Instructions for authors

COVID-19 impact on peer review
As a result of the significant disruption that is being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we understand that many authors and peer reviewers will be making adjustments to their professional and personal lives. As a result they may have difficulty in meeting the timelines associated with our peer review process. Please let the journal editorial office know if you need additional time. Our systems will continue to remind you of the original timelines but we intend to be flexible.

Thank you for choosing to submit your paper to us. These instructions will ensure we have everything required so your paper can move through peer review, production and publication smoothly. Please take the time to read and follow them as closely as possible, as doing so will ensure your paper matches the journal’s requirements.


For general guidance on every stage of the publication process, please visit our Author Services website.


For editing support, including translation and language polishing, explore our Editing Services website.


This journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts (previously Manuscript Central) to peer review manuscript submissions. Please read the guide for ScholarOne authors before making a submission. Complete guidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to this journal are provided below.

Contents

About the Journal

Scientific Studies of Reading is an international, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality, original research. Please see the journal's Aims & Scope for information about its focus and peer-review policy.

Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English.

Scientific Studies of Reading accepts the following types of article: Empirical studies presented as Research Articles, Research Reports, and Registered Reports. Occasionally, scholarly reviews of the literature, manuscripts focused on theory development, and discussions of social policy issues will also be considered for publication. Please contact the editor prior to submitting such papers.

Peer Review and Ethics

Taylor & Francis is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the editor, it will then be double blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. Find out more about what to expect during peer review and read our guidance on publishing ethics.

Preparing Your Paper

Structure

Your paper should be compiled in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list).

Style Guidelines

Please refer to these quick style guidelines when preparing your paper, rather than any published articles or a sample copy.

Please use American spelling style consistently throughout your manuscript.

Please use double quotation marks, except where “a quotation is ‘within’ a quotation”. Please note that long quotations should be indented without quotation marks.

Formatting and Templates

Papers may be submitted in Word format. Figures should be saved separately from the text. To assist you in preparing your paper, we provide formatting template(s).

Word templates are available for this journal. Please save the template to your hard drive, ready for use.

If you are not able to use the template via the links (or if you have any other template queries) please contact us here.

Research Articles (max 8000 words, not including the abstract, references, tables, or footnotes; references no longer than 10 pages of the manuscript) present new data, new methods, or both. They must include a review of relevant literature and a clear and self-contained presentation of methods and data followed by a discussion. Research Articles must be written to be understandable to a readership with experience in reading research. Detailed descriptions of data analysis methods are warranted only when they are novel or unusually complex. Both the theoretical and practical significance of the findings, as well as limitations of the study, should be discussed.

Research Reports (max 3000 words, not including the abstract and references) present new data that relate to an existing question in reading research. The literature review is expected to be focused and end with clear research questions. Presentation of methods and data must be clear and self-contained, and the discussion of the findings should be limited to their immediate significance and limitations of the study. Research Reports will generally be published more quickly than other manuscripts.

Registered Reports (max 6000 words for full manuscript, not including the abstract and references) are reviewed over two stages. Reviewers initially consider a detailed study protocol before the research is undertaken, assessing the importance of the research question for current theory or applications, the strength of the scientific rationale, and rigour of the proposed methodology. Following revision, the highest quality protocols are awarded in principle acceptance (IPA), which commits the journal to publishing the final paper provided the authors adhere to their protocol, that the work is performed to a high standard, and that the conclusions are supported by the evidence. The paper is published at the end of this process as a complete article that integrates the approved protocol and outcomes.

Registered Reports advance existing processes in three important ways: (1) pre-study peer review ensures that protocols are sufficiently well specified to be reproducible while also providing the opportunity for reviewers to correct serious errors before they happen. (2), in principle acceptance before results are known helps to prevent publication bias. (3) because the protocol is embedded unchanged in the final publication, and typically re-reviewed by the same reviewers, the format is immune to various forms of selective reporting by authors.

To ensure that your work is continuous with that previously published in the Journal, we encourage you to review articles that have been published in the Journal in the area you are addressing and, where you feel appropriate, to reference them.

Please also note the following:

Authors must use bias-free language in their articles as specified in the “Reducing Bias in Language” in the APA Manual (7th ed.). Authors should make every effort to see that the manuscript itself contains no clues to their identities. Masking of citations to your own work does not facilitate evaluation by reviewers and typically serves to identify the authors of the manuscript. Instead, please include full citations to all work, but do not refer to these in the first person (I, my, we, our) when referring to work conducted by the author(s). Instead, use phrasing such as “Jones et al. (2010) reported that….”.

Adequate description of participants and measures is critical to the scientific study of reading. Always report both grades and ages of participants, as well as the language spoken by participants, and always provide sufficient details of standardised tests so that readers can evaluate their validity.

Ethical principles of research. In the cover letter, authors should state that the findings reported in the manuscript are original and have not been published previously, and that the manuscript is not being simultaneously submitted elsewhere. Authors should also state that they have complied with American Psychological Association ethical standards in the treatment of their samples. The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on their website in HTML and PDF.

Ethics Statement. For manuscripts reporting studies that involve human participants, a statement identifying the ethics committee that approved the study and confirmation that the study conforms to recognized standards must be included in the manuscript, for example: Declaration of Helsinki; US Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects; or European Medicines Agency Guidelines for Good Clinical Practice.

It should also state clearly in the text that all participants (or their legal guardians) gave their informed consent and children gave their assent prior to their inclusion in the study.

References

Please use this reference guide when preparing your paper.

Taylor & Francis Editing Services

To help you improve your manuscript and prepare it for submission, Taylor & Francis provides a range of editing services. Choose from options such as English Language Editing, which will ensure that your article is free of spelling and grammar errors, Translation, and Artwork Preparation. For more information, including pricing, visit this website.

Checklist: What to Include

1. Author details. All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript. Where available, please also include ORCiDs and social media handles (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn). One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after your paper is accepted. Read more on authorship.

2. Should contain a structured abstract with information on the following four headings: Purpose, method, results, and conclusion (max 200 words).

3. You can opt to include a video abstract with your article. Find out how these can help your work reach a wider audience, and what to think about when filming.

4. Do not include keywords. Read making your article more discoverable, including information on choosing a title and search engine optimization.

5. Funding details. Please supply all details required by your funding and grant-awarding bodies as follows:
For single agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].
For multiple agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency <] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency >] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency &] under Grant [number xxxx].

6. Disclosure statement. This is to acknowledge any financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of your research. Further guidance on what is a conflict of interest and how to disclose it. If there is no conflict of interest, this should be stated clearly in the manuscript.

7. Data availability statement. If there is a data set associated with the paper, please provide information about where the data supporting the results or analyses presented in the paper can be found. Where applicable, this should include the hyperlink, DOI or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). Templates are also available to support authors.

8. Data deposition. If you choose to share or make the data underlying the study open, please deposit your data in a recognized data repository prior to or at the time of submission. You will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-reserved DOI, or other persistent identifier for the data set.

9. Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, dataset, fileset, sound file or anything which supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. We publish supplemental material online via Figshare. Find out more about supplemental material and how to submit it with your article.

10. Figures. Figures should be high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour, at the correct size). Figures should be supplied in one of our preferred file formats: EPS, PS, JPEG, TIFF, or Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) files are acceptable for figures that have been drawn in Word. For information relating to other file types, please consult our Submission of electronic artwork document.

11. Tables. Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Please supply editable files.

12. Equations. If you are submitting your manuscript as a Word document, please ensure that equations are editable. More information about mathematical symbols and equations.

13. Units. Please use SI units (non-italicized).

Using Third-Party Material in your Paper

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. More information on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.

Submitting Your Paper

This journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts to manage the peer-review process. If you haven't submitted a paper to this journal before, you will need to create an account in ScholarOne. Please read the guidelines above and then submit your paper in the relevant Author Centre, where you will find user guides and a helpdesk.

Please note that Scientific Studies of Reading uses Crossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to Scientific Studies of Reading you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.

On acceptance, we recommend that you keep a copy of your Accepted Manuscript. Find out more about sharing your work.

Data Sharing Policy

This journal applies the Taylor & Francis Basic Data Sharing Policy. Authors are encouraged to share or make open the data supporting the results or analyses presented in their paper where this does not violate the protection of human subjects or other valid privacy or security concerns.

Authors are encouraged to deposit the dataset(s) in a recognized data repository that can mint a persistent digital identifier, preferably a digital object identifier (DOI) and recognizes a long-term preservation plan. If you are uncertain about where to deposit your data, please see this information regarding repositories.

Authors are further encouraged to cite any data sets referenced in the article and provide a Data Availability Statement.

At the point of submission, you will be asked if there is a data set associated with the paper. If you reply yes, you will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-registered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). If you have selected to provide a pre-registered DOI, please be prepared to share the reviewer URL associated with your data deposit, upon request by reviewers.

Where one or multiple data sets are associated with a manuscript, these are not formally peer reviewed as a part of the journal submission process. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of data. Any errors in the data rest solely with the producers of the data set(s).

Publication Charges

There are no submission fees, publication fees or page charges for this journal.

Colour figures will be reproduced in colour in your online article free of charge. If it is necessary for the figures to be reproduced in colour in the print version, a charge will apply.

Charges for colour figures in print are £300 per figure ($400 US Dollars; $500 Australian Dollars; €350). For more than 4 colour figures, figures 5 and above will be charged at £50 per figure ($75 US Dollars; $100 Australian Dollars; €65). Depending on your location, these charges may be subject to local taxes.

Copyright Options

Copyright allows you to protect your original material, and stop others from using your work without your permission. Taylor & Francis offers a number of different license and reuse options, including Creative Commons licenses when publishing open access. Read more on publishing agreements.

Complying with Funding Agencies

We will deposit all National Institutes of Health or Wellcome Trust-funded papers into PubMedCentral on behalf of authors, meeting the requirements of their respective open access policies. If this applies to you, please tell our production team when you receive your article proofs, so we can do this for you. Check funders’ open access policy mandates here. Find out more about sharing your work.

Open Access

You have the option to publish open access in this journal via our Open Select publishing program. Publishing open access means that your article will be free to access online immediately on publication, increasing the visibility, readership and impact of your research. Articles published Open Select with Taylor & Francis typically receive 32% more citations* and over 6 times as many downloads** compared to those that are not published Open Select.

Your research funder or your institution may require you to publish your article open access. Visit our Author Services website to find out more about open access policies and how you can comply with these.

You will be asked to pay an article publishing charge (APC) to make your article open access and this cost can often be covered by your institution or funder. Use our APC finder to view the APC for this journal.

Please visit our Author Services website or contact openaccess@tandf.co.uk if you would like more information about our Open Select Program.

*Citations received up to Jan 31st 2020 for articles published in 2015-2019 in journals listed in Web of Science®.
**Usage in 2017-2019 for articles published in 2015-2019.

My Authored Works

On publication, you will be able to view, download and check your article’s metrics (downloads, citations and Altmetric data) via My Authored Works on Taylor & Francis Online. This is where you can access every article you have published with us, as well as your free eprints link, so you can quickly and easily share your work with friends and colleagues.

We are committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article. Here are some tips and ideas on how you can work with us to promote your research.

Article Reprints

You will be sent a link to order article reprints via your account in our production system. For enquiries about reprints, please contact the Taylor & Francis Author Services team at reprints@tandf.co.uk. You can also order print copies of the journal issue in which your article appears.

Queries

Should you have any queries, please visit our Author Services website or contact us here.