Guidelines

Submit to the Journal

Peer Review Process
Editor reviews each paper and, if it is judged suitable for publication in WCSA Journal, paper is sent to at least two independent reviewers for blind peer review.After the consultation with the relevant members of the Editorial Board, taking into account reviewer’s recommendations, the editor decides wheteher the paper will be accepted as is, revised or rejected.

Publication Frequency
WCSA Journal is published quartelry.

Open Access Policy
The WCSA Journal is uniquely an “open access” peer-reviewed scholarly publication which allows for the completely free and open access of scientific intellectual property (e.g.: articles, essays, reviews). The Academy does not own the copyright of any information, and operates on a “copyleft” model, which provides for the open access of all content.

The WCSA Journal is available entirely online to readers without any financial, legal, or technical barriers (no publication charges, for instance), based on the idea and theory that the article’s content should remain free of contextual motive, wholly objective, and thus intellectually intact.

Authors should use the widely-acclaimed Creative Commons licenses to specify the legal usage rights of articles and knowledge property. Accordingly, The WCSA Journal celebrates the notion that all legal copyright of intellectual property belongs exclusively to the contributing authors. All versions of the articles can be deposited in an institutional or other repository of the authors’ choice without embargo.

Publishing fee
• There is no processing or submission fee for this journal.

Manuscripts considered for publication in WCSA journal are those which:
• Contain original work– which is not published elsewhere in any medium by the authors or anyone else and is not under consideration for publication in any other medium. The author(s) is/are also responsible for any violations of the copyright regulations. Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of others without attribution. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text. The papers are checked with the plagiarism checker to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts. Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. Any published articles may need to be corrected or retracted.

• Are focused on the core aims and scope of the journal: WCSAJ is a peer-reviewed, double-blind, “open access” academic publication focusing broadly on the contemporary intersections of the fields of sociology, political science, and communication. The journal particularly privileges the epistemic approach behind “Systemics and Complexity Theories,” therefore interdisciplinary academic works are welcome (e.g., economics, psychology, digital media, Internet studies, and philosophy).

• Are clearly and correctly written – should contain all essential features of a complete scientific paper, should be written in a clear, easy to understand manner and be readable for a wide audience

• Are written in British English – should be clearly and grammatically written, in an easily readable style. Attention to detail of the language will avoid severe misunderstandingswhich might lead to rejection of the paper. Correct language is the responsibility of the authors. Unless the author is an English native speaker, the paper must be proofread by a language editor, English native speaker.

• WCSAJ paper template should be used for preparing the paper. Maximum length of the paper is 10.000 words.

Example: ABSTRACT
A single paragraph of about 250 words maximum. The entire paper will be written using Times New Roman font type, 12 point, alignment: justify, line spacing: 1, paragraph spacing: 6 pt before and after each paragraph. The abstract must include sufficient information for readers to judge the nature and significance of the topic. It should summarize the objectives of the article, methodology, results and conclusions. In order to increase the visibility of the article, the abstract should reiterate key words and phrases while avoiding unnecessary repetition.

Keywords: Four to seven keywords (words or expressions) that capture the essence of your paper should be listed in decreasing order of importance, ensuring consistency with the title and the abstract of the article.

1. Introduction
The body of the paper will be written using Times New Roman font type, 12 point, alignment: justify, line spacing: 1, paragraph spacing: 6 pt before and after each paragraph. An empty row will be introduced before every subtitle. All subtitles will be numbered. The introduction familiarizes the reader with the context of the paper. It must reflect, briefly, current research in the field and order approach presented in the article.

2. Paper Body
The paper should be the result of a research in the area, corresponding to the specific topic of the journals’ issue. The structure of the paper should be clear and well emphasized by titles and subtitles placed in a logical sequence, according to the writing methodology of the scientific papers. In order to allow the readers to understand better the work of the authors, the following structure of the paper will be used: Review of the scientific literature, Research methodology, Results and discussion.

For lists unordered bulleted lists will be used:
• This is the first item on the list. In case of sublists, unordered lists with dashes will be used, as follows:
– first subitem
– second subitem
• Second item on the bulleted list
• Last item on the bulleted list.

Tables and figures should be placed in the body of the paper exactly where the authors want them to appear printed and be of the size desired by the authors. We recommend that the tables and figures fit on one page and be inside the margins of the paper. Graphs must be uncluttered and easy to read, preferably in black and white. Tables and figures will be numbered. Their content will be written using the Times New Roman font type, 12 point. The heading should be in Times New Roman font type, 12 point, bold, positioned above the corresponding table or below the corresponding figure. Please indicate the source of data when appropriate (in Times New Roman font type, 10 point, italic, center, below the table or figure). References to tables and figures must be made within parentheses in the text of the paper, e.g.: (figure 1), (table 1).

2.1 Equtations and formulas (Heading 2)

Equations and formulas should be numbered. The numbers are to be justified to the right, within parentheses.

Examples of equations:
IGDPc=IEα ICKc(1-α)ITFP (1)

where:
IGDPc – index of GDP in constant prices
IE – capacity utilization index
α – elasticity of industrial output
ICKc – index of active assets at constant prices
ITFP – productivity index.

2.1.1 Abbreviations and acronyms (Heading 3)

Abbreviations and acronyms should be defined the first time they are used in the text.

Examples of abbreviations and acronyms:
soc. – sociology
cyb. – cybernetics
ec. – economy
ICT – information and communication technology
CEEC – Central and Eastern Europe Countries
CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility
GMES – Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security
MRA – Mutual Recognition Agreement

3. Conclusions A conclusion section is required. Conclusions should provide a synthesis of the main contributions of the paper, discuss the importance of the work, and/or suggest possible applications and extensions of the research.

References,
Harvard referencing style

The WCSAJ uses Emerald Chicago Style Reference, Times New Roman 11, line spacing 6 (before and after). It is forbidden to list cited works in footnotes.

References to other publications in your text should be written as follows:

Single author: (Adams, 2006)
Two authors: (Adams and Brown, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Adams et al., 2006).
A few other style points. These apply to both the main body of text and your final list of references.

When referring to pages in a publication, use ‘p.(page number)’ for a single page or ‘pp.(page numbers)’ to indicate a page range.
Page numbers should always be written out in full, e.g. 175-179, not 175-9.
Where a colon or dash appears in the title of an article or book chapter, the letter that follows that colon or dash should always be lower case.
When citing a work with multiple editors, use the abbreviation ‘Ed.s’.
At the end of your paper, please supply a reference list in alphabetical order using the style guidelines below. Where a DOI is available, this should be included at the end of the references.

For books: Surname, initials (year), title of book, publisher, place of publication.

Aernoudt, R. (2020), Entrepreneurship, No Guts, No Glory. Intersentia, Cambridge, UK.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2001), Making social science matter: Why social enquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

For books chapters: Surname, initials (year), “chapter title”, editor’s surname, initials (Ed.), title of book, publisher, place of publication, page numbers.

Roblek, V. (2019), “Smart city Vienna”, Anthopoulos, Leonidas G. (Ed.), Smart city emergence: cases from round the world, Elsevier, Amsterdam, NL, pp.105-127.

For journals: Surname, initials (year), “title of article”, journal name, volume issue, page numbers.

Aernoudt, R. (2020), “Evidence – and foresight-based policy: dichotomy or overlap? World Complexity Science Academy Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1, 14.

Horton, A. (1999), “A simple guide to successful foresight”, Foresight, Vol. 1, pp. 5-9.

For published conference proceedings: “title of paper”, in editor’s surname, initials (Ed.), title of published proceeding which may include place and date(s) held, publisher, place of publication, page numbers.

Roblek, V. and Meško, M. (2020), “Smart city knowledge management: Holistic review and the analysis of the urban knowledge management”, in Eom, S.J and Lee, J. (Ed.s), Intelligent government in the intelligent information society: the proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DGO2020), June 15-19, 2020, Seoul, Republic of Korea, The Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, pp. 52-60.

For newspaper articles (authored): Surname, initials (year), “article title”, newspaper, date, page numbers.

Fangfang, L. (2020), “Delivering services innovations to drive post-pandemic growth”, Bloomberg Businessweek (Europe), 5. October, pp.6-7.

For newspaper articles (non-authored: Newspaper (year), “article title”, date, page numbers.

Bloomberg Businessweek (Europe), “Delivering services innovations to drive post-pandemic growth”, 5. October, pp.6-7.

For electronic sources: Surname, initials or publisher name (year), “title of electronic source”, available at: persistent URL (accessed date month year).

Deloitte (2012), “Econometric analysis for scenario-based planning”, available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ie/Documents/Strategy/econometric_analysis_for_scenario_based_planning.pdf (accessed 3 May 2020).

OECD (2017), “The role of foresight in shaping the next production revolution”, The next production revolution, Implications for Government and Business, available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/the-next-production-revolution/the-role-of-foresight-in-shaping-the-next-production-revolution_9789264271036-13-en: pp. 299 – 324 (accessed 6 May 2020).