Author Guidelines

Before submitting for publication, please check that your manuscript has been prepared in accordance to the step-by-step instructions for submitting a manuscript to our online submission system.

Manuscript Format

Your manuscript should be in MS Word format. You are advised to download the template when preparing your submissions to this journal. All manuscripts must be written in clear, comprehensible English. Both British and American English are accepted. Usage of non-English words should be kept to a minimum and all must be italicized, with the exception of “e.g.” and “i.e.” If you have concerns about the level of English in your submission, please ensure that it is proofread before submission by a native English speaker or a scientific editing service.

Types of Submission

Forum for Linguistic Studies accepts original articles, review articles, editorials, book reviews, letters, commentaries, perspectives, reports, etc. Please read this section further for the definition of each type and select the appropriate option in the submission system. Submissions exceeding the suggested requirements, such as total manuscript length, will still be processed for consideration and peer review. However, article processing charges will differ in exceptional cases (e.g. a raw text file exceeding 2MB, etc.) The article processing charge will be determined according to the manuscript type.

Original articles: Scientific articles based on research findings or analysis. This manuscript type typically has a minimum of 20 references, 4000 words (inclusive of reference list and abstract).

Review articles: A summary highlighting recent developments and current/future trends of the field. This manuscript type typically has a minimum of 30 references, 5000 words (inclusive of reference list and abstract).

Editorials: Solicited concise commentary highlighting prominent topics in the Journal’s issue. These are the official opinions of the editors of the journal or its special issue. Editorials will be published in both online and printed versions of the journal. This manuscript type typically has 3,500 words.

Book Reviews: Book reviews can be a review of a single book (800-1200 words) or an essay on multiple books on the same subject or multiple books from the same author (3,000 words).

Letters to the Editor-in-Chief/authorship (please specify): Comments from reader(s) about individual articles. These letters must be constructive and contribute to the development of individual articles published or the entire journal. Letters containing new ideas, supporting data, or data criticizing an article may be subjected to peer-review (determined on a case-by-case basis by the journal’s editorial team) and published in the online publication but not in the printed version. This manuscript type typically has 1,800 words (exclusive of a reference list).

Commentaries: Unsolicited commentaries or analysis from reader(s) targeting specific published articles in the journal. Commentaries will be subjected to peer-review and may be published in both online and printed versions of the journal. This manuscript type typically has 3,500 words.

Reports: Documents that summarize the execution and results of cases involving linguistic studies. Submissions will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and are usually solicited by the editors.

Cover Letter

All submissions should include a cover letter as a separate file and upload it as a supplementary file. A cover letter must include a brief explanation of what was previously known, the conceptual advancement with the findings and its significance to broad readership. The cover letter is confidential and will be read only by the editors. It will not be seen by reviewers.

Title Page and List of Authors

A separate file that contains the title of the manuscript and the list of all authors should be uploaded as a supplementary file. The names of authors must be spelled out rather than set in initials along with their affiliations. Authors should be listed according to the extent of their contribution, with the major contributor listed first. All corresponding authors should be identified with an asterisk. Affiliations should contain the following core information: department, institution, city, state, postal code, and country. For contact purposes, email address of at least one corresponding author must be included. Please note that all authors must view and approve the final version of the manuscript before submitting. The file should be uploaded separately as the main text. Title page should be separated from the main manuscript. 

Main Manuscript

The main body of a manuscript should include the title of the manuscript and following components: Abstract, Introduction, Data and Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Conflict of Interest and References.

Abstract

Articles must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words. The purpose of abstract is to provide sufficient information for readers to determine whether or not to proceed to the full text of the article. Authors are required to provide a maximum of 8 keywords; please avoid using the same words as those already used in the title.

Section Headings

Number the section headings (e.g. 1., 2., 3., 4., etc.) in boldface. Likewise, use boldface to identify subheadings too but distinguish it from major headings using numbers (e.g. 1.1., 1.2., 2.1., 2.2., etc.) The first word of Sub-subheading should be capitalized(e.g. 1.1.1., 1.2.1., 2.1.1., 2.2.1., etc.). Further subsections of subheadings should be differentiated by boldface font with the numbers (1), (2), (3), etc.

Introduction

The introduction should provide a background that gives a broad readership an overall outlook of the field and the research performed. It identifies research problems and highlights the importance of the study. Introduction should end with a brief statement about the aim of the study conducted.

Data and Methods

This section provides a brief description on the method followed. The aim is to provide enough detail to for other investigators to fully replicate the results. It is also required to facilitate better understanding of the results obtained. Protocols and procedures for new methods must be included in detail for the reproducibility of the experiments. Informed consent should be obtained from patients or parents prior to commencement of the study and should be mentioned in this section.

Results

This section of manuscript focuses on the results from the analyses.

Discussion

This section should provide the significance of the results and identify the impact of the research in a broader context. It should not be redundant or similar to the content of the results section.

Conclusions

Please use the conclusion section for interpretation only, and not to summarize information already presented in the text or abstract.

Author contributions (more than one author)

For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. The following statements should be used “Conceptualization, XX and YY; methodology, XX; software, XX; validation, XX, YY and ZZ; formal analysis, XX; investigation, XX; resources, XX; data curation, XX; writing—original draft preparation, XX; writing—review and editing, XX; visualization, XX; supervision, XX; project administration, XX; funding acquisition, YY. 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 reported.

Fundings (optional)

This section is not mandatory. If your research has received any external funding, you could claim that “This research was funded by NAME OF FUNDER, grant number XXX” and “The APC was funded by XXX”. Check carefully that the details given are accurate and use the standard spelling of funding agency names at https://search.crossref.org/funding. Any errors may affect your future funding.

Acknowledgments (optional)

Here, 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).

Conflict of Interest

All authors are required to declare all matters that have the potential to be deemed as a source of competing interest in relations to their submitted manuscript. Examples of such activities could include personal or work-related relationships, events, etc. Authors who have nothing to declare are encouraged to add "The authors declare no conflict of interest." in this section.

Appendix

This section is optional and is for all materials (e.g. advanced technical details) that has been excluded from the main text but remain essential to the readers in understanding the manuscripts. This section is not for supplementary figures. Authors are advised to refer to the section on Supplementary Figures for such submissions. 

Text

The text of the manuscript should be in Microsoft Word or Latex. The length of the manuscript cannot be more than 50,000 characters (inclusive of spaces), or approximately 7,000 words.

Figures

Authors should include all figures into the manuscript and submit it as one file. Figures include photographs, scanned images, graphs, charts and schematic diagrams. Figures submitted should avoid unnecessary decorative effects (e.g. 3D graphs), as well as should be minimally processed (e.g. changes in brightness and contrast applied uniformly for the entire figure). It should also be set against a white background. Please remember to label all figures (e.g. axis, etc.) and add captions below the figure, as required. These captions should be numbered (e.g. Figure 1., Figure 2., etc.) in boldface. All figures must have a brief title (also known as caption) that describes the entire figure without citing specific panels, followed by a legend, defined as description of each panel. Please identify each panel with uppercase letters in parenthesis (e.g. (a), (b), (c), etc.)

The preferred file formats for any separately submitted figure(s) are PNG or JPEG. All figures should be legible in print form and of optimal resolution. Optimal resolutions preferred are 300 dots per inch (dpi) for RBG coloured, 600 dpi for greyscale and 1,200 dpi for line art. Although there are no file-size limitation imposed, authors are highly encouraged to compress their figures to an ideal size without unduly affecting the legibility and resolution of figures. This will also speed up the process of uploading in the submission system, if necessary.

The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher reserve the right to request from author(s) the high-resolution files and unprocessed data and metadata files, should the need arise at any point after manuscript submission for reasons such as production, evaluation or other purposes. The file name should allow for ease in identifying the associated manuscript submitted.

Tables, Lists and Equations

Tables created using the Microsoft Word table function are preferred. The tables should be numbered (e.g., Table 1., Table 2., etc.) and should include a title at the top. Titles and footnotes/legends should be concise. These must be submitted together with the manuscript. Likewise, lists and equations should be properly aligned and their meaning clear to readers. 

Supplementary Information

This section is optional and contains all materials and figures that have been excluded from the entire manuscript. This information is relevant to the manuscript but remains non-essential to readers’ understanding of the manuscript’s main content. All supplementary information should be submitted as a separate file in Step 4 during submission. Please ensure the names of such files contain "suppl. info". Video files could include in this section.

In-text citations 

In-text citations should follow author-date style in which the author’s surname and the year published are included in the text. If the reference has no known year of publication, use "n.d." (without the quotation marks). The citation style depends on the number of authors for the reference.

Examples:

One author 

Niemi (2011) illustrated some scenarios to prove this. The theory governs civil society (Niemi, 2011) and social behaviour. In 2011 Niemi described the theory in detail.

Two authors

Always use both names. Examples:

Chandler and Tsai (2001) analyzed data from several reports. This theory was further supported by Chandler and Tsai (2001). In 2001 Chandra and Tsai proposed a possible mitigation measure. The method is proved to be valid in the literature (Chandler and Tsai, 2001).

Three or more authors

Use all three last names with "and" before the last author's name if there are only three authors; and use all three last names followed by et al. and the year if there are four or more authors. Examples: This was further emphasized and subsequently widely accepted (Dickson, Andersen, and Thompson, 2014; Gates et al., 2016).

Personal communications and unpublished works can only be used in the main text of the submission and are not to be placed in the Reference section. Authors are advised to limit such usage to the minimum. They should also be easily identifiable by stating the authors and year of such unpublished works or personal communications and the word ‘Unpublished’ in parenthesis.

E.g. (Smith J, 2000, Unpublished)

References

This section is compulsory and should be placed at the end of all manuscripts. The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. 

The references in reference list should be arranged in alphabetical order of the first author’s surname. Authors referenced should be listed with their surname followed by their initials. All references should also appear as an in-text citation. References should follow the following pattern: Author(s) followed by year of publication, title of publication, full journal name in italics, volume number, issue number in parenthesis and lastly, page range. If the referred article has more than three authors, list only the first three authors and abbreviate the remaining authors to "et al." (meaning: "and others"). If the DOI is available, please include it after the page range.

Journal Articles 
Journal article with one to three authors 
Younger P (2004). Using the internet to conduct a literature search. Nursing Standard 19(6): 45–51. DOI: 10.7748/ns2004.10.19.6.45.c3728.

 Jackson D, Firtko A, and Edenborough M (2007). Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: A literature review. Journal of Advanced Nursing 60(1): 1–9. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2007.04412.x.

Obisesan TO and Gillum RF (2009). Cognitive function, social integration and mortality in a U.S. national cohort study of older adults. BMC Geriatrics 9:33. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2318-9-33.

Journal article with more than three authors 
Gamelin FX, Baquet G, Berthoin S, et al. (2009). Effect of high intensity intermittent training on heart rate variability in prepubescent children. European Journal of Applied Physiology 105: 731–738. DOI: 10.1007/s00421-008-0955-8.

Book 

Book with one to three authors 
Schneider Z, Whitehead D, and Elliott D (2007). Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence-based Practice  (3^rd ed.). Marrickville, NSW: Elsevier Australia.

Book with more than three authors 
Davis M, Charles L, Curry MJ, et al. (2003). Challenging Spatial Norms. London: Routledge.

Chapter or Article in Book 
Conway KM (2014). Critical quantitative study of immigrant students. In: FK Stage and RS Wells (eds) New Scholarship in Critical Quantitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp.51–64.

Others

Reports and conference papers:

MacDonald S (2008). The state of social welfare in the UK. Report, University of Durham, UK, June.

DiPrete TA, Bol T, Coicca C, et al. (2015). School-to-Work Linkages in the United States, Germany and France. In: The 2015 annaul meeting of the Population Association of America，San Diego, CA. 30 April—2 May 2015. Available at： http://paa2015.princeton.edu/papers/150302 （accessed on 19 July 2016).

Online document with author names:

Este J, Warren C, Connor L, et al. (2008). Life in the clickstream: The future of journalism. Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance. Available at: http://www.alliance.org.au/documents/ foj_report_final.pdf (accessed on 27 May 2009).

Thesis/Dissertation:

Gale L (2000). The relationship between leadership and employee empowerment for successful total quality management. Thesis, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Standards:

ISO 27799:2008 (2008). Information security management in health.

Government report:

Citigroup Ltd. (2011). How to make your money work for you. Report for the Department of Finance. Report no. 123345, 13 June. Oxford: OUP.

Legislation:

Digital Economy Act 2017 [Internet]. 2017 Apr 27 [cited 2021 Jan 13] (Great Britain). Available from: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/30/introduction/enacted.

Note: When referencing an entry from a dictionary or an encyclopedia with no author there is no requirement to include the source in the reference list. In these cases, only cite the title and year of the source in-text. For an authored dictionary/encyclopedia, treat the source as an authored book.