How to Write an Article
The emphasis of the content of this section is on the way of organizing and writing research articles. However, other types of articles can be accepted and published by the decision of the editorial board of each journal; because in addition to research articles, it is possible to publish other types of articles such as review articles, theoretical articles, letters to the editor, etc.
Obviously, all types of articles have some common and different features. These features are generally related to their content and structure. In this section, although due to the importance of research articles compared to other articles, the content and structure of research articles are described, the common features of other articles are also discussed. In most of the sources that describe and explain the types of articles, as in the approach of the present text, the emphasis is always on research articles. Before submitting the article to the journal, it is recommended to consider the following points in writing and editing the article:
General Principles of Article Submission
1) The content of the article must be related to the scope of the journal;
2) The majority of the articles in each issue of a journal is dedicated to research articles reporting of a specific research result;
3) The article has not been submitted or published before to any local or foreign publication. It should be noted that the authors must refrain from submitting the article to another Journal for four months after submitting it to the journal in question, and during this time, they can check the status of the submitted article through the electronic system or the internal manager of the journal.
4) Authors are required to prepare the following files (Download the following forms):
5) All authors must have an ORCID code. To get the ORCID code, register in the ORCID website at https://orcid.org/ and receive your ORCID code for free.
The Structure of an Article
Each submitted (research) article must have this general structure:
Title
On the first page, the title of the article, the names and organizational affiliations of the author(s), abstract and keywords should be provided. The title of the article should be accurate and as short and interesting as possible to make the reader interested in reading the article. It also shows the main idea of the article and briefly states the variables, the problem and the relationship between them. The number of words used in the title should range from 10 to 15. The title should not be too short or too long. If the title is too short, it will confuse the reader and create ambiguity in them, and if the title is too long, it will cause the reader to ignore it.
Author(S) and Affiliated Organization(S)
After the title, the name of the author(s) and their organizational affiliation(s) is stated. The e-mail address of the corresponding author (preferably an organizational email) should be mentioned in the footnote so that the audience can contact them. If the author is not affiliated with a particular organization, their educational qualification should be included.
The ordering of the author(s)’ names depends on their cooperation and is an agreement between the author(s) of the article. If all authors have cooperated similarly, their names can be written in alphabetical order. One should avoid writing titles such as doctor, professor, engineer, etc.
Abstract
Full abstract is prepared for research articles. Its content includes purpose, method, findings, innovation (value), and conclusion, respectively. In its structured form, the mentioned parts are presented separately. It includes 150-250 words.
Keywords
The terms of this section should be exactly extracted from the text of the abstract and refer to the main concepts of the study. In some sources, it is recommended to set the keywords alphabetically. The number of keywords or key phrases should be 4-7.
Introduction
Considering the latest guidelines and international standards, the content of the introduction includes introductory explanations, statement of the problem, main goal(s), questions or hypotheses and literature review.
The introduction should be concise, clear, purposeful and well written. Authors should pay attention to the type, sequence, and logical order of the information provided in the introduction. These principles do not differ in quantitative, qualitative and hybrid studies, and their order includes: explaining the field of research in general, more specific explanations about the aspects of the problem that is of particular interest to this study (theoretical foundations), and the general purpose or question of the research is stated at the end of the introduction. All of the information should be put together like pieces of a puzzle so that after reading the section, the reader will have a general picture of all the information used in this article.
If it is necessary to review and present the backgrounds in a separate section, and it is not considered appropriate to review the backgrounds in the introduction due to its brevity, it is possible to review the backgrounds in an independent section after the introduction.
In this first part, the introductory material about the research topic is stated and then the research backgrounds are reviewed. Then a logical conclusion is made from the background review and the existing research gap(s) are shown. It is obvious that the best review method is the analytical or analytical-critical method, in which the backgrounds are grouped regardless of the time and place of their implementation and on the basis of similarities in the approach, and then, the opinion and viewpoint of the researcher(s) regarding them are expressed.
Method
This section includes the research design, method or approach (with a detailed description of the general method and the specific method of conducting the research), the research population, the data collection tool(s), and the data analysis method. In the first stage, the researcher must explain the research method and the research design so that the reader can get a clear picture of what was done during the research; therefore, it is necessary to provide detailed and clear explanations of the process followed, such as the method of using the independent variable, defining the variables, sampling method, assigning people to the experimental and control groups, how to record the reaction of the samples to the independent variable, how to record and measure the dependent variable and etc.
The researcher should specify the intended population so that the reader understands who the participants of the research were. Then, it should specify the subjects or participants in the research, which actually determine the sample of the research. Of course, in case studies, the method of selecting the sample and the type of subject is different from the samples of other researches.
In the next step, the researcher determines the instruments and tools of the research (data collection). In this section, it is necessary to pay attention to this point, if the instruments and tools used in the study are known in the scientific community of the audience, there is no need to give a detailed and complete explanation and mentioning the name of the research tool along with a brief explanation about its reliability and validity is enough. But if the research tool is designed by the researchers themselves, a complete explanation of how to evaluate the reliability and validity of the tool is required. Then, the method of data analysis should be described and the statistical steps taken should be mentioned.
Results
The analysis and explanation of the collected data in statistical (descriptive and inferential), qualitative and mixed formats along with the limited interpretation of the data is done in this section. It should be mentioned that to explain and represent the collected data, it is enough to use one of the graphs, figure and table tools. In cases where the research has a question, the answer to the question should be explained clearly and unambiguously. If there is a hypothesis in the research, the detailed description of the tests should be done and the rejected or confirmed hypotheses should be specified.
*The title is placed above the tables, figures and charts with 12pt spacing before and after them.
** The numbers of tables, figures and diagrams should be in bold font and their titles should be written simply.
***Tables should be adjusted according to APA format and font size 10.
Discussion
The main value of research lies in this section because the research findings are determined and the researcher's final understanding of the research is expressed. In general, in this section, the detailed interpretation of the data and the expression of the researcher's point of view regarding the findings, the comparison of the research findings with those of previous studies and showing the position of the research among similar studies are presented. Also, a brief statement of the limitations in the process of conducting the research, and the research suggestion(s) deduced from the research findings are stated in this part.
Ethical Considerations
Compliance with ethical guidelines: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of ABCD (Ethical code: FR.AMU.REC.2022.500). The authors avoided from data fabrication and falsification.
Funding: The study was funded by the University of ABCD, Country ABCD, and Grant No. 111111. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Authors' contribution: For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. The following statements should be used “Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; methodology, X.X.; software, X.X.; validation, X.X., Y.Y. and Z.Z.; formal analysis, X.X.; investigation, X.X.; resources, X.X.; data curation, X.X.; writing—original draft preparation, X.X.; writing—review and editing, X.X.; visualization, X.X.; supervision, X.X.; project administration, X.X.; funding acquisition, Y.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.” Please turn to the CRediT taxonomy for the term explanation. Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work re-ported.
Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. Declare conflicts of interest or state “The authors declare no conflict of interest.” Authors must identify and declare any personal circumstances or interest that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of reported research results. Any role of the funders in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results must be declared in this section. If there is no role, please state “The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results”.
Acknowledgements: The Acknowledgments section should be a few sentences at the end, but it is important to recognize those people (organizations and individuals) who made considerable impact on the research, provided significant help to the author to formulate and complete the experiment, and improved the research at any stage (from providing access to equipment or field sites to editing the manuscript). However, this is an optional section.
In this section, you can acknowledge any support given which is not covered by the author contribution or funding sections. This may include administrative and technical support, or donations in kind (e.g., materials used for experiments).
The authors would like to thank all participants of the present study.
References
The sources used in the article should be set based on APA reference formatting method.
Jackson, L. M. (2019). The psychology of prejudice: From attitudes to social action (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association
Parenthetical citations: (Jackson, 2019)
Narrative citations:
Jackson (2019)….
Harris, L. (2014). Instructional leadership perceptions and practices of elementary school leaders [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Virginia.
Parenthetical citation: (Harris, 2014)
Narrative citation:
Harris (2014)
Sanchiz, M., Chevalier, A., & Amadieu, F. (2017). How do older and young adults start searching for information? Impact of age, domain knowledge and problem complexity on the different steps of information searching. Computers in Human Behavior, 6(72), 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.02.038
Parenthetical citations: (Sanchiz et al., 2017)
Narrative citations:
Sanchiz et al. (2017)
Cacioppo, S. (2019, April 25–28). Evolutionary theory of social connections: Past, present, and future [Conference presentation abstract]. Ninety-ninth annual convention of the Western Psychological Association, Pasadena, CA, United States. https://westernpsych.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WPA-Program-2019-Final-2.pdf
Parenthetical citation: (Cacioppo, 2019)
Narrative citation:
Cacioppo (2019)
Vanaei, A., & Hakemi, F. (2015). Designing adaptive neural fuzzy inference system to assess the establishment business intelligence systems in software industry. Journal of Information Technology Management, 1(7), 85-104.
Parenthetical citations: (Vanaei & Hakemi, 2015)
Narrative citations:
Vanaei and Hakemi (2015)…