Submissions

Author Guidelines

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

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.

Please note that the Social Sciences Spectrum (SSS) strictly follows the ethical guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to ensure integrity in publishing. The ethical guidelines of the COPE are followed to cover issues related to authorship, peer review, and editorial conduct.

Open Journal System Manuscripts 
This journal uses Open Journal System OJS 3.x to process the submitted manuscripts for all processes i.e. submission, peer review, copyediting, and publication. Please read the guide for OJS authors before making a submission. Complete guidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to this journal are provided below.

About the Journal

Social Sciences Spectrum is an international, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality, original research. Please see the journal's Aims & Scope for information about its focus.

Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English. Social Sciences Spectrum accepts the following types of articles:

• original article
• conceptual papers
• systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses

Preparing Your Paper

Your article must be within the scope of the journal and be of sufficient quality. If not, it will not be reviewed. Please read the journal’s Aims and Scope to see if your article is appropriate.

The manuscript must be your original work, you must have the rights to the work, and you must have obtained and be able to supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, including figures, illustrations, tables, lengthy quotations, or other material previously published elsewhere.

original article

Papers should normally be between 6000-8000 words including all text (References, Tables, & Figures)

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text; introduction, literature review/theoretical framework, methods, results, discussion, conclusion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices
• Should contain an unstructured abstract of 200 words.
• Should contain 5 keywords. Read making your article more discoverable, including information on choosing a title and search engine optimization.

Formatting your manuscript

The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. You do not need to follow a template, but please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined.

Title

Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services.

Abstract

Please include an unstructured abstract between the title and main body of your manuscript that concisely states the purpose of the research, major findings, and conclusions. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered.

Keywords

Please include a minimum of 5 keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic. The keywords should be other than the title to enhance the chances of discoverability of the manuscript. Detailed guidance is given on phrasing a title, writing an abstract, and keywords

Title page

To ensure fair and anonymous peer review, your manuscript must be fully anonymized. Please ensure any identifying information is removed from the main manuscript document and included on the Title Page instead. Do not include any author names in the manuscript file name and remove names from headers and footers. This version of the manuscript will be sent to the peer reviewers. The Title Page will not be sent to peer reviewers. See the detailed guidance on making an anonymous submission.

The Title Page should include:

Mandatory

• Article title
• The full list of authors including names and affiliations of each
• The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript – please indicate this on the title page.
• All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission (please see the authorship section for more information).
• Contact information for the corresponding author: name, institutional address, phone, email
• Declaration of conflicting interest

Optional (if applicable)

• Acknowledgments section
• Funding statement
• Ethical approval and informed consent statements
• Data availability statement
• Any other identifying information related to the authors and/or their institutions, funders, approval committees, etc., that might compromise anonymity.

Acknowledgments

If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the end of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. See details about authorships and contributions at ICMJE recommendations, it is best practice to obtain consent from non-author contributors who you are acknowledging in your manuscript.

Writing assistance and third-party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third party, for example, a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the cover letter. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the journal editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.

Ethical considerations

Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to explicitly state this. You can find information on what to say in your ethical statements as well as example statements on our Publication Ethics and Research Integrity policies page.

All papers reporting studies involving human participants or human data must state that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board approved the study, or waived the requirement for approval, providing the full name and institution of the review committee in addition to the approval number. If applicable, please also include this information in the Methods section of your manuscript.

Consent for publication

Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images, or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted. Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the participant’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.

 Declaration of conflicting interest

The journal requires a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors so that a statement can be included in your article. For guidance on conflict of interest statements, see our policy on conflicting interest declarations and the ICMJE recommendations.

If no conflict exists, your statement should read: ‘The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article’.

Funding statement

All articles need to include a funding statement, under a separate heading, even if you did not receive funding. You’ll find guidance and examples on our Funding page.

Peer Review Process

The Social Sciences Spectrum follows a double-blind peer review process to ensure the publication of quality content. The journal aims to provide rapid turnaround for manuscripts requiring peer review (i.e., three months) but cannot guarantee publication in a particular issue.

All submissions to SSS should adhere to the guidelines set forth in the American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide, 7th edition.

All authors should ensure that their user profile includes information on their affiliation and position title.

• The editors are responsible for final decisions regarding publication and reserve the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and consistency of style.
• A final decision to publish or not is made by the appropriate editor after the anonymous peer review is completed.
• All submissions to the journal should be fully anonymized in preparation for peer review.

Peer Review Policy

Important: The journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file.

According to the 2024 Journals and Publications’ Policy of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, Editorial Team Members and Editorial Advisory Members are not allowed to publish their articles in SSS.

The following summary describes the peer review process of the SSS:
Identity transparency: Double-anonymized (for this purpose, the journal does not require authors to provide the names of the reviewers)
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: None

Desk Review Time: 1-2 weeks approximately

Peer-review Process: 1-2 months approximately

Your manuscript will undergo an initial evaluation (Desk-Review). If it does not conform to the requirements laid out in the Author Guidelines, it will be returned to you for amendments prior to peer review. Manuscripts may be desk rejected without peer review at this point if they are out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.

After passing the initial evaluation, your manuscript will then be peer-reviewed. You can log in at any time to check the status of your manuscript. We will notify you when a decision has been reached.

Social Sciences Spectrum (SSS) operates a strictly anonymized peer review process in which the reviewer’s name is withheld from the author and, the author’s name from the reviewer. The reviewer may at their discretion opt to reveal their name to the author in their review but our standard policy practice is for both identities to remain concealed. Two independent reviews are required for a manuscript to reach a Revised or Accepted decision. All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, and an editorial decision is generally reached within 12 weeks of submission.

To ensure the integrity of the peer review process we assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.

All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Editor who then makes the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue or special collection. Plagiarism and AI Generative Texts

The journal takes issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism, or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. SSS strictly follows HEC’s Anti-Plagiarism Policy 2023. The journal uses Turnitin to check the similarity index and AI detection. A maximum of 19% unintentional similarity including not more than 4% from one source or not more than 4% generated from AI by crediting the authors’ works and acknowledgment of AI usage in the methods section and the Cover Letter is acceptable. However, the editors, associated editors, and reviewers will check the content of similarity to find any plagiarized materials.

The journal considers plagiarism as a serious crime as per the guidelines of the COPE and advises authors to strictly follow these guidelines. As per guidelines of the HEC, plagiarism complaints are lodged, and processed, and penalties (Major, Moderate, and Minor) are commensurate [Para 13) according to the grounds determined by the constituted committed [Para 13.1].

Publication Fee

The Social Sciences Spectrum has been managed and run by a non-profit organization Institute for Youth Drug Abuse Education and Prevention Studies. There is no source of income or financial assistance from any other organization or government entity to sponsor the SSS expenses. SSS is striving to get Doi allotted to all published articles moreover, we are striving hard to be indexed in Web of Science, SCOPUS, and other subject-related quality databases. The board of the Centre approved the following publication and processing charges;

Publication charges will be received after the final report of the reviewers, and the link will be shared after paying the charges.

For any queries please feel free to contact us via:

Email: editor@sss.com