Author Guidelines
INTRODUCTION
Please read the following instructions prior to submitting your work and feel to contact our team with queries (details below). In order to standardise publication and maintain acceptable review times, manuscripts that do not follow the author guidelines will be returned to the corresponding author to revise prior to undergoing peer review. We look forward to reviewing your submission and thank you for your interest in the International Journal of Esports.
International Journal of Esports (IJESPORTS) is an online open access journal dedicated to advancing research in esports. The journal aims to publish, collate and stimulate high quality research within this field. Whilst we have a focus on health-based study in esports, we invite original publications across the full spectrum of related work ranging from information technology-based analysis, business and the social sciences. Thus, high quality quantitative and qualitative analysis in addition to perspective articles are encouraged for submission to cover the breadth of study esports encapsulates.
We have a passion for research in esports and accordingly have made changes to the traditional way of presenting academic work which includes creating a tailored article layout and editorial system in addition to a highlights section in all work, social media presence and translational services for the 3 major languages (English, Mandarin and Spanish).
PRE-SUBMISSION
1. Editorial Review and Acceptance
Manuscripts are accepted based on the novelty, quality and relevance. Unless otherwise stated, papers are double-blinded peer reviewed
by at least two well-placed reviewers. The decision of successful submission or rejection lies with the Editorial Board that reserve the right
to refuse any content for publication.
2. Manuscript Preparation
2.1. Manuscript Categories and Criteria
All submitted work to IJESPORTS must be in English and include a “Highlights” section.
This comprises of 2-5 bullet points, highlighting the key findings or conclusions of the article.
A cover letter is not required to support the manuscript submission, however guidance
(below) is provided if this is desired.
Please make sure that all submitted article files including the manuscript are completely anonymised and that line numbers are present.
Author details will be entered during the submission process.
IJESPORTS accepts the following categories of articles:
Original Research Articles
Original articles should not exceed 5000 words (excluding abstract, references, tables and figures) and may include up to 8 figures and/or tables and 50 references. Full length articles should be divided into the following sections as relevant: (1) Abstract and up to six Keywords, (2) Highlights, (3) Introduction, (4) Methods, (5) Results, (6) Discussion, (7) Conclusion, (8) Acknowledgements, (9) Funding, (10) Declaration of interest, (11) References, (12) Figures with legends, (13) Tables with legends and (14) Appendices. The Abstract should be divided into the following sections 'Aims', 'Methods and results' and 'Conclusions'; it should not exceed 250 words.
Reviews
IJESPORTS publishes both short and comprehensive review papers. Reviews have unstructured
abstracts with no headings, which should not exceed 250 words. Review articles should not exceed
5000 words (excluding abstract, references, tables and figures), and may include up to 120 references.
All reviews should summarise and critically evaluate research in the subject area, and should discuss
implications for the future.
Perspectives
All perspectives should be limited to 1500 words (excluding abstract, references), with a maximum of 10
references. The abstract should not exceed 150 words.
Letters to the Editor & Response to the Journal Article
IJESPORTS does consider relevant correspondence which should not exceed 400 words in length
excluding references. A maximum of 10 references are permitted.
Registered Report
All registered reports should be limited to 3000 words (excluding abstract, tables, figures and references).
A maximum of 60 references are permitted.
A simple guide to the article types and FAQ section can be accessed here
2.2. Manuscript Format and Structure
General Format
Manuscript articles are accepted in .rtf or .word formats. Please avoid footnotes and notes within brackets.
Check the final copy of your paper carefully as any spelling mistakes and errors may appear in the final version.
Spelling
IJESPORTS recommends Oxford English or American English spelling. Authors whose first
language is not English are requested to have their manuscripts checked carefully by a native English
speaker before submission.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations of standard SI units of measurement only should be used.
Ethics
Authors should confirm their study has been favourably reviewed by locally approved committees,
that the study complies with the Declaration of Helsinki
and that informed consent has been obtained from the subjects or their guardians.
IJESPORTS bases animal ethics on ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments)
Guidelines to review manuscripts of research involving animals. The studies should be appropriately
designed, analysed and reported. A minimum amount of relevant information must be included in manuscripts
published in this journal to ensure that the methods and results of a study can be reviewed, analysed and repeated.
Cover Letter for & Declarations on ethical publishing
All authors wishing to publish in IJESPORTS are encouraged to state in the article’s cover
letter that they have adhered to the journal’s ethics policies by
stating “The authors of this manuscript comply with the ethics policies of IJESPORT as stated in the Author Guidelines”.
2.3. Parts of the Manuscript
Abstract and Keywords
All original research article abstracts may not contain more than 250 words and should be submitted within the manuscript document. The abstract should be structured with the following sections: (1) Aims, (2) Methods and Results, (3) Conclusions.
A maximum of six keywords may be submitted.
Introduction
This is the opening section that should provide relevant background and reasoning for conducting the research work.
Methods
This section should be written clearly with enough explanation for other researchers to duplicate the work if needed.
This section should confirm that the study complies with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by local ethics committees. Additionally, a statement is required around participants or guardians giving informed consent to take part in the study.
If statistical analysis is used, the software package and statistical methods with level of significance used must be mentioned.
Results
Figures are preferred over tables to represent results. Importantly, results should not be at any point. SI units should be used throughout.
Figures
All graphs, photographs and illustrations are classified as figures. Figures must be of sufficiently high quality to allow for publication.
IJESPORTS supports the following image file formats: JPG, BMP, TIF, PNG, PPT and PDF.
Figure & Table Legends
These should below the figure or table and in an editable format within the manuscript rather than embedded into the image (or scanned in).
All symbols and abbreviations must be defined; however abbreviations already mentioned earlier in the manuscript are not required to be redefined here.
Tables
Tables must be submitted in an editable format such as Word or Excel rather than as an image file or figure.
Copyright
If figures or tables have been copied from any other previously published work then permission must be
obtained from usually the publisher (in cases the author as well) of the work with a statement crediting
the source placed in the figure legend. If text is duplicated from a published source then it is important
to reference this in the bibliography unless the material is greater than 250 words at which point written
permission is required from both the publisher and author. In these cases you must attach the letter
confirming that permission has been received as a supplementary file.
If permission has not been obtained then this must be stated within the submission.
You must confirm in the submission if all content is original.
Discussion
This section should primarily remain relevant to the results and presented succinctly with
limitations to the study included. Discussion is encouraged around the potential impact or future
perspective in the context of the associated topic.
Conclusion
A short paragraph summarising the key findings of the article. This section should not include references.
Acknowledgements
Major contributions by individuals who have not been given or quality for authorship status must be noted in this section
Funding
Funding details should be presented clearly without omission. We recommend the following structure:
This work was supported by A, Grant number(s) B for author C
A - Official funding organisation name (avoid use of abbreviations)
B - Grant number(s) given to funding
C - The author initials for which the funding was given
An example is below:
This work was supported by the National Institute for Health Research, Grant number DH0135464 for author AL.
Conflicts of Interest
All authors must make a formal statement during the submission process constituting a declaration of any
conflicts of interest that must include all relevant relationship with organisations and agencies.
Declarations include receiving consultancy fees, owning shares and receiving a grant from a company.
Indeed, any association that may be seen as an issue for any authors at publication should be included.
If there is no relevant interest to declare then indicate this by stating, “The authors confirm that there are no conflicts of interest to declare.”
References in IJESPORTS
IJESPORTS recommend using EndNote for reference management and formatting. Endnote reference styles can be searched at: https://www.endnote.com/support/enstyles.asp
References should be placed in the text with Arabic numerals and numbered in the same order that they are cited in.
A bibliography or list of references should be placed at the end of the article in Vancouver style.
This includes the title, abbreviated journal title and page number for each article.
Abbreviated journal titles can be found in Index Medicus, if the journal is not listed here
then it must be cited with the full name. Authors may cite unpublished data if permission has been
received from the owners of the data.
We recommend Vancouver or APA reference style for submission with IJESPORTS.
Below are examples of appropriate citation:
Article Citation
Vinyals O, Babuschkin I, Czarnecki WM, Mathieu M, Dudzik A, Chung J, et al. Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning. Nature. 2019;575(7782):350-4
Book Citation
Yi R. Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports. 1st ed. New York, USA: Skyhorse Publishing; 2016
Website Citation
Fives B. BUSINESS ESPORTS ONLINE FIFA TOURNAMENT RULES 2018 [07/04/2020]. Available from: https://www.businessfives.co.uk/online-fifa-tournament-rules/.
where the date in square brackets or parentheses refers to the access date.
Supporting Information
Supporting material can be submitted with the manuscript. This will be reviewed by the editors and
reviewers which may at times be discarded if not adding sufficient value to the manuscript.
SUBMISSION PROCESS
International Journal of Esports uses a tailor-made web-based submission and review system based on
Open Journal Systems.
This can be accessed directly through https://ems.ijesports.org/index.php/ijesports/submissions
Authors may contact the editors or send queries to editor@ijesports.org
Users must first create an account which is available as a “register” below the login screen. The system will send a reminder email containing the username and password on successful registration. Once logged in, the manuscript details can be submitted along with the relevant files. Following initial quality check, the manuscript will undergo review with feedback given to authors regarding publication.
Articles will be routinely reviewed for plagiarism with queries first made to the authors if any issues do arise.
Authors are required to pay a publishing fee of $250 if the article is deemed appropriate for publication following blinded peer review. Waivers are considered for authors with demonstratable needs or for submissions from students.
Open Access Agreements
During submission, the corresponding author will be required to confirm the Creative Commons License Open Access Agreements on behalf of all the authors. IJESPORTS is an open access journal with an interest in maximal readership thus gives CC BY licence to all articles published with us. More information regarding licenses can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.
4. Submission Requirements
Each submission must include a conflict of interest statement as described earlier. All research and review articles must include a highlight section.
POST-SUBMISSION
5. Author Services
Our editorial manager enables tracking of the article through the review process with email notification
on an update of status whether it be approved for publication, revisions required or rejection of the article.
Repository policy
Authors are entitled to make their article available in various repositories as per the CC BY license. If the article is re-used, distributed or archived, IJESPORTS must be attributed as the original publisher with the original publication cited. Authors are free to archive the article and upload them into institutional repositories without embargo. Authors publishing with IJESPORTS can deposit the article in any archive that meets suitable archiving ant citation standards. The article can be submitted in multiple forms:
Author’s original manuscript – This is the manuscript that was submitted to the journal. This manuscript can be shared as desired.
Accepted manuscript – This is the manuscript that has been accepted by the journal following peer review and can be shared at any point by the authors. This article must include the text “This article has been accepted for publication in IJESPORTS. [Manuscript Number].”
Published version – This is the final version of the article following review and copy editing. Authors are allowed to share the article on any non-commercial websites and repositories. This article must include the text “This is an accepted manuscript of an article published in IJESPORTS on [date of publication], available at [URL].”
OTHER INFORMATION
6. Contact the Editorial Office
Editor, Email: editor@ijesports.org