Submission Guidelines

Publication ethics

The editors of Science & Technology Studies, as well as the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies (FSSTS) that facilitate the journal, take an active interest in publication ethics. This includes but is not limited to plagiarism, falsification of data, fabrication of results, issues of authorship, and inappropriate or non-transparent use of generative AI tools. Submitted manuscripts may be subject to checks using various electronic services in order to detect these. When preparing your manuscript, please make sure you follow the following guidance.

Authorship. Authorship is a way of assigning responsibility and giving credit for intellectual work. Authorship practices should be judged by how accurately and honestly they reflect each individual’s actual contribution to the final product of research. Authorship is important to the reputation, academic promotion, and funding opportunities of the individuals involved, as well as to the credibility and reputation of their affiliated institutions.

All listed authors must have made a substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work. While acquiring funding or providing technical services or materials may be essential to the research, these contributions alone do not justify authorship. Everyone who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the work, on the other hand, should be included as an author. All authors should participate in writing the manuscript by reviewing drafts and approving the final version. Everyone who has made other substantial contributions should be acknowledged. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to make sure that all authors and contributors to the work have been cited and or acknowledged appropriately.

Contributions that do not justify authorship should be acknowledged separately in the notes to the manuscript. These may include general supervision of a research group, assistance in obtaining funding, or technical support.

These criteria follow those recommended by several professional associations. See e.g. Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (2018) Agreeing on authorship. Recommendation for research publications.

Use of generative AI tools. Generative AI tools cannot be credited as authors, as they cannot take responsibility of the content of the submitted work. Authors who use generative AI tools in any aspect of preparing a manuscript must be transparent in disclosing how and which AI tools were used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.

If editors of the journal are convinced that generative AI tools have been used inappropriately or use has not been transparently disclosed, a submission may be rejected at any time during the editorial process. Already published articles may also be retracted.

The use of generative AI tools presents considerable confidentiality and copyright issues also with regard to referee and editorial work. Thus we ask for our reviewers and editors not to use generative AI tools, for example, in writing reviews or creating summaries.

These criteria follow those recommended by several professional associations. See e.g. Committee on Publication Ethics (2023) Authorship and AI tools.

Copyright. Science & Technology Studies publishes under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. Authors are responsible for obtaining necessary permissions from copyright holders to reproduce any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. Although Science & Technology Studies is open access, it adheres, when applicable, to the copyright guidation of the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, which further is aligned with the Finnish Copyright Act.

 

Preparation of manuscripts

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 them:

• I confirm that this manuscript contributes to the social scientific field of science and technology studies (STS)
• I confirm that this manuscript has not been previously published, nor is it under consideration to be published in another journal
• I confirm that I have read and followed the Submission guidelines of Science & Technology Studies
• I confirm that I have read and followed the Terms and conditions of Science & Technology Studies (see About the Journal).

Manuscripts should be written in UK English (use -ise ending rather than -ize) and saved in MS Word or rich text format (RTF). For peer-reviewed research articles, the total manuscript length – including tables, figures, and any appendices – should not exceed 10,000 words, excluding references.

An abstract of no more than 150 words and 3-6 keywords should be on the first page of the manuscript for a research paper. Do not include author details here, as the manuscript should be fully anonymized; these will be stored in the OJS submission system. Acknowledgements, author details, etc. will be included in the paper later if the manuscript proceeds to the copy-editing stage. Please follow below further instructions for anonymization:

• Remove all author information in the text (names, affiliations, acknowledgements) and change the references of author studies to “AUTHOR (year of publication)“. Place them first in the reference list and also omit all titles and publication channels. E.g.:
• AUTHOR 2001A
• AUTHOR 2001B
• AUTHOR 2015
• For multi-author references including the submitting author, remove names of all the authors even if they are not authors of this manuscript. Multi-author studies should be referenced similarly to above as “AUTHOR (year of publication)’’.
• Remove all author-related metadata from the manuscript file. In MS Word: File > Properties / Info > Inspect document / Remove author & company etc. details.

Tables and figures should be sent embedded within the manuscript. Editors may ask authors to provide figures and tables in the original format such as .xls as separate documents, if clarity or final layout so requires. Tables and figures should be numbered with short descriptive titles. Figures should give monetary values in euros (€) or US dollars ($).

Footnotes should be avoided. However, when necessary, notes should be numbered consecutively and included as endnotes. Endnotes are to be used only for substantive commentary, not for citation.

Long citations/quotations from informants, other authors, or references should be indented (no italics, no quotation marks). When in text, use ‘ ’ for concepts and " " for direct quotes.

 

Reference style and citations

The reference style of Science & Technology Studies is Harvard Sage (search for add-ons, if it is not automatically in your reference manager system). See more information about the style here: https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/sage_harvard_reference_style_0.pdf.

Examples for text citations:

If the author’s name is in the text, follow with year in parentheses: ''… Bernal (1939) has argued …''

If author’s name is not in the text, insert last name, comma and year: ''… several works (Bloor, 1981; Knorr, 1983; Mulkay, 1985) have described …''

When appropriate, the page number follows the year, separated by a colon: ''… it has been noted (Merton, 1964: 61–64) that …''

Where there are two authors, give both names, joined by ‘&’: ''… it has been stated (Geels & Schot, 2007) that …''

If there are three or more authors, use et al.: ''… some investigators (Smith et al., 2010) …''

If there is more than one reference to the same author and year, insert a, b, etc. in both text and the reference list: ''… it was described (Geels, 2002a, 2002b) …''

If two or more references by the same author are cited together, separete the years with a comma: ''… the author has stated in several studies (Geels, 2002, 2004, 2006) …''

For an institutional authorship, supply minimum citation from the beginning of the complete reference: ''… a recent statement (National Research Council, 1998: 201–205) …''

For authorless articles or studies, use the name of the magazine, journal, newspaper or sponsoring organisation (not the title of the article): ''… it was stated (Science Daily, 2005) that …''

For text citations, please also note the following:

• All references are to be identified at an appropriate point in the text by last name of author, year of publication, and pagination where appropriate, all within parentheses.
• Initials should be used without spaces or full points.
• Ibid., op. cit., loc. cit., infra, supra should not be used.
• Where et al. is used, it should be upright, not italic.
• Science & Technology Studies encourages inclusive referencing and linking research duly to previous research reported within the journal.

Examples for the reference list:

Journal article

Collins HM (1999) Tantalus and the Aliens: Publications, Audiences, and the Search for Gravitational Waves. Social Studies of Science 29(2): 163–197.

Ylijoki OH, Lyytinen A and Marttila L (2011) Different Research Markets: a Disciplinary Perspective. Higher Education 45: 307–335. 

Lim ET, Würtz P, Havulinna AS, et al. (2014) Distribution and Medical Impact of Loss-of-Function Variants in the Finnish Founder Population. PLOS Genetics 10(7): e1004494.

Journal article published ahead of print

Huth EJ, King K and Lock S (1988) Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. British Medical Journal. Epub ahead of print 12 June 2011. DOI: 10.1177/09544327167940.

Book 

Mullis K (1998) Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. New York: Pantheon Books.

Prigogine I and Stengers I (1984) Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.

Lawrence C and Shapin S (eds) (1998) Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Book chapter

Browne J (1998) I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and his Body. In: Lawrence C and Shapin S (eds) Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, pp.240–287.

Thesis or dissertation

Clark JM (2001) Referencing style for journals. PhD Thesis, University of Leicester, UK.

Article in a newspaper or magazine 

Gates D (2011) Boeing celebrates 787 delivery as program’s costs top $32 billion. Seattle Times, 13 September. Available at: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2016310102_boeing25.html (accessed 13.3.2015).

Article in case the author is unknown 

The Independent (2006) Referencing style for journals. 21 May, 56–57.

Conference paper 

Buur J and Sitorus L (2007) Ethnography as design provocation. In: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings (eds Cefkin M and Anderson K), Keystone, CO, USA, 3–6 October 2007: 140–150. Keystone, USA: EPIC.

Report 

General Accountability Office (2011) Aviation Safety: Status of FAA’s Actions to Oversee the Safety of Composite Airplanes. Report to Congressional Requesters, September 2011.

Blog post or website

Solheim E (2015) Targeted policies to eradicate poverty. In: OECD Insights Blog, 9 March. Available at: http://oecdinsights.org/2015/03/09/targeted-policies-to-eradicate-poverty/ (accessed 13.3.2015).

For the reference list, please also note the following:

• The reference list should be in alphabetical order (treat Mc as Mac).
• Where several references have the same author(s), ditto marks or em dashes should not be used; the name must be repeated each time.
• Last names containing de, van, von, De, Van, Von, de la, etc. should be listed under D and V respectively (De Roux DP, not Roux DP, de).
• All periodical data should be included – volume, issue and page numbers, publisher, place of publication, etc.
• Journal titles should not be abbreviated.
• Where et al. is used in reference lists, it should always be upright, not italic. Et al. is used in the reference list if the paper has more than six authors (thus up to six authors can be listed). If there are more authors, then list the first three and represent the rest by “et al.”