Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be made at the Quantitative Science Studies submission site.

Please note that no fees are charged for Quantitative Science Studies submissions. We do charge an article processing charge for submissions that have been accepted for publication in Quantitative Science Studies.

Before Submitting

The following is a brief checklist of important issues to address before submitting to Quantitative Science Studies:

• Be sure your manuscript fits with the scope of Quantitative Science Studies. On first submission, we require a brief cover letter (preferably no more than 300 words) in which you may comment on the significance of your work and the fit with the scope of the journal.
• Be sure your manuscript represents original work and that there is no significant overlap with other manuscripts, by you or your co-authors, under consideration or in press elsewhere. Related submissions at other journals must be brought to the attention of the editor.
• Confirm that all of your co-authors have approved your manuscript in its submitted form. Collect their names, affiliations, email addresses, and funding information.
• Be ready to provide the ORCIDs of all authors. Providing ORCIDs is strongly encouraged.
• Be ready to enter author contributions, which are required for all research and review articles. Quantitative Science Studies uses the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) for reporting author contributions..
• Be ready to declare any competing interests for yourself and your co-authors.
• Be sure all authors agree that your manuscript will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows free and unlimited reuse of your manuscript without permission or fees.
• Be sure all authors of reprinted figures or text agree that your manuscript will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows free and unlimited reuse of your manuscript without permission or fees.
• Be sure to formally cite all publicly available data sets used in your manuscript, both data sets created by yourself and data sets created by others. Cite each data set in the text of your manuscript and include a reference to the data set in the reference list. Whenever possible, include a persistent identifier such as a DOI in the reference. Using DOIs or other persistent identifiers is preferable over the use of URLs.
  
   

First Submission

Quantitative Science Studies does not have strict formatting requirements for the first submission. Manuscripts are uploaded as a single Word or PDF file with all elements of the manuscript fully integrated, including figures, tables, and references. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that their Word or PDF file is readable and complete and that figures are legible and properly placed.

The formatting of your manuscript should follow some general guidelines:

• Names and affiliations of all authors should be presented on the first page of your manuscript.
• The title of your manuscript should be concise. The abstract is limited to 200 words.
• Provide a list of up to six keywords.
• Pages, sections, and subsections should be numbered. In addition, we suggest line numbering as well.
• The text, including formulas and mathematical symbols, should be typed so as to be easily legible and properly spaced.
• Figures and tables should be placed close to where they are first referenced.
• Figures should be supplied at a suitable resolution, with labels that are legible and properly sized.
• References should be complete. They should have a consistent format in an author-year style. Numbered references should not be used. Note that at the revision stage references will need to be formatted in the style of the American Psychological Association (see below).
• Supplementary materials can be supplied in any file type that is suitable (e.g., text, Word, PDF, or Excel) and should not exceed 100 Mb.

You are encouraged to provide suggestions for potential reviewers. Be sure to avoid conflicts of interest. You may also provide names of people that you do not want to review your work. In this case, be sure to briefly explain why you do not consider someone suitable as a reviewer of your work. 

Revision

Once your manuscript reaches the stage of revision, we have specific formatting and style requirements. Manuscripts should conform to the format and style of the American Psychological Association (APA) as specified in the APA Publication Manual. References should be formatted in the APA style. There are no strict requirements for the structure of your manuscript. You may adopt the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) structure, but this is not a requirement. However, methods should be discussed in the first part of your manuscript, not at the end. Acknowledgments, author contribution statements, competing interests statements, funding information, data availability statements, and appendices should be included at the end of your manuscript. Sections and subsections in your manuscript should be numbered. Your manuscript may be written in either American or British English, but be sure to use a consistent style.

Files must be provided in Word or LaTeX format.

Requirements for Word submissions:

• Single-column
• Standard 12 pt. serif font (e.g., Times)
• Text, references, and figure legends all double spaced
• Equations in MathType (not images)

Figure requirements (Word and LaTeX): Figures may appear inline, but be sure to also supply them as separate files. Appropriate formats include EPS, JPG, and TIFF. High-resolution (300 dpi) figures are desirable. Individual figure files should be no larger than 10 Mb. Figure labels and lettering should be legible once figures are reproduced at their publication sizes (no larger than 7x10 inches). Separate panels should be labeled clearly and fully referred to in the figure legend. Authors are strongly encouraged to design their figures so that they reproduce well in the final PDF layout.

Table requirements: Tables should appear inline and be formatted as tables. They should not be provided as tab or comma delimited text or as images. No colors should be used in tables.

Preprinting

Quantitative Science Studies strongly encourages you to publish your manuscript submitted to the journal on a preprint server, for instance on arXiv, bioRxiv, MetaArXiv, or SocArXiv. Our recommendation is to preprint each version of your manuscript, not only the initial version submitted to Quantitative Science Studies, but also revised versions submitted to the journal, and the version accepted for publication in the journal.

Sharing of Data and Other Materials

Quantitative Science Studies requires authors to openly share all data essential for reproducing the key findings and conclusions presented in their manuscript. Sharing of other materials, such as software code, is strongly recommended.

Data must be shared in a public repository that provides a persistent identifier such as a DOI. You may for instance use Zenodo. Other repositories can be found in re3data. Making data available on request is not acceptable.

Exceptions to our data sharing requirements are possible if data cannot be shared openly for legal or ethical reasons. Some manuscripts published in Quantitative Science Studies for instance use data from proprietary scientometric databases that do not allow their data to be shared. If it is not possible to meet our data sharing requirements, we request authors to share as much data as possible, for instance by sharing samples of data, by sharing data at an aggregated level, or by sharing data in an anonymized form.

Manuscripts submitted to Quantitative Science Studies must include a data availability statement that explains how and where the data is shared. If data cannot be shared, the data availability statement must explain why this is not possible. For instance, in the case of data from a proprietary scientometric database, the data availability statement may provide the following explanation: “For legal reasons, data from [name of scientometric database] cannot be made openly available.”

Article Types

Contributions to Quantitative Science Studies can be submitted in the following formats:

• Articles: original theoretical, empirical, or methodological research (typically between 5,000 and 8,000 words)
• Reviews: manuscripts that provide a novel synthesis of a research area (typically between 5,000 and 10,000 words)
• Letters: responses to previously published research or current events in the field (typically up to 1,000 words)
• Book reviews: evaluation of a recently published monograph (typically between 1,000 and 2,000 words)

Publication of Letters are under Editorial discretion and may involve external review. Original Articles comprise the majority of published contributions to Quantitative Science Studies.

Checklist for Accepted Manuscripts

When your manuscript has been accepted for publication in Quantitative Science Studies, you will be requested to use this checklist to prepare the final version of your manuscript.

Peer Review

All submissions for Quantitative Science Studies will be evaluated first for suitability in the journal. This will be done by the Editor-in-Chief or one of the Associate Editors. Contributions deemed unsuitable can be rejected without further review. Letters may be subject to external review, but can be published at the discretion of the editors. Articles and Reviews deemed in scope and of sufficient quality will be sent to external reviewers (typically two or three) for an in-depth review. The editors will select the reviewers, but authors are encouraged to provide suggestions. The names of authors will be disclosed to reviewers. Reviewers will be kept anonymous, unless they choose to disclose their identity to the authors. Reviewers are expected to treat information they receive in the peer review process in a confidential way. Quantitative Science Studies will attempt to review each manuscript within five weeks of submission, but delays may be expected based on the availability and responsiveness of reviewers.

Increasingly, manuscripts submitted to Quantitative Science Studies are already available online as preprints. When reviewers review a manuscript that is available as a preprint, they are encouraged to publish their review, either on the preprint server or on an online platform such as PREreview, Qeios, or ScienceOpen. To protect the confidentiality of the peer review process of Quantitative Science Studies, the published review should not reveal that the manuscript has been submitted to Quantitative Science Studies and should not provide a recommendation for publication in the journal. More information can be found on the website of the Publish Your Reviews initiative.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in Quantitative Science Studies, the reports of the reviewers, the responses of the authors, and the decision letters of the editor will be made openly available in Web of Science (formerly Publons). Reviewers will remain anonymous, unless they have chosen to disclose their identity.

Peer Review Taxonomy

Quantitative Science Studies and the MIT Press are participating in a pilot of STM's Working Group on Peer Review Taxonomy.

Background statement: "STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, has recognised a need to identify and standardise definitions and terminology in peer review practices in order to help align nomenclature as more publishers use open peer review models. A peer review taxonomy that is used across publishers will help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent, and will enable the community to better assess and compare peer review practices between different journals."

Taxonomy:

1. Identity transparency: Single anonymized
2. Reviewer interacts with: Editor
3. Review information published: Review reports, Reviewer identities reviewer opt in, Editor identities