Publication of any articles/ manuscript in FCS journals requires strict conformance to the paper template. However, initial submission of an article or manuscript for review need not be compliant with the template. Once the paper is selected, the authors will be asked to submit the camera-ready paper. The camera-ready paper is the final version of the article/ manuscript that will be published in the FCS journals' Digital Library. While submitting the camera-ready, the authors must take extreme care so that the paper strictly conform with the prescribed template of FCS journals.

Additional Considerations

Language

Badly written papers tend to loose their scientific credibility almost instantly. For this reason, the authors who are not used to write in English should make sure their papers are revised by knowledgeable English writers.

Grammar and Punctuation

If you are a scientist or historian, nobody expects you to have the command and range of language that a language student will, or possess perfect grammar and punctuation.

In fact, this is no problem, because you must strive for maximum clarity and readability rather than win a Pulitzer Prize.

  • Use the correct sentence length. Too long, and people will think that your paper is tortuous and message will be lost. Too short, and it looks unprofessional.
  • When you do the spell check at the end of the paper, it brings up a box telling you the average sentence length.
  • Whilst you should be wary of slavishly adhering to numbers, 15 – 20 words per sentence is about right. If you find that you are writing 40 – 50 word ‘run on’ sentences, look for somewhere to break it into two or three shorter sentences. You may be able to cut out a few unnecessary words, too.
  • You need to be able to use commas, full stops and capitalization correctly.
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Relevance

Your paper must be clearly relevant to the audience of the journal or conference where you intend to publish it. Otherwise, you are likely to have it rejected by the reviewers.

Rigor

There is no room in a research paper for unsupported expressions of belief. Every single claim of your paper must be fully supported by empirical or analytical evidence, or by the authority of a reputable source. Any source you refer to must be mentioned in the text and included in your reference list. You should avoid by all means the use of sources (namely those found on the Internet) whose scientific reputation is unknown.

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Self-referencing

Authors should avoid unnecessarily referencing themselves. A paper is a humble, hopefully solid, contribution to the progress of human knowledge in a given field, usually inspired by the contributions of many other authors. It should not be seen as fanfare of the author’s past achievements or as a stage where the spotlights are turned to the author in detriment of the credits due to other, earlier, authors. Of course, if some of the author’s former work is essential to understand the paper, it should by all means be referred to, but this should be done with discretion and elegance.