Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  • *The topic of your manuscript is consistent with the aims and scope of the journal.
    *The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
    *Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'.
    *All authors have read and understood the Copyright Notice section and other policies of the journal.
    *Conflict of interest statement has been declared in the cover letter.
    *Provide 3-5 highlights of your manuscript to the editor.
    *The submission format should be in Microsoft Word.
    *Where available, DOIs or URLs for the references have been provided.
    *The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
    *The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Author Guidelines

Submission Process

Manuscripts for Research on Sustainable Marine Structures should be submitted online or email at nass-sms@nassg.org.

If this is your first time submitting to this journal, please choose the Register option first. If you already have an account in this journal, please use the provided username and password and login to submit a NEW manuscript or to track your manuscript.

The submitting author, who is generally the corresponding author, is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. The submitting author must ensure that all eligible co-authors have been included in the author list and that they have all read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript. 

Don't forget to add your ORCiD ID during the submission process. It will be embedded in your published article.

Don’t have one yet? It only takes a few moments to register for a free ORCiD identifier.

Please note: The total amount of data for a file must not exceed 8 MB. If you fail to upload or have other problems, please contact the Editorial Office at nass-sms@nassg.org.

Format

Program: Microsoft Word (preferred)
Font: Times New Roman
Size: 12
Style: Normal
Paragraph: Justified

Required Documents:

  1. Cover Letter
  2. Main Manuscript
  3. Reference List
  4. Supplementary Data/Information
    Supplementary figures, small tables, text etc.

As supplementary data/information is not copyedited/proofread, kindly ensure that the section is free from errors, and is presented clearly.

Cover Letter

All articles should include a cover letter as a separate document.

The cover letter should include:

  • Names and affiliation of author(s)
    The corresponding author should be identified. It is necessary to provide the ORCID id of the authors.
    Eg. Department, University, Province/City/State, Postal Code, Country.  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx
  • A brief description of the novelty and importance of the findings detailed in the paper
  • Declaration

            >Conflict of Interest 
            >Research grants
            >Honoria
            >Employment or consultation
            >Project sponsors
             Author’s position on advisory boards or board of directors/management relationships.  
            >Multiple affiliation
            >Other financial relationships/support
            >Informed Consent
             This section confirms that written consent was obtained from all participants prior to the study.
            >Ethical Approval
            Eg. The paper received the ethical approval of XXX Ethics Committee. 
           >Trial Registration
            Eg. Name of Trial Registry: Trial Registration Number. 
           >Author Contributions
            The role(s) that each author undertook should be reflected in this section. This section affirms that each credited author has had a significant contribution to the article.

          >Data Availability Statement

           Authors should state where data supporting the results reported in a published article can be found, and under what conditions the data can be accessed. They also include links (where applicable) to the data set. 

Structure of Research Manuscripts

This document provides some guidelines to authors for submission in order to work towards a seamless submission process. While complete adherence to the following guidelines is not enforced, authors should note that following through with the guidelines will be helpful in expediting the copyediting and proofreading processes, and allow for improved readability during the review process. 

The section titles given are for Research articles. Review papers and other article types have a more flexible structure. Click to download the Microsoft Word template or LaTex template

Title

The title should not exceed 50 words. Authors are encouraged to keep their titles succinct and relevant.  Titles should avoid using uncommon jargons, abbreviations and punctuation.

Abstract

The abstract should be kept to a maximum of 300 words. It reports concisely on the main findings of the research. To this end, the abstract is structured in Background, Methods, Results and Conclusions, Significance. Kindly ensure the abstract is self-contained and remains readable to a wider audience.  For this reason, references are not allowed. 

Keywords

Authors should also include 3-8 keywords after the abstract, separated by a semi-colon, avoiding the words already used in the title of the article.

Title, abstract and keywords are very important for an article, which will be used for indexing purposes, so please be concise, clear and attractive.

Section Headings

Section headings, sub-headings, and sub-subheadings should be differentiated by number . 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.).

Introduction

This section usually uses the method of literature review to outline the background, current status and the unresolved problems of the field, thus highlighting the reasons and significance of the research, etc.

Materials and Methods

In this section, the methods used to obtain the results in the paper should be clearly elucidated. This allows readers to be able to replicate the study in the future. Authors should ensure that any references made to other research or experiments should be clearly cited.

Results

In this section, the results of experiments conducted should be detailed. The results should not be discussed at length in this section.

Discussion

In this section, the results of the experiments conducted can be discussed in detail. Authors should discuss the direct and indirect implications of their findings, and also discuss if the results obtain reflect the current state of research in the field. Applications for the research should be discussed in this section. Suggestions for future research can also be discussed in this section. It should not be redundant or similar to the content of the results section. A combined Results and Discussion section is often appropriate. 

Conclusions

This section offers closure for the paper. An effective conclusion will need to sum up the principal findings of the papers, highlighting its importance and relevance, and its implications for further research.

Author Contributions

The contributions of all listed authors should be described here or stated in the Cover Letter.

Funding: Please add: “This research received no external funding” or “This research was funded by NAME OF FUNDER, grant number XXX” and “The APC was funded by XXX”. Check carefully that the details given are accurate and use the standard spelling of funding agency names at https://search.crossref.org/funding. Any errors may affect your future funding.

Acknowledgments
In this section, you can acknowledge any support given which is not covered by the author contribution or funding sections. This may include administrative and technical support, or donations in kind (e.g., materials used for experiments).

Conflict of Interest
Declaration of conflict of interest.

References

In-text citations

For parts of the manuscript that have referenced a particular source, a superscript (ie. [x]) should be included next to the referenced text and should be in the Vancouver style [numeric] not Harvard style [name and year]. Kindly note that all references should be numbered consecutively in the order of their first citation, and the serial number is not to be used instead of the content of the sentence.

eg:

About 80% of Ethiopia’s foreign exchange is derived from agricultural exports [1].
Fabio [2] studied both technical and scale...

Reference list, placed at the end of the main manuscript.
[x] refers to the allocated number of the source under the Reference List (eg. [1], [2], [3])

eg:
Journals:
[1] Singh, S., Nayak, S., 2020. Development of sustainable livelihood security index for different agro-climatic zones of Uttar Pradesh, India. Journal of Rural Development. 39(1), 110-129. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25175/jrd/2020/v39/i1/125991
[2] Mondal, B., Singh, A., Singh, S.D., et al., 2017. Augmentation of water resources potential and cropping intensification through watershed programs. Water Environment Research. 90(2), 101-109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2175/106143017X1490296 8254700
Books:
[3] Zotz, G., 2016. Plants on plants: the biology of vascular epiphytes, 1st ed.; Springer International Publishing: Switzerland. pp. 1–282.
Online publishing:
[4] Lewis, D., Mertens, K., Stock, J., 2020. Weekly Economic Index. Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WEI. (Accessed 26 May 2020).

Graphs, Figures, Tables, and Equations

All Graphs, figures, tables and Equations should be mentioned in the text and placed in their corresponding places.

All Graphs, figures and tables 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. 

eg: 

Figure 1. xxx

Figure 2. xxx

Table 1. xxx

Table 2. xxx

Graphs, figures and tables should be labelled closely below it and aligned to the center. Each data presentation type should be labelled as Graph, Figure, or Table, and its sequence should be in running order, separate from each other.

Equations should be aligned to the left, and numbered with in running order with its number in parenthesis (aligned right), and please use the MathType add-on. Equations should be editable by the editorial office and not appear in a picture format.

Copyright Notice

Copyright

The authors shall retain the copyright of their work but allow the Publisher to publish, copy, distribute, and convey the work.

Licensing

Sustainable Marine Structures publishes accepted manuscripts under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). Authors who submit their papers for publication by Sustainable Marine Structures agree to have the CC BY-NC 4.0 license applied to their work, and that anyone is allowed to reuse the article or part of it free of charge for non-commercial use. As long as you follow the license terms and original source is properly cited, anyone may copy, redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform, and build upon the material.

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