for them to want to review it. Your Abstract should answer these questions about your manuscript: What was done? Why did you do it? What did you find? Why are these findings useful and important? Answering these questions lets readers know the most important points about your study, and helps them decide whether they want to read the rest of the paper. Make sure you follow the proper journal manuscript formatting guidelines when preparing your abstract. The abstract should contain a problem statement, an outline of research approach (methodology), a statistical sample and conclusions. The advisable length of the abstract is 150-200 words.
• Keywords – immediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 6 keywords, avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for example, ’and’, ’of’). These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.
• Classification codes – please provide up to 5 standard JEL codes.
• We recommend including an acknowledgement that recognizes the importance of contributions made by other researchers to the paper submitted (that have not been included in the paper authorship) or organisations (universities, grants, etc.) which provided funds for conducting the research.
• Author Contributions section (“CRediT” taxonomy of contributor roles).
• Declaration of Conflicting Interests – please include such a declaration at the end of your manuscript after any Acknowledgements, under the heading ’Declaration of Conflicting Interest’. If no conflict exists, please state that ’The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’.
  The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) states in its Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (2003) that: ‘Conflicts of interest arise when authors, reviewers, or editors have interests that are not fully apparent and that may influence their judgments on what is published. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived.’

Structure of the paper

The length of the paper should amount to no more than 8,000 words. The paper should be divided into clearly defined and numbered structural parts (e.g. 1. Introduction, 2. Literature review, 3. Research Methodology, 4. Results, 5. Discussion, 6. Conclusion).

Tables and illustrations quality

Figures should be of clear quality, in black and white and numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals. Tables should be typed and included as part of the manuscript. There should be a possibility to edit the tables.

Equations

Equations should be numbered consecutively beginning with (1) to the end of the paper, including any appendices. The number should be enclosed in parentheses and set flush right in the column on the same line as the equation. It is this number that should be used when referring to equations within the text. Equations should be referenced within the text as "Eq. (x)." When the reference to an equation begins a sentence, it should be spelled out, e.g., "Equation (x)."

Formulas and equations should be created to clearly distinguish capital letters from lowercase letters. Care should be taken to avoid confusion between the lowercase "l"(el) and the numeral one, or between zero and the lowercase "o." All subscripts, superscripts, Greek letters, and other symbols should be clearly indicated.

In all mathematical expressions and analyses, any symbols (and the units in which they are measured) not previously defined in nomenclature should be explained. If the paper is highly mathematical in nature, it may be advisable to develop equations and formulas in appendices rather than in the body of the paper.

Please use Microsoft Equation add-in or the Math Type add-in in the MS Word. Equations should be editable.

References

The list of references should pay special attention to the works of the recent years. References to other publications must be in APA (American Psychological Association) 7th Edition style and carefully checked for completeness, accuracy and consistency (see more https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples). This is very important in an electronic environment because it enables your readers to exploit the Reference Linking facility on the database and link back to the works you have cited through CrossRef.

At the end of the paper, there should be supplied a reference list in an alphabetical order.

How to promote your papers:

We’ve prepared several short recommendations for our authors that can help to promote their papers published in our journals. These recommendations are available by this link.

Managing editor: Olha Lytvynenko - olha.lytvynenko[at]virtusinterpress.org