Author guidelines

Preparing your manuscript

All authors submitting to Research for All must read and accept the UCL Press Journals Editorial Policy (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/editorial_policy) and consent to the Journal Contributor Agreement (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/licence). The notes here offer additional guidance.

Ethics approval

Research for All is committed to upholding the integrity of the work published. Papers may be reporting empirical research, or practice papers reporting practice-based evidence. Authors submitting research papers are required to follow best ethical practice for research as outlined in the British Educational Research Association or similar professional body (please indicate this clearly in your submission). Authors are required to show in their papers that they have received ethical approval for their research from all relevant institutional review boards and that they have followed General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the handling of personal data. Where such committees do not operate, authors are responsible for providing evidence of their adherence to relevant ethical guidelines (please indicate this clearly in your submission)..

English language

All publications are in English (UK). In order to facilitate rigorous and high-quality peer review, all manuscripts should be written in good and coherent English. Should you require help when writing your manuscript, a native English-speaking colleague may be well suited to help edit the level of English language in the manuscript. You may also want to consider using a professional English language editing service to improve the level of English language. Please note that using professional English language editing services does not guarantee manuscript acceptance in the journal, and you may be charged for these services.

Covering letter

Authors are welcome to submit a covering letter with the manuscript, for the Editors’ reference. Should you wish to provide one, please briefly summarise your manuscript, its findings, major themes, relevant discussion points and any disclosures including conflicts of interest the Editor(s) should be aware of.

Data and materials

Research for All encourages authors to either deposit any datasets on which conclusions in their manuscript rely in publicly available repositories or to present them in the main paper or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spread sheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. UCL Press journal authors are encouraged to follow the FAIR data principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. Further information and guidance on these principles are outlined at https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples.

Image permissions and copyright

Authors are responsible for determining the copyright status of illustrations or other material they wish to reproduce in their article and, if necessary, obtaining permission to reproduce it. This applies both to direct reproduction and to ‘derivative reproduction’ (where authors create a new figure or table which derives substantially from a copyrighted source). By including such material in their submission, authors warrant that it may be reproduced or adapted under the terms of the CC BY licence in the same way as their own work. Please note that short extracts of copyright text (excluding poetry and song lyrics) for the purposes of criticism, discussion, or review may be reproduced without formal permission assuming that the quotation is reproduced accurately and full attribution is given. Please contact UCL Press for any questions, at uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk.

Article types

Article type	Description
Research article	Papers that explore the relationship between theory and practice. These might be conventional academic research articles that develop or test theory. They might be sets of short case studies to explore how theory informs practice and how practice informs theory. (6,000 words)
Review article	Articles that analyse the thinking around an aspect of engaged research. These landscape pieces draw on the wealth of writing, experience and thought from across different disciplines and practices involved in engaged research. They capture the breadth of the landscape while providing new insights around a specific theme or topic. (6,000 - 10,000 words)
Practice case study	Stories of the practices of engaged research, told by those who have been involved. These are vivid accounts of practice, with reflection that leads to learning about the processes of engagement. They consider whether and how this learning affected those involved, the research, and wider society. They may or may not situate the practice in theory. (3,000 words)
Commentary article	Shorter pieces offering views about thinking, practices and debates in engaged research. These contributions offers the opportunity to share personal reflections, raise new perspectives and respond to someone else’s piece. (1,500 - 3,000 words)
Book review	Book reviews are concise articles that provide an evaluation of a published scholarly book and must be relevant to engaged research (800–1,500 words). Book reviews are often invited but suggestions are welcome and should be sent to the Editors.

In addition, authors can submit ‘Who inspired my thinking?’ articles (1,500 words)
Personal reflections drawing out key features of a book, paper or person and how they influenced the writer’s thought and practice.

Anonymisation

Research for All operates double anonymised peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised to each other during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review. Authors should submit their manuscript as:

The complete manuscript not blinded, as a word file (.doc/.docx, etc.) and;
An anonymous PDF version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review (anonymisation includes references to authors, acknowledgements, self-references, and any electronic author identification., etc.) Manuscripts may be returned before peer review if manuscripts are not sufficiently anonymised.

Formatting

It makes a huge difference to the ease of production if you read and adhere to the author guidelines when preparing your manuscript. If your submission does not follow these guidelines it may be returned to you for modification.

Title page (non-anonymised word file)
The title page must be a single page and attached a the manuscripts first page and include all of the information below, in the same order. No further information should be included:
1. Title of the manuscript
2. Full name(s) of contributing authors including their institutions/affiliation and address, and their institutional email address (including ORCiD ID’s - see below note on ORCiD).
3. The corresponding author(s) should be clearly identified and include their contact email address (normally this will be your university email address).
Abstract
Present the abstract as an overview of your article (up to 250 words), giving a summary of the contents and major themes. (Note that this will ultimately be used by search engines, and it will form part of the meta-data that will be seen first by people searching your article.)
Keywords
All articles must list a maximum of up to ten key words.
Main text
The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy to follow manner. A clear introduction section should provide non-specialists in the subject with an understanding of the topic and a background to the issue(s) involved.
Headings and sub-headings
Up to three level headings may be present and must be clearly identifiable using different font sizes, bold or italics. We suggest using Headings 1, 2 and 3 in MS-Word’s ‘Style’ section.
Funding and Acknowledgement statements
1. Funding: All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared, including any project and grant codes and details.
2. Acknowledgements: mentions everyone whose contribution to the work you wish to recognise.
Declarations and conflicts of interest statements
Clearly state the following in the article as sub-headings:
1. Conflicts of interest
  Clearly declare any possible conflicts of interest, including but not limited to financial and non-financial competing interests. Where there are no conflicts of interests or competing interests, authors must clearly declare this under the same heading. For further information, please refer to the journal’s Editorial Policy at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/editorial_policy.
2. Ethics approval
  Authors are required to show in their articles that they have received ethical approval for their research from all relevant institutional review boards and that they have followed appropriate personal data protection regulations (e.g. EU General Data Protection Regulation and the UK Data Protection Act 2018) in the handling of personal data. Where such committees do not operate, authors are responsible for providing evidence of their adherence to relevant ethical guidelines for the subject. Where ethics approval is not applicable (e.g. due to the type of article) please indicate this as "N/A".
3. Consent for publication
  For all articles involving human subjects, including any images, videos, and any other personal and identifiable information, authors must have secured informed consent to participate in the study and to publication before submitting to the journal, and a statement declaring this must be included in the article. Where consent for publication is not applicable (e.g. no such data is included) please indicate this as "N/A".
Data, supporting information and appendices
Articles in Research for All do not feature end-article appendices or supplementary information. All illustrative matter should be included in the body of the text or as a table/figure. See below section for further advice on data.

References/bibliography
A full references list should contain all the sources cited in the text.
Author biographies
If you wish to include a short biography of each author, please format under the author biographies heading and not as a footnote.

Data and supporting information

Data or information should not be submitted as supplementary information alongside the manuscript, but instead be included in the body of the text as a table/figure or deposited into a publicly available repository, depending on the type of data or information concerned. Where supporting information is included in the article that has no persistent identifier (for example, a Google survey), authors may be requested to deposit the information into a relevant data repository to ensure persistent access, have it registered to a DOI, and cite the DOI in the article.

The journal strongly encourages authors to make all data and datasets on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely to be publicly available either in publicly open repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main paper in machine-readable format (such as formatted tables rather than flat images) whenever possible. Authors are encouraged to follow the FAIR data principles – to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. Further information and guidance on these principles is outlined at https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples.

ORCiD

ORCiD helps researchers record and report their work by providing researchers with a personal unique identifier that can be kept throughout their career. UCL Press journals now implement ORCiD in publications and authors are encouraged to register with ORCiD and enter their ORCiD details into their submission as a URL link or ORCiD number. To register, follow the instructions on the ORCiD web pages at https://orcid.org .

Revisions

Should your manuscript be requested for revision to raise the acceptability for publication in the journal, please ensure that you follow below points when revising your manuscript and responding to peer review comments. Please provide your timely revisions along with a response letter to any reviewer reports, within the specified revision period to the Editor as instructed in your revision request email. Namely:

Clearly show and/or highlight the revisions you have made in the text. This can be accommodated by making use of either a different colour text, highlighting the text, or by using Microsoft Word's Track Changes function.
Outline what revisions you made to your manuscript by way of a response letter, addressing all points raised by the editor and reviewers, preferably sequentially (e.g. Editor comments response, Reviewer 1 comments response, Reviewer 2 comments response) and in a bullet point list.
Where applicable, perform any additional analyses or experiments the reviewers recommend (unless you feel that they would not make your paper better; if this is the case, explain why in your response letter).
Provide a polite objective rebuttal to any points or comments you disagree with.

Referencing style

Research for All uses the APA Author-date style (https://apastyle.apa.org). This format consists of in-text citations, e.g. (Smith, 1994: 33) and a list entitled ‘References’ placed at the end of a journal article. The list of references should contain only those works cited in the text and should not be subdivided. Each entry on the list of references must correspond to at least one citation in the text.

In the main text:

Do not use the ampersand – write ‘and’ in full, e.g. (Smith and Jones, 1990)
If there are two publications with the same author/s and year, use a, b etc., e.g. (Smith, 1994a)
For three or more authors, use et al.
References should be after the closing quotation mark of a quotation but before the full stop in a sentence
After block quotations, put the source in parentheses following the quotation

In the list of references:

Give the names (surname and initials) for all authors – do not use et al.
List works by the same author chronologically, with the earliest first
Where there are lots of books by one author, in conjunction with other people, works should be ordered chronologically within each of the following categories in the following order:
Single author (Smith, 2000, 2001, 2002 etc)
Each set of named two authors listed alphabetically (Smith and Bloggs, 2000, 2001, followed by Smith and Jones, 1990, 1991)
Multiple authors, irrespective of alpha order of author names (Smith, Winters and Bloggs, 1990, followed by Smith, Jones and Bloggs, 2000)
Use (ed.) for one editor; (eds) for two (‘eds’ does not have a full stop)

Please refer to the APA style guide for further reference: https://apastyle.apa.org

House style

Spelling

Authors should consistently adopt British spelling conventions (except in quotations from other sources, where the spelling convention of the original should be retained, or where stipulated specifically in by the journal – for example World Health Organization).

Punctuation

Systems should consistently follow British conventions (except in quotations from other sources, where the punctuation convention of the original should be retained). British style uses single inverted commas, except for quotations within quotations (which have double inverted commas).
Punctuation should follow closing inverted commas (except for grammatically complete sentences beginning with a capital).
Punctuation should precede closing quotation marks (except for dashes, colons and semicolons, unless these are part of the quoted matter).

Hyphenation

Please consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for guidance. Hyphenation must be used consistently throughout your text.

Contractions and abbreviations

If you need to use them please write in full at the first appearance with the abbreviation in brackets. You may repeat an abbreviation if it reappears later in your article.
Abbreviations are usually expressed without full stops, e.g. GNP, USA, PhD
British style contractions will have no full points (e.g. Mr, St, edn), though abbreviated words, which do not end with their final letter, will (e.g. vol., vols., ed., eds.)

Capitalisation

Keep capitalisation to a minimum and use only for proper nouns and formal names of organisations, etc.

Numbers and dates

Spell out numbers up to but not including 10.
Elide numbers to minimum digits, e.g. 233-4; dates, e.g. 1993-4. Do not elide in titles and headings.
Centuries should be written as words not numbers, e.g. eighteenth century. Hyphenate if used as an adjective, e.g. eighteenth-century masterpiece.
Dates as British usage: 18 August 2015.

Quotations

Quotations should be indicated by single quotation marks but use double quotation marks for quotations within quotations.
Indent quotations of more than 50 words.
Quotations should remain exactly as they are in the original.

Acceptable language

Please be sensitive in use of terms that might cause offence or be interpreted as racist or sexist; for example, avoid gender-specific pronouns where possible.