Author Guidelines

Publication Formats

Academic writing is a contested concept. Over time, with the impact of new ways of inquiring and innovations in technology, what is accepted as academic writing has changed. ASRHE welcomes innovative ways of writing. The traditions of academic writing are aligned with scientific method and have led to traditional article structures. ASRHE accepts that those structures will not always be appropriate for new forms of inquiries and encourages authors to present their work in emerging formats. The affordances of publishing a journal electronically includes reference to moving images or soundscapes, and other innovations in the presentation of an academic argument.

There are editorial expectations around inquiry rigour and grounding the inquiry in established discourses, along with realisation that both rigour and grounding can be recognised in new forms of writing.

Submission instructions for non-traditional articles include

• Material in video/audio/image format that forms a substantial article component needs to be uploaded together with the article submission. Providing a link to external material is not sufficient.
• All articles require a text-based abstract and a text-based article component. As a minimum this needs to address editorial expectations around inquiry rigour and grounding the inquiry in established discourses. It is recommended that you consider any contextual and technical factors that a non-specialist reader needs to be aware of in order to understand your work.

Requirements for all Submissions

Please ensure that your submission is a complete and coherent piece of work whatever structural or format choices you make. All submissions require a text document with the following components:

• A title
• Author details (name, affiliation, email for corresponding authors, ORCID)
• An abstract (150 to 250 words)
• Keywords (3 to 5)
• Key contributions or pathways to collaboration (3 to 6 bullet points)
• References in APA 7 style with DOIs included where available
• Tables and figures with APA 7 style captions above table or figure

Key contributions relate to articles submitted under the Research Complete category. They should address what is already known about the topic, what the article adds, and what the implications for research and practice are.

Pathways to collaboration relate to articles submitted under the Research in Progress category. They should address what has already been achieved, how others can build on the research presented, and how current and future work might be integrated.

All submissions require a primary article text document with a title, author details, keywords, key contributions or pathways to collaboration, an abstract, and references. Please include author details in support of our non-blind peer review process.

For traditional articles, your submission will comprise only this text document. For non-traditional articles additional files, text and/or multimedia, may be supplied. It is important that you explain in your primary article text document how the reader should approach additional files.

The submission process asks you to select the article component for each file that you upload (you can submit multiple files which are uploaded one-by-one). Select ‘Article Text’ for your primary submission document. For non-traditional submissions, additional files may be submitted. Select ‘Article Video’ for video and animation files. Select ‘Article Audio’ for audio files. Select ‘Article Image’ for image files or artwork. You should choose the ‘Article Other’ option for other common presentation file formats such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat.

For all submissions, make sure that all sources of knowledge and/or authorship including artificial intelligence are appropriately cited and/or acknowledged.

Guidelines for the Text Components of Submissions
We accept text submissions in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or RTF file formats. Guidelines are available as a sample Microsoft Word Document. Please keep the formatting of your document simple; do not use advanced formatting features of your word processing software.

Our preferred formatting requirements are:

• Document margins 2.5cm
• Arial, a sans serif font, for easy on-screen reading
• Title text 14 point, bold, centred 
• Sections headings 12 point bold, centred
• Capitalisation of only the first word in headings
• Subsection headings 12 point bold, justified left
• Body text 11 point text, 1.3 spaced and justified
• Italics used for emphasis, rather than underlining
• No footnotes
• Figures and tables positioned at the first convenient place after they are referred to in the text; do not provide separate copies of figures and tables
• APA 7 style captions above figures and tables
• APA 7 style references (with DOIs where possible) and citations
• UK spelling style used consistently 
• Double quotation marks, except where "a quotation is 'within' a quotation"
• Long quotations indented without quotation marks
• Title page with author details included (see template)

Note that in APA7, for citations with three or more authors, only the first author et al., needs to be given. Within parentheses, citations should be in alphabetical order, by author.

Should you find it necessary to depart from these guidelines please add a note to your submission explaining your approach.

Word and File Limits

For traditional articles the body should be between 3500 and 5000 words. The abstract, tables, figure captions, and references are in addition to this word limit.

For non-traditional articles, we offer the following guidance. Videos and/or animations should not exceed 10 minutes in length and should be supplied in mp4 format. We encourage you to consider accessibility including the use of closed captions. Audio files should not exceed 30 minutes in length and should be in mp3 format. Image files should not exceed 100Mb in size and we encourage you to consider resolution should readers decide to print images; tiff and jpeg formats are preferred. Preferred presentation file formats are pdf, pptx and odp. Files that cannot be opened and poor quality files may be rejected without review.

If you are considering making a non-traditional submission and would like additional guidance please contact editors@asrhe.org to seek advice.