Submissions

Author Guidelines

Before submitting for publication, please check that your manuscript has been prepared in accordance to the step-by-step instructions for submitting a manuscript to our online submission system.

Manuscript Format

Your manuscript should be in MS Word or LaTeX format. You are advised to download the template when preparing your submissions to this journal. All manuscripts must be written in clear, comprehensible English. Both British and American English are accepted. Usage of non-English words should be kept to a minimum and all must be italicized, with the exception of “e.g.” and “i.e.” If you have concerns about the level of English in your submission, please ensure that it is proofread before submission by a native English speaker or a scientific editing service.

Types of submission accepted:

Smart Construction Research accepts original articles, reviews, letters, editorials, commentaries, perspectives and position papers. Please read this section further for the definition of each type and select the appropriate option in the submission system. Submissions exceeding the suggested requirements, such as total manuscript length, will still be processed for consideration and peer review. However, article processing charges will differ in exceptional cases (e.g. a raw text file exceeding 2MB, etc.) The article processing charge will then be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Original articles: Scientific articles on original basic and applied research and/or analysis. This manuscript type typically has 5 tables and figures in total, and has approximately 40 references and 7,000 words (inclusive of reference list and abstract).

Review articles: A summary highlighting recent developments and current/future trends of the field. This manuscript type typically has 5 tables and figures in total, with approximately 70 references and 7,000 words (inclusive of reference list and abstract).

Letters to the Editor-in-Chief/authorship (please specify): Comments from reader(s) about individual articles. These letters must be constructive and contribute to the development of individual articles published or the entire journal. Letters containing new ideas, supporting data or data criticizing an article may be subjected to peer-review (determined on a case-by-case basis by the journal’s editorial team) and published in the online publication but not in the printed version. This manuscript type typically has 1,800 words (exclusive of reference list).

Editorials: Solicited concise commentary highlighting prominent topics in the Journal’s issue. These are the official opinions of the editors of the journal or its special issue. Editorials will be published in both online and printed versions of the journal. This manuscript type typically has 3,500 words.

Commentaries: Unsolicited commentaries or analysis from reader(s) targeting specific published articles in the journal. Commentaries will be subjected to peer-review and may be published in both online and printed versions of the journal. This manuscript type typically has 3,500 words.

Perspectives: These are author’s personal opinion on a subject/topic. Unlike Reviews, Perspective articles may cover a more specific, narrow part of the field. However, these are still required to uphold the spirit of academia of being objective as well as aiming to initiate or furthering discussions and novel experimental procedures in the field. Therefore, it will undergo peer review and be indexed if accepted. Accepted articles may be solicited or unsolicited. This manuscript type typically has 5 tables and figures in total, along with approximately 70 references and 7,000 words (inclusive of reference list and abstract).

Reports: Documents that summarize the execution and results of a clinical case involving bioprinted construct or a collaborative research programme that is directly related to the advancement of bioprinting. Submissions will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and are usually solicited by the editors.

Position papers: Submissions that reflect the official opinion of an organization (e.g. government bodies, funding agencies, etc.) This manuscript type typically has 3,500 words.

Cover letter

All submissions should include a cover letter as a separate file. A cover letter should contain a brief explanation of what was previously known, the conceptual advancement with the findings and its significance to broad readership. The cover letter is confidential and will be read only by the editors. It will not be seen by reviewers.

Title

The title should capture the conceptual significance for a broad audience. The title should not be more than 50 words and should be able to give readers an overall view of the paper’s significance. Titles should avoid using uncommon jargons, abbreviations and punctuation.

List of Authors

The names of authors must be spelled out rather than set in initials along with their affiliations. Authors should be listed according to the extent of their contribution, with the major contributor listed first. All corresponding authors should be identified with an asterisk. Affiliations should contain the following core information: department, institution, city, state, postal code, and country. For contact, email address of at least one corresponding author must be included. Please note that all authors must view and approve the final version of the manuscript before submitting.

Abstract

Articles must include an abstract containing a maximum of 200 words. The purpose of abstract is to provide sufficient information for a reader to determine whether or not to proceed to the full text of the article. After the abstract, please give 5 keywords; please avoid using the same words as those already used in the title, separate terms with a semi-colon (term1; term2; term3).

Section Headings

Please number the section headings (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) in boldface. Likewise, use boldface to identify subheadings too but please distinguish it from major headings using numbers (e.g. 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, etc.) Further subsections of subheadings should be differentiated by boldface and italics font with the numbers (1), (2), (3), etc.

Introduction

The introduction should provide a background that gives a broad readership an overall outlook of the field and the research performed. It tackles a problem and states its important regarding with the significance of the study. Introduction can conclude with a brief statement of the aim of the work and a comment about whether that aim was achieved.

Materials and Methods

This section provides the general experimental design and methodologies used. The aim is to provide enough detail to for other investigators to fully replicate the results. It is also required to facilitate better understanding of the results obtained. Protocols and procedures for new methods must be included in detail for the reproducibility of the experiments. Informed consent should be obtained from patients or parents before the experiments start and should be mentioned in this section.

Ethics

Ethics information include IACUC permit numbers and/or IRB name, if applicable. This information should be included in a subheading labelled "Ethics Statement" in the "Methods" section of the manuscript file, in as much detail as possible.

Results

This section can be divided into subheadings and focuses on the results of the experiments performed.

Discussion

This section should provide the significance of the results and identify the impact of the research in a broader context. It should not be redundant or similar to the content of the results section.

Conclusion

Please use the conclusion section for interpretation only, and not to summarize information already presented in the text or abstract.

Conflict of Interest

All authors are required to declare all activities that have the potential to be deemed as a source of competing interest in relations to their submitted manuscript. Examples of such activities could include personal or work-related relationships, events, etc. Authors who have nothing to declare are encouraged to add "No conflict of interest was reported by all authors" in this section.

Funding

Authors should declare all financial and non-financial support that have the potential to be deemed as a source of competing interest in relations to their submitted manuscript in this section. Financial supports are generally in the form of grants, royalties, consulting fees and others. Examples of non-financial support could include the following: externally-supplied equipment/biological sources, writing assistance, administrative support, contributions from non-authors, etc.

Appendix

This section is optional and is for all materials (e.g. advanced technical details) that has been excluded from the main text but remain essential to the readers in understanding the manuscripts. This section is not for supplementary figures. Authors are advised to refer to the section on Supplementary Figures for such submissions.

Text

The text of the manuscript should be in Microsoft Word or Latex. The length of the manuscript cannot be more than 50,000 characters (inclusive of spaces), or approximately 7,000 words.

Nomenclature for genes and proteins

This journal aims to reach researchers all over the globe. Hence, for reviewers’ and readers’ ease in comprehension, authors are highly encouraged to use the appropriate gene and protein nomenclature. Authors may prefer to utilize resources such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene.

Figures

Authors should include all figures into the manuscript and submit it as one file. Figures include photographs, scanned images, graphs, charts and schematic diagrams. Figures submitted should avoid unnecessary decorative effects (e.g. 3D graphs), as well as should be minimally processed (e.g. changes in brightness and contrast applied uniformly for the entire figure). It should also be set against a white background. Please remember to label all figures (e.g. axis, etc.) and add captions below the figure, as required. These captions should be numbered (e.g. Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.) in boldface. All figures must have a brief title (also known as caption) that describes the entire figure without citing specific panels, followed by a legend, defined as description of each panel. Please identify each panel with uppercase letters in parenthesis (e.g. (A), (B), (C), etc.)

The preferred file formats for any separately submitted figure(s) are TIFF or JPEG. All figures should be legible in print form and of optimal resolution. Optimal resolutions preferred are 300 dots per inch (dpi) for RBG coloured, 600 dpi for greyscale and 1,200 dpi for line art. Although there are no file-size limitation imposed, authors are highly encouraged to compress their figures to an ideal size without unduly affecting the legibility and resolution of figures. This will also speed up the process of uploading in the submission system, if necessary.

The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher reserve the right to request from author(s) the high-resolution files and unprocessed data and metadata files, should the need arise at any point after manuscript submission for reasons such as production, evaluation or other purposes. The file name should allow for ease in identifying the associated manuscript submitted.

Tables, lists and equations

Tables created using Microsoft Word table function are preferred. The tables should include a title at the top. Titles and footnotes/legends should be concise. These must be submitted in the manuscript. Likewise, lists and equations should be properly aligned and its meaning clear to readers. For listing items within the main body of the manuscript, please use Roman numbers in parenthesis (e.g. (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), etc.).

Supplementary information

This section is optional and contains all materials and figures that have been excluded from the entire manuscript. These information are relevant to the manuscript but remain non-essential to readers’ understanding of the manuscript’s main content. All supplementary information should be submitted as a separate file in Step 4 during submission. Please ensure the names of such files contain ‘suppl. info’. Videos may be included in this section.

In-text citations

Reference citations in the text should be numbered consecutively in superscript square brackets. Some examples:

1. Negotiation research spans many disciplines^[3,4].
2. This result was later contradicted by Becker and Seligman^[5].
3. This effect has been widely studied^[1–3,7].

Personal communications and unpublished works can only be used in the main text of the submission and are not to be placed in the Reference section. Authors are advised to limit such usage to the minimum. These should also be easily identifiable by stating the authors and year of such unpublished works or personal communications, and the word ‘Unpublished’ in parenthesis.

E.g. (Smith J, 2000, Unpublished)

References

This section is compulsory and should be placed at the end of all manuscripts. Do not use footnotes or endnotes as a substitute for a reference list. The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should be excluded from this section. The EndNote output style of IJB can be downloaded at here.

For the reference list, all authors must be stated. Authors being referenced are listed with their surname followed by their initials. All references should be numbered (e.g. 1, 2, 3, etc.) and sequenced according to the order they appear as the in-text citations. References should follow the following pattern: Author(s), followed by year of publication, title of publication, abbreviated journal name in italics, volume number, issue number in parenthesis and lastly, page range. If the referred article has more than three authors, list only the first three authors and abbreviate the remaining authors as the italicized ‘et al.’ (meaning "and others"). If the DOI is available, please include it after the page range. Examples of references for different types of publications are as follows;

Journal

Journal article (print) with one to three authors Younger P. Using the internet to conduct a literature search. Nursing Standard 2004; 19(6): 45–51.

Journal article (print) with more than three authors Gamelin FX, Baquet G, Berthoin S, et al. Effect of high intensity intermittent training on heart rate variability in prepubescent children. European Journal of Applied Physiology 2009; 105: 731–738.

Journal article (online) with one to three authors Jackson D, Firtko A and Edenborough M. Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: A literature review. Journal of Advanced Nursing 2007; 60(1): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2007.04412.x. 

Journal article (online) with more than three authors Hargreave M, Jensen A, Nielsen TSS, et al. Maternal use of fertility drugs and risk of cancer in children—A nationwide population-based cohort study in Denmark. International Journal of Cancer 2015; 136(8): 1931–1939. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ijc.29235.

Book

Book with one to three authors 

Schneider Z, Whitehead D and Elliott D. Nursing and Midwifery Research: Methods and Appraisal for Evidence-based Practice, 3rd edn. Marrickville, NSW: Elsevier Australia. 2007.

Book with more than three authors

Davis M, Charles L, Curry M J, et al. Challenging Spatial Norms, London: Routledge. 2003. 

Chapter or Article in Book

Conway KM. Critical quantitative study of immigrant students. In F K Stage and R S Wells (Eds.)*, New Scholarship in Critical Quantitative Research — Part 1 (pp. 51–64). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2014.

*Note that the editor’s name is not inverted.

Others

Proceedings of meetings and symposiums, conference papers:

Chang S S, Liaw L and Ruppenhofer J, (eds) 2000, Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12–15, 1999: General session and parasession on loan word phenomena. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, 12–13.

Conference proceedings (from electronic database):

Wang T, Cook C and Derby B, 2009, Fabrication of a glucose biosensor by piezoelectric inkjet printing. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications, 2009 (SENSORCOM-
M’09), 82–85.

Online document with author names:

Este J, Warren C, Connor L, et al., 2008, Life in the clickstream: The future of journalism, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, viewed May 27, 2009, http://www.alliance.org.au/documents/ foj_report_final.pdf

Online document without author name:

Developing an argument, n.d., viewed March 30, 2009, http://web.princeton.edu/sites/writing/Writing_Center/WCWritingResources.htm

Thesis/Dissertation:

Gale L, 2000, The relationship between leadership and employee empowerment for successful total quality management, thesis, Australasian Digital Thesis database, University of Western Sydney, 110–130.

Standards:

Standards Australia Online, 2006, Glass in buildings: selection and installation, AS 1288-2006, amended January 31, 2008, SAI Global database, viewed May 19, 2009.

Government report:

National Commission of Audit, 1996, Report to the Commonwealth Government, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.

Government report (online):

Department of Health and Ageing, 2008, Ageing and aged care in Australia, viewed November 10, 2008, http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/ageing

No author:

Guide to agricultural meteorological practices, 1981, 2nd edn, Secretariat of the World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, 10–20.

Note: When referencing an entry from a dictionary or an encyclopedia with no author there is no requirement to include the source in the reference list. In these cases, only cite the title and year of the source in-text. For an authored dictionary/encyclopedia, treat the source as an authored book.