Author Guidelines

How to get your article under consideration

JTSP considers for publication only articles, which:

  1. Report original science and add significantly to existing research
  2. Are of high interest to the community
  3. Are scientifically rigorous
  4. Have sufficient scientific motivation and purpose
  5. Have not been published previously elsewhere
  6. Are not under consideration for publication in any other peer reviewed journal or book available through a library or by purchase
  7. Comply with our ethical policy

Reporting only incremental steps forward from previous work is usually not sufficient to get an article published in JTSP. Articles based on theses for higher degrees can be submitted but it should be taken care to ensure that such articles have the format of a research paper, which is more succinct than a thesis.

Articles describing work that was originally presented at a conference may be submitted, as long as these articles do not appear in a peer reviewed, published conference proceeding.

All articles are judged solely based on the scientific quality of their content. Unbiased consideration is given to each submitted manuscript regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, political philosophy, sexual orientation, age or reputation of the authors.

All submitted articles are treated as confidential until they are published and they will only be shared with referees, board members, editors and JTSP staff who are directly responsible for the peer review process of the article. (An exception to this can only be made if it is felt necessary to share the article with additional external parties in order to investigate a possible violence of our ethical policy.)

Submitting an article that has been posted as a preprint

JTSP considers articles that have been:

  1. Posted as a preprint on the following sites, provided that (i) there was no and is no transfer of ownership of its copyright, (ii) was not and is not being granted an exclusive licence to it, and (iii) it is not made available under any open access or Creative Commons Licence:
    • arXiv/bioRxiv;
    • other non-commercial subject-based preprint servers or repositories;
    • Scientific Social Networks that have endorsed the STM voluntary principles for article sharing;
    • your Personal Website and/or;
    • your company/institutional repository
  2. Included in a thesis or dissertation, under the same provision as in 1. and provided that it has not been and will not be published commercially and there is no and won’t be an exclusive licence to it.

Language

All papers should be written in English. They should be written clearly and concisely, and be accessible to an international audience. Colloquial language and sayings that may not be widely understood have to be avoided. Short sentences and paragraphs simplify the reading. Articles should be consistent in hyphenation and spelling. All acronyms and abbreviations must be clearly explained/defined when they first appear in the text. A final spelling and grammar check should be carried out before submission. If you are a non-native English speaker, it is advisable to get help from a fluent English speaker before submitting.

Article Types

The possible article types are:

Paper:
An article of original research with conclusions representing a significant advance in the field

Letter:
Outstanding short articles up to four pages, reporting important, new developments

Review paper:
Extensive articles, mostly written by leading researchers in their fields. They present the background to and overview of and the current state of the art in a special field.

Comment:
Comment or criticism on articles previously published in JTSP. These are usually published with an associated reply and are free of charge.

Corrigendum:
An article to correct an omission or error in an author’s article, also free of charge.

Article Format

It is not necessary to try to produce pages that look like published journal pages, as the typesetting will be done by JTSP within the production process. However, for a more rapid publishing process you can use our LaTeX and WORD templates. Please consider the readability for reviewers when formatting your manuscript. Thus, please use a reasonable font size and line spacing. Figures and tables should be embedded at the appropriate point within the text, rather than placed at the end of the manuscript. Papers must be written in English.

Article Structure

Your article should be divided in the following sections: Introduction, Methods/Experimental Setup, Results and Discussion, and consist of the following segments (Authors are encouraged to use the WORD and LaTeX templates, which can be found here.):

Title
A concise, informative and meaningful title is beneficial to the whole readership of the journal. It should include key terms, to help make it easier to be found when people search online. Please avoid the use of long systemic names and non-standard or obscure abbreviations, acronyms or symbols.

Authors
List all authors names and their institutions.

Abstract
The abstract should give interested readers a brief but concise summary of your article, including key terms (especially in the first two sentences, to increase search engine discoverability). The abstract should be complete in itself and it should not contain undefined acronyms/abbreviations, table numbers, figure numbers, references or equations. It should be suitable for direct inclusion in abstracting services and should not be more than 300 words.

Introduction
This describes the nature of the scientific problem treated in the article and its background. It should also cite relevant references. Introductions should thoroughly explain highly specialized terms and abbreviations used in the article to make it more accessible for readers.

Methods/Experimental Setup
This section should provide all necessary details of the experiment, simulation, statistical test or analysis carried out to generate the results. This has to be done in such a way that the method can be repeated by another researcher and the results reproduced.

Results
The results section should highlight the main findings and outcomes of your study. Tables should be used only where the information cannot be given satisfactorily in other ways such as histograms or graphs. Tables should be numbered consecutively and referred to in the text by number (table 1, etc.). Each table should have an short but explanatory caption.

Discussion
Here the significance of the results should be discussed and compared to previous work using references, if needed.

Conclusion
This section should be used to emphasise on the significance of the work, and any plans for future relevant work should be outlined.

Acknowledgments
All authors and co-authors are required to disclose any potential conflict(s) of interest when submitting an article (e.g. employment, consulting fees, research contracts, stock ownership, patent licences, honoraria, advisory affiliations, etc). This information has to be included in an acknowledgments section at the end of the manuscript (before the references section). All sources of financial support for the project must also be disclosed in the acknowledgments section. The name of the funding agency and the grant number should be given, for example: This work was funded by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF), grant no. 123456789.

References
Here the relevant references to previous work, related to your article has to be stated in the form: A. Einstein, and J. Doe, “A guide for writing for the JTSP”, J. of Technol. and Space Plasmas, vol. 0, no. 1, 2018. The number of references is limited with 30 for a regular article and with 120 for a review paper. Thus, only the most relevant and/or recent publications should be taken into account.

Figures

Suitable figures, like diagrams and photographs, greatly enhance an article. Figures that are clear and of the best possible quality and resolution (300 dpi minimum) should be used.
Figures are used as submitted and, thus, it is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that they are legible and technically correct. Micrographs must include a scale bar of appropriate size, e.g. 100 nm. Figures should be numbered in the order in which they are referred to in the text body. If there is more than one part to a figure (e.g. figure 1(a), figure 1(b) etc.), the parts should be identified by a lower-case letter in parentheses within the figure.

Permissions
Note that it is also the authors’ responsibility to obtain written permission from the copyright holder for any figures that are reused from somewhere else. This also includes any figures that the authors created themselves but have previously been published elsewhere, unless that publisher allows you to reuse them without permission under their author rights policy. Check each individual publisher’s policies for details.

Figure captions
Captions have to be included in the text and not in the graphics files. Figure captions should contain relevant key terms and avoid acronyms so that a reader can understand the figure without any reference to the main text. Captions must also reference the source of the figure if it has been reused from elsewhere.

References

Authors must acknowledge all relevant work. A reference in JTSP should give the reader enough information to locate each citation and should be made in the form: A. Einstein, and J. Doe, “Title of the publication”, J. of Technol. and Space Plasmas, vol. 0, no. 1, 2018. For less than five authors, all authors’ names should be given in the reference list. Where there are more than five authors, only the first name should appear, followed by et al.

Utmost care has to be taken to ensure that the information is correct so that links to referenced articles are working. Footnote material to the text should not be included in the reference list. Unpublished results and lectures should generally not be cited. Referencing of online material with no guarantee of perpetuity should be avoided. Permanent web links can be used, as these are intended to remain unchanged for the future. Examples of acceptable links include: Digital Object Identifier (DOI), PubMed identifier (PMID), PubMed Central reference number (PMCID), SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Bibliographic Code, and arXiv e-print number. If you are in doubt regarding what constitutes an acceptable web link then please email us to editor@jtsp.eu.

Reference labeling system
JTSP uses the Vancouver numerical system, where references are numbered sequentially throughout the text. The numbers should be given in square brackets, e.g. [1], [4-7] etc., and one number can be used to refer to several instances of the same reference. The reference list at the end of the article contains the references in numerical and not alphabetical order.

Supplementary Material

The submission of supplementary material is encouraged as it will enhance the quality of the online version of a published research article. Supplementary material usually contains relevant material that does not form part of the main article. Examples are computer code, large tables, additional figures, appendices or multimedia files, such as video clips or animations. Music files are not allowed as supplementary material. Supplementary material can also include primary datasets up to a size of 10 MB.

Supplementary material is not included in the PDF of the article as it is not considered integral to the article it is not subject to the peer review process and cannot be formally cited. Supplementary material is hosted for free with an article on the JTSP homepage in the format you supply, and is accessible to the whole readership.

JTSP supports the principle of reproducible research, and we encourage all authors to make the data related to their article available wherever practical, legal and ethical to do so. The necessary permissions have to be obtained before including any third party supplementary material with a submission.

Preparing your source files

Naming your files

Please name all your files according to the following rules:

  1. Use only characters from the set a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9 and underscore (_)
  2. Do not use spaces in file names
  3. Include an extension of the file type (e.g. .doc, .txt, .jpg, etc)
  4. Do not use any symbols accented letter (for example, à, ê, ñ, ö, ý, etc) as they may cause difficulties when processing the files.
  5. Figure files should be named and numbered in accordance with the manuscript text, e.g. figure1.jpg, figure2.png, …

Article text files

The articles may be submitted in any common variant of LaTeX. A LaTeX template file is available to help authors prepare articles for consideration by JTSP.

Articles can also be prepared using Microsoft Word (the Word template can be downloaded here.) but the fonts used should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol). If special symbols such as Greek characters, accented characters or mathematical symbols are used, these should be typed in an appropriate TrueType font. The Symbol facility on the ‘Insert’ menu should be avoided as this often results in font conversion problems. Equations must be prepared using Microsoft Word Equation Editor or the full commercial MathType package.

For articles prepared using LaTeX2e, all figures must be supplied as vector Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and linked to the main TeX files using appropriate figure inclusion commands such as \includegraphics. For other common LaTeX versions the formats .png, .jpg or .pdf can be used as well but the resolution should be at least 300 dpi. For articles written in Word, all figures should be as well be provided as separate graphics files (in addition to being embedded in the text). It is beneficial to use vector graphics as they give the best possible quality at all output resolutions. Fonts used in the figures should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol). For the initial submission (before the start of the peer review), it is sufficient to submit a single pdf file that contains the manuscript. If any difficulty arise when archiving or submitting files, please contact editor@jtsp.eu for assistance.