Author Guidelines

Research and Change is open to submissions at any time – in response to biannual calls or outside of calls. All submitted manuscripts should strictly follow the specifications below.

Research and Change receives a large amount of articles outside of calls and you should therefore expect a period of up to three months (longer if your article is submitted just before the summer holiday) before you receive a decision on whether your article is rejected or accepted for review. 

Preparing for submission of a peer-reviewed article

Research and Change considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:

  • A manuscript submitted to the journal does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own.
  • The manuscript should not be under consideration elsewhere.
  • Regular articles should not exceed 8 000 words, including notes, references, abstract and acknowledgements. Manuscripts that greatly exceed this will be reviewed critically with respect to length.

Authorship

Please note that the submitting author will be the principal contact for editorial correspondence throughout the peer-review and proofreading processes, if applicable.

A contributor should be listed as author only if complying to the criteria listed by the Vancouver recommendations: https://www.etikkom.no/en/library/practical-information/legal-statutes-and-guidelines/the-vancouver-recommendations/

Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged, for example in a note. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

Manuscripts generated through the use of ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs), generative AI, or chatbots do not satisfy the journal's criteria for authorship, and AI tools cannot be listed as an author. Manuscripts must be written by persons who can account for and claim responsibility for the originality and integrity of the content. Furthermore, authors must disclose the extent to which any AI tools may have been used in preparation of written, visual or graphic elements of their manuscripts. The publisher ascribes to COPE's position statement regarding authorship and AI tools; see more information here.

Plagiarism Detection

NOASP – Cappelen Damm Akademisk uses iThenticate to screen all submissions for plagiarism before publication. iThenticate is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. iThenticate checks submissions against millions of published research papers, and billions of pages of web content. The reports generated from iThenticate are evaluated by the editor-in-chief or a qualified subject editor.

Editors and staff are required to report any case of suspected plagiarism to NOASP. The publisher and editor-in-chief determine the steps to be taken in case of suspected plagiarism.

Ensuring anonymity

When submitting to the journal, the identity of the authors must not be revealed in the manuscript text, as this journal adheres to a 'double blind' review process.

To ensure anonymity, the name(s) of the author(s) must be deleted from the manuscript’s text and file properties, and the submitting author must upload a separate file with a title page that includes author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s). Please follow these instructions:

  1. The title page must be uploaded separately from the manuscript, as an additional file, during the submission process.
  2. Check that the text of your manuscript is also blinded; that is to say, any references within the manuscript which might reveal you to be the author are removed. This means that there should only be few (if any) references to your own publications (in the text as well as in the reference list).
  3. If you as an author are very easily recognizable based on the project you are describing, the project should also be anonymized.
  4. Author identification must also be removed from the properties for the file. Instructions for deleting names from file properties in Word can be found here: Support Microsoft Office.

If you have any questions regarding anonymization of your manuscript, contact the editors.

Language

All articles should be written in one of the Scandinavian languages or in British English. Please subject the manuscript to professional language editing before submitting the final version.

Content

When assessing the article, reviewers will be asked to provide a general evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript:  

  1. The originality of the manuscript.
  2. The logical coherence, structure, legibility and length of the manuscript.
  3. The current interest, value and relevance, e.g. does the manuscript advance new knowledge?
  4. Whether the issues addressed are discussed and analyzed in a proper way, and whether the conclusions are supported by the sources and data presented in the manuscript.
  5. Whether the use of sources is conscientious and methodologically acceptable.
  6. Whether the references are satisfactory and in accordance with the journal’s editorial guidelines.
  7. Is the manuscript otherwise of sufficient quality to be published as a peer-reviewed academic article?

In addition, reviewers and editors will assess the quality of the contribution based on the following quality criteria:

Practical relevance: Does the article present research demonstrating explicit theoretical, methodological or empirical reflection, which is relevant to practice and which contributes new knowledge about what the value, relevance or importance of research actually is, should be, or may become in terms of the development or renewal of practice?

Forms of cooperation: Are actual or potential instances of collaboration between research and practice presented and analysed as part of the research – or as relevant and reflective activities related to it? Are the role of research and its potential importance for actual cooperation with practice sufficiently clear and reflectively argued?

With a view to change: Does the article clearly state the contribution or significance of the research presented to progress, renewal or learning in the professions, or in related social, cultural, organisational or societal fields? Does the article pass on essential approaches or contributions to solving or ameliorating problems or unacceptable conditions found in practice?

Theoretical and methodological perspectives: Does the article contribute to the theoretical, scientific or methodological development or investigation of the interaction between research, education and practice? Can the research presented enrich, or present new angles on, such interaction, above and beyond the scope of the research itself?

Abstract

Articles must include an abstract of 150–200 words. After the abstract, please give 3-5 keywords; avoid using the same words as in the title. An identical abstract and keywords should also be entered as metadata during the submission process.

Articles in the Scandinavian languages should have a supplementary abstract and keywords in English, as well as an English title. The English versions should also be entered as metadata during the submission process.

Title page

When submitting to the journal, the title page revealing the identity of the authors must be uploaded separately as an additional file during the submission process.

Organize the title page in the following way:

  1. title of manuscript
  2. name of author(s)
  3. name of department(s) and institution(s)
  4. email addresses of all authors (listed by authors' initials)
  5. name and full postal and email address of the corresponding author who also acts as 'Guarantor' for all parts of the paper
  6. author biographies (three to five lines of text) for each author

Manuscript layout

Please follow a traditional layout and insert running page numbers, footnotes, etc. To facilitate the review process, please provide a complete manuscript, preferably a Word-file including all figures/tables/graphics/images placed in their correct places within the text.

Section headings

Please do not number section headings. Use a maximum of three levels of headings made clear by orthographic indicators, i.e. capitals, bold etc.

Format

Use Times New Roman, point 12 and double spacing throughout your manuscript, including indented quotations. Do not use any unnecessary formatting features (justification, hyphenation). Use one space between words. Use one tab stop in the beginning of a paragraph, except after headings and indented quotations. Do not use a blank line between paragraphs. Use a blank line before and after headings and indented quotations. Do not use quotation marks for indented quotations.

Quotations

Use double quotation marks; if there is a quotation within quotation, use single quotes. When quoting from existing texts in languages that are widely understood use the original text, and provide, if necessary, an existing translation into your own language in the endnote. If the work is not translated, provide your own translation, making a note of this (e.g. Gramsci, 1947, p. 13; my translation).

Italics

Use italics for whole works (books, journals, newspapers). Use double quotes for parts of a work.

Figures/tables/graphics/images

Please place suggested figures/tables/graphics/images in their correct places within the text. They should be referred to in the manuscript text, and abbreviations should be explained in the legends.

Upon acceptance, please supply figures/tables/graphics/images in at least 300 dpi.

If the figures/tables/graphics/images have been taken from sources not copyrighted by the author, it is the author's sole responsibility to secure the rights from the copyright holder to reproduce those figures/tables/ graphics/images for both worldwide print and web publication. All reproduction costs charged by the copyright holder must be borne by the author.

When figures/tables/graphics/images are reproduced, a parenthesis should be added to the legend thus: (Reproduced with permission from xxx.)

References system

For all citations, please follow the APA 7 standard:

Notes

Please insert footnotes or endnotes using the automatic function in Word (or other text-editing program). Please also avoid an excessive use of notes.

Supplementary material

Note that all material considered part of the article, such as figures, tables, graphics or images – and their legends – must be included in the manuscript.

Authors can upload supplementary material, such as data sets, protocols, videos, interactive files, etc. Supplementary material is not considered part of the article’s content. If accepted for publication, files for such material will be published unchanged and in their original format, separate from the article.

Manuscript checklist

  1. Formatting of elements in the text (for example heading styles, citations, etc.) has been done consistently throughout the manuscript.
  2. References are in accordance with journal style.
  3. URLs to online references are provided and ready to click (e.g. http://www.cappelendamm.no).
  4. All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa.
  5. All figures/tables/graphics/images are placed in their correct position within the manuscript and are referred to in the text.
  6. Abbreviations in figures/tables/graphics/images are explained in the corresponding legends.
  7. The text has not been justified; a ragged right-hand margin has been used.
  8. Only one space has been entered after the full-stop at the end of a sentence.
  9. A double hyphen (--) has been used to indicate a dash in the text if the dash is not available in your text editor. TAB has been used when indenting paragraphs or separating columns in tables.
  10. Italics or ‘single quotes’ have been used for emphasis (avoid using underlines).

Uploading of articles

Articles should be uploaded to the Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing platform