Instructions for authors

Thank you for choosing to submit your paper to The Primary Education Journal. 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.

About the Journal

The Primary Education Journal 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.

Journal of College Science Teaching accepts the following types of article:

  • Research Article
  • Review Article
  • Book Review

We hope you will consider writing a manuscript for The Primary Education Journal. The Primary Education Journal is published continuously in digital-only format. The primary audience for The Primary Education Journal includes university faculty, teachers, researchers, students, and state and district supervisors and leaders

Preparing Your Paper

Article Types

Research Article

  • Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, literature review/theory/framework, research methods, description of the study, results, discussion, conclusion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate).
  • Should be no more than 12000 words. This word limit includes all elements of the article.
  • Should be no more than 50 pages, inclusive of:
    • Abstract
    • Tables
    • References
  • Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
  • Should contain between 3 and 6 keywords.
  • An extensive piece of work, which presents original research supported by a substantial amount of data.

For Research Articles involving human participants, authors must include a description of all necessary ethics approvals, including the name of the ethics committee, its respective institution, and the approval number given. Additionally, all research subjects must have provided appropriate informed consent and details on how this was obtained must be detailed in the manuscript. If requirement for consent was waived by the ethics committee this should be explained in the manuscript.

Review Article

  • Should be written with the following elements 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).
  • Should be no more than 15000 words. This word limit includes all elements of the article.
  • Should be no more than 50 pages, inclusive of:
    • Abstract
    • Tables
    • References
  • Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
  • Should contain between 3 and 6 keywords.
  • A survey of the literature on a particular topic, which summarises past research, outlines recent advances and evaluates the body of knowledge. Reviews are incredibly useful for researchers –providing an introduction to a topic and stimulating ideas on new areas to explore.

Book Review

  • Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page including full details of the book under review; abstract; keywords; main text.
  • Should be no more than 3500 words. This word limit includes all elements of the article.
  • Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
  • Should contain between 3 and 6 keywords.

Format-free Submission

Authors may submit their paper in any scholarly format or layout. Manuscripts may be supplied as single or multiple files. These can be Word, rich text format (rtf), open document format (odt), PDF, or LaTeX files. Figures and tables can be placed within the text or submitted as separate documents. Figures should be of sufficient resolution to enable refereeing.

  • There are no strict formatting requirements, but all manuscripts must contain the essential elements needed to evaluate a manuscript: abstract, author affiliation, figures, tables, funder information, and references. Further details may be requested upon acceptance.
  • References can be in any style or format, so long as a consistent scholarly citation format is applied. For manuscripts submitted in LaTeX format a .bib reference file must be included. Author name(s), journal or book title, article or chapter title, year of publication, volume and issue (where appropriate) and page numbers are essential. All bibliographic entries must contain a corresponding in-text citation. The addition of DOI (Digital Object Identifier) numbers is recommended but not essential.
  • The journal reference style (APA 7) must be applied to the paper.
  • Spelling must be UK English so long as sage is consistent.

Note that, regardless of the file format of the original submission, an editable version of the article must be supplied at the revision stage.

Formatting and Templates

Papers may be submitted in Word format. Please do not submit your paper as a PDF. 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.

Download format-free manuscript template

Checklist: What to Include

  • Author details. Please ensure all listed authors meet the The Primary Education Journal authorship criteria. All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the title page. 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.

    Download title page template
  • 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 #1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency #2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency #3] under Grant [number xxxx].
  • Disclosure statement. This is to acknowledge any financial or non-financial interest that has arisen from the direct applications of your research. If there are no relevant competing interests to declare please state this within the article, for example: The authors report there are no competing interests to declare. Further guidance on what is a conflict of interest and how to disclose it.
  • Data availability statement. Authors are required to provide a data availability statement (DAS), detailing where data associated with a paper can be found and how it can be accessed. If data cannot be made open, authors should state why in the data availability statement. This should include the hyperlink, DOI or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). Templates are also available to support authors.
  • Data deposition. Data must be deposited 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.
  • Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, fileset, audio file or anything which supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. Articles with extenders, such as infographics or video summaries, are up to 108% more likely to be downloaded. We publish supplemental material online via Figshare. Find out more about supplemental material and how to submit it with your article. 
  • 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: PS, JPEG, TIFF, or Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) files are acceptable for figures that have been drawn in Word.
  • 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.
  • Equations. If you are submitting your manuscript as a Word document, please ensure that equations are editable.
  • Units. Please use SI units (non-italicized).

Using Third-Party Material

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. 

Disclosure Statement

Please include a disclosure statement, using the subheading “Disclosure of interest.” If you have no interests to declare, please state this (suggested wording: The authors report there are no competing interests to declare). For all NIH/Welcome-funded papers, the grant number(s) must be included in the declaration of interest statement. Read more on declaring conflicts of interest.

Complying with Ethics of Experimentation

Please ensure that all research reported in submitted papers has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and is in full compliance with all relevant codes of experimentation and legislation. All original research papers involving humans, animals, plants, biological material, protected or non-public datasets, collections or sites, must include a written statement in the Methods section, confirming ethical approval has been obtained from the appropriate local ethics committee or Institutional Review Board and that where relevant, informed consent has been obtained. All research studies on humans (individuals, samples, or data) must have been performed in accordance with the principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki. In settings where ethics approval for non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys) is not required, authors must include a statement to explain this. In settings where there are no ethics committees in place to provide ethical approval, authors are advised to contact the Editor to discuss further. Detailed guidance on ethics considerations and mandatory declarations can be found in our Research Ethics page.

Consent

All authors are required to follow the ICMJE requirements and The Primary Education Journal's research ethics on privacy and informed consent from patients and study participants. Authors must include a statement to confirm that any patient, service user, or participant (or that person’s parent or legal guardian) in any type of qualitative or quantitative research, has given informed consent to participate in the research. For submissions where patients or participants can be potentially identified (e.g. a clinical case report detailing their medical history, identifiable images or media content, etc), authors must include a statement to confirm that they have obtained written informed consent to publish the details from the affected individual (or their parents/guardians if the participant in not an adult or unable to give informed consent; or next of kin if the participant is deceased). The process of obtaining consent to publish should include sharing the article with the individual (or whoever is consenting on their behalf), so that they are fully aware of the content of the article before it is published. Authors should familiarize themselves with our policy on participant/patient privacy and informed consent.

Submitting Your Paper

This journal uses Open Journal Systems (OJS) to manage the submission process. The submission system allows you to see your submissions journal in one place. To submit your manuscript please click here.

Please note that The Primary Education Journal uses Crossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to The Primary Education Journal 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.

Data Sharing Policy

Authors are required to make the data and materials supporting the results or analyses presented in their paper freely available. Authors may, however, choose to apply a licence that limits re-use. If the data cannot be made open, we recommend it is still preserved in a FAIR-compliant repository with appropriate access and controls in place. Authors are required to cite any data sets referenced in the article and provide a Data Availability Statement. Please note that data should only be shared if it is ethically correct to do so, where this does not violate the protection of human subjects, or other valid ethical, privacy, or security concerns.

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 required 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.