Information For Authors

Author Guidelines 

The Student Journal of Service Sector Management Research is an open access journal that publishes student research from the Department of Service Sector Management at Sheffield Hallam University. Students interested in submitting an article should discuss it with their project or dissertation supervisor.

Publishing your research can seem like a daunting task the first time. This journal has been created to help students get over this first hurdle and hopefully encourage them to publish further. 

Length of papers

Papers should between 3000 (short papers) or 6000 words (long papers) excluding notes, references, author details, keywords and abstract).

Covering Information

When submitting your paper you should have ready:

• Article Title
• Author’s Name
• Author’s contact details
• Supervisor details
• Paper in the journal format.  Click HERE for the paper template
• Signed supervisor checklist. Click HERE for the supervisor checklist
• Signed student checklist. Click HERE for the student checklist

All submissions should be e-mailed to ssmstudentjournal@shu.ac.uk

Presentation/Style

All articles should be written in Word and single-spaced. The font should be Time New Roman 12 point. The main body text should be justified, with paragraphs separated by a line. The layout of the margins should be top: 2.5cm, inside: 2.5cm, bottom: 4cm, outside: 3.01cm.

Headings

Please do not exceed three levels of headings. The recommended format for headings are:

• Heading 1 (14 point, Capitalised, Bold,)
• Heading 2 (14 point, Sentence case, Bold, Italicised,)
• Heading 3 (14 point, Sentence case, Italicised,)

References

Adhere to the SHU APA referencing format. Click HERE for the SHU Reference Guide.

A template is provided for you to use to format your paper for submission. It also indicates the sections and suggested word count. Please used this template and contact your supervisor if you need further help.

The Process

When you submit your paper, all your identifying details will be removed and your paper will be reviewed by members of the editorial board.

The reviewers will make a decision on your work, if it is accepted with revisions they will usually return comments designed to help to refine and improve your paper. The editorial process is part of the support that we offer. Very few papers will be accepted with no editing - so please do not feel disheartened if you are asked to make changes or clarify any issues. Decisions are chosen from the list below

Accepted with no changes 
The best outcome and rare - it will go straight to publishing

Accepted with minor changes 
This is the most common outcome. Don’t be upset by the comments.  They are there to help you. Read them carefully and see what they are asking for. It might be spellings and typos, areas where meaning is not clear, missing references, areas where more information is needed, or where sections need to be rearranged. Ask for help if you need to.

Accepted with major changes 
Although this may feel like a 'rejection' this outcome still meant that the paper is worthwhile and can be brought up to publishable quality, it simply needs more work. Read the comments carefully and ask for help if you need it.

Rejected 
There is not enough work evident in the paper or there are so many revisions needed that the reviewers can’t accept the paper in its current version. You could re-work and resubmit for consideration in a later edition, but you will need to do much more work.

If you have had a request for changes you will be given a date to do these and send in the revised version.

Your work will be reviewed for any minor errors and formatted for print

Please Note 

It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that permissions to reproduce any kind of third party material are obtained from copyright holders prior to the article being submitted for publication.

Authors must disclose if there are any conflict of interest in their submitted work. If there are no conflicts of interest to declare then please state this.

Submission of an article implies that the publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form. To verify originality, your article may be checked by the originality detection service Turnitin.