Instruction for Authors
Publication Process
- The completion and signing of the Authors’ Commitment Form is required by all author(s), and articles without this form will not be reviewed and published (download the form here). All steps of submission, reviewing, and publication of the articles are free of charge.
- Submitted articles are evaluated in terms of quality, their compliance with the aims and scope of the journal, and the submission guidelines (at most within a week). Articles that fall outside the journal's scope or fail to meet the minimum requirements are rejected at this stage. Articles that do not meet the journal submission guidelines can be revised by the author(s) up to a maximum of three times. If, after three revisions, the article continues to fail the said requirements, it will be rejected. If the author(s) still intends to publish their article in the journal, they must re-submit it as a new article. After approval at this stage, the article will be sent to the editor-in-chief for the selection of expert reviewers. In this journal, the submission date of an article is the date it is sent out for the selection of reviewers, and if the author(s) fail to comply with the submission guidelines of the journal and the article remains in the initial stage for a while before it is sent out for the selection of reviewers, it will reserve no right for the author(s) to have their article accepted.
- Once the reviewers have been appointed by the editor-in-chief, upon receiving the comments of at least two reviewers, the article will be sent back to the editor-in-chief for a final assessment. Normally, after a maximum of three months, the final assessment of the article will be reached. If the journal’s response during the reviewing phase (from the date the article is sent out for the selection of reviewers to the date the reviewers’ comments are passed to the author(s)) exceeds three months, the author(s) may submit their article to another journal; provided that they state their definite withdrawal. It is worth noting that the editor-in-chief can accept or reject the article at any stage of the reviewing process, and the number of reviews or revisions does not reserve any rights for the author(s) to object to the editor’s decision.
- Suppose the journal’s decision is not definitive at this stage (either definitive acceptance or rejection). In that case, the author(s) have a maximum of thirty days to revise and re-send the article according to the reviewers’ comments.
- Upon receiving the revision(s) from the author(s), the editor-in-chief or a person appointed by him will be responsible for determining the adequacy of the revision(s). The process of revision by the author(s) and evaluating the adequacy of the revisions shall continue until a final decision is made to either accept or reject the article, during which the author(s) have to submit the revision(s) within seven days.
- In case of a definitive rejection of the article at any stage, the author(s) have no right to object, and the duration of the reviewing phase does not reserve any rights for the article to be accepted.
- Once the editor-in-chief announces the acceptance, the article is transferred to the journal's editorial department, and the editors make all the necessary edits. The journal has full discretion regarding the editing process, during which the author(s) must cooperate with the editors to correct any possible errors. After editing and before pagination, the submitter must answer and approve the galley proof. Failure of the author(s) to accept the final version means the article will be withdrawn. According to the journal’s guidelines, the submitter's approval represents the collective approval of all the authors.
Publishing Ethics and Copyright Information
- The publishing ethics of all Afarand Scholarly Publishing Institute journals are based on the instructions of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).
- All submitted articles that have passed the initial compliance evaluation regarding the aims and scope and the submission guidelines of the journal will be peer-reviewed by at most one of the members of the journal’s editorial and scientific board and at least one external reviewer.
- All authors must sign the “commitment to publishing ethics, transfer of copyright, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and introduction of the authors” form when submitting an article. By signing this form, the author(s) undertake that “the submitted article is not being reviewed by, has not been published in, and will not be submitted to any other journal until the end of the reviewing process and reaching a definitive decision; and if accepted, the author(s) are obliged to cooperate with the editors of the journal up to the stage of the pagination and publication of the article.”
- The author(s) transfer all copyrights resulting from the publication of the article (not the copyrights of the content of the article) to the journal, and the journal has the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, sell, and distribute copies of the article in any way, shape, or form; including all forms of online and traditional distribution. The authors also transfer the right to all financial earnings resulting therefrom to the journal. All authors endorse transferring the aforementioned rights to the journal by signing the Authors’ Commitment Form.
- All the authors of an article are required to comply with the “Research Ethics Protocols” during all stages of the research. They must obtain all the necessary professional and ethical approvals for each research and submit it to the journal at the time of submission. Also, it is necessary to declare all the financial resources used to conduct the research and possible conflicts of interests of the author(s). The ethical principles of research at Tarbiat Modares University are based on the “Instruction of the Publishing Ethics Committee on the Interaction of Research Institutions and Publications in the Field of Honest in Research,”; which can be found at (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/cooperation-between-research-institutions-and-journals-research-integrity)
- Articles submitted by the author(s) should not be subject to “duplicate publication” or “plagiarism” as emphasized in the Authors’ Commitment Form. The exact text can only be used as a direct quotation when citing other sources. Any use of text, data, or analysis of other sources that resemble the original material with no substantial differences is subject to plagiarism; this includes other articles by the authors themselves. Even if multiple articles have been extracted from a single study, the text and references used cannot be the same, and similar data cannot be used in the article. If the editor becomes convinced that the author(s) have plagiarized, they will be dealt with according to the “Committee on Publishing Ethics” instructions. The penalty varies from a verbal warning to a notification to the relevant organization and decision-making bodies of scientific journals.
- All the journals of Afarand Scholarly Publishing Institute are open-access under the general certificate of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Article Format and Submission Guidelines
1- Articles are accepted in both Persian and English.
2- The types of articles accepted by Philosophical Thought are "Original Research", "Literature Review", "Book Review", and "Note".
3- The main file of the article can be submitted in either Word (.doc or .docx) or Latex (.tex) format (when submitting the article, a pdf file that excludes the identifying information of the authors should be submitted).
4- The main file of the article should use an A4 paper size with a 3cm margin on the top, bottom, left, and right, typed in an 11-point Times New Roman font with 1.5 line spacing.
5- The main file of the article should include the first page (a single page), the abstract page (a single page), the text of the article, and the list of references (the pdf file should not include the first page).
A) On the first page, the details of all authors should be written in order of their appearance in the articles.
- For the corresponding author, the first name, last name, last degree and field of study, affiliation (the name of the group, department/research center, faculty/research institute, university/research institute, city, and country), mobile number, telephone number (workplace), postal address (workplace), and email should be specified.
- The information of the remaining author(s) must include the first name, last name, last degree and field of study, affiliation (the name of the group, department/research center, faculty/research institute, university/research institute, city, and country) and email. The order of appearance of the authors must be specified.
B) the title, abstract, and keywords should be written on the abstract page.
- English title
- English abstract (a maximum of 150 words)
- English keywords (a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 7 words)
C) The specifications of the main text of the article according to the type of article are as follows:
Original Research
It must include an argument for or against a theory, the analysis of a theory, and so on. The article's subdivision is at the author's discretion (up to 10,000 words).
Literature Review
It must include a complete or partial systematic introduction to the recent literature on a specific topic. The articles' subdivision is at the author's discretion (up to 10,000 words).
Book Review
It should include a comprehensive review of the book and a partial or complete critical assessment of its contents. The articles' subdivision is at the author's discretion (up to 5000 words).
Note
It should include a brief argument in favor of or against a theory, a presentation of a theory, a short critique of a bilateral or multilateral discussion in the later literature, a short critique of an article previously published in Philosophical Thought, and so on. The article's subdivision is at the author's discretion (up to 2500 words).
- If applicable, graphs, tables, or diagrams should be included in the text (with a single line spacing above and below the text), including numbers and captions (9-point Times New Roman font). Three series of independent numberings should be used for in-text numbering and citations of graphs, tables, and diagrams. Note that the description of each diagram should be such that it reflects the contents of it without the need for an in-text description.
- In the article's main text, footnotes should be avoided as much as possible (except in cases of additional and necessary explanations).
- All articles should have five sections added to the end: Acknowledgements, Ethical Approvals, Conflicts of Interest, Authors’ Contribution, and Financial Support (names of individuals should be excluded from the acknowledgments section in the submitted article). If either one does not apply (other than the authors’ contribution in cases where there is more than one author), please include the statement, “There is no case for reporting.”
D) The Harvard style should be used for citations and references. The references in the list of references should be listed in alphabetical order. Wherever required in the text, the name of the first author (in case there is more than one author, mention the first author followed by “et al. ”) and the year of publication of the reference should be cited in square brackets. If more references are to be cited in the square bracket, the publication years should be set in ascending order from left to right and separated with a semicolon (guide). No secondary referencing is acceptable; only primary references must be cited.
6- The submitter of the article shall be considered as the connector of all the journal affairs concerning the submitted article (all subsequent relations and notifications shall be made to the submitter author). When submitting an article, a letter (The Authors’ Commitment Form) must be sent to the journal confirming and introducing the submitter, signed by all the authors; also, a corresponding author must be specified for when the article may be accepted and published (The correspondent is the author who has the responsibility to respond to possible questions and notes of the readers of the published article).
