Author Guidelines

Aims and scope

The first aims of this initiative of launching, for the first time, the Somali Journal of Science, Technology and Society (SJSTS) as Online and Open Access Journal are as follows:

  1. Diffusion of all scientific and technical information and results in all field of Sciences and Technologies, with a defined approach of Responsible Research and Innovation.
  2. To provide publishing platform to Somali scientists, scholars and researchers in the Diaspora and the locals.
  3. To give Somali scholars and Somali Diaspora a chance to be part of the scientific community who assists and helps others in publication and review.
  4. To create channels for the promotion and publication of research papers about and from socially, economically, and culturally disadvantaged groups around the world.
  5. To build a network of Somali Universities, Research Institutions, scholars and researchers willing to increase the dissemination of Science, Technologies and Society, with the Responsible Research and Innovation and with the Science Diplomacy approaches.

Overview

Manuscripts will be carefully scrutinized for evidence of plagiarism, duplication and data manipulation; in particular, images will be carefully examined for any indication of intentional improper modification. Any suspected misconduct will result in a quick rejection and is then reported to the US Office of Research Integrity.

Ensure that the following items are present
One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address

Ensure all necessary files have been uploaded

  • Manuscript file
  • Include keywords (no more than five)
  • All figures (include relevant captions)
  • All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
  • Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided

Further considerations

  • Ensure that all references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa
  • Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)
  • A competing interests statement is provided in the manuscript, even if the authors have no competing interests to declare
  • Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed
  • Referee suggestions and contact details provided, based on journal requirements

Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'. Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission. Note that submitted manuscripts will not go through language-focused copyediting with the journal prior to or after acceptance; language-focused copyediting is the responsibility of the authors prior to submission.

Preparing your manuscript

Manuscripts should be written in American English consistently throughout. Check for consistent spelling of names, terms, and abbreviations, including in tables and figure captions. Note that submitted manuscripts will not go through language-focused copyediting with the journal prior to or after acceptance; language-focused copyediting is the responsibility of the authors prior to submission. Each manuscript has to be typewritten and double-spaced throughout; pages should be in A4 format and numbered. The manuscript should be submitted in Word format (we recommend Times New Roman or Arial as font for easier reading by reviewers). If names of equipment or substances are mentioned in the text, brand, company names and locations (city and state) for equipment and substances should be included in parentheses within the text.

Declarations
All manuscripts must contain the following sections (compulsory):

  • Ethical approval
  • Availability of data and material
  • Declaration of interests (i.e. competing and other relevant interests)
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – assistance

At submission, we require authors to disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the production of submitted work. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work, how they used it. If authors have used AI assisted technologies to generate major parts of the manuscript text (e.g. >25%) and particularly when the first draft of the full length manuscript or the discussion was generated by AI assisted technologies, this should be highlighted. Please indicate in the cover letter the approximate percentage of text generated by AI in four categories: 0%, up to 5% (minimal), 5 to 25% (moderate), greater than 25% (extensive). The editorial office generally supports the use of AI technology as long as it is transparently made clear to all concerned. Articles generated with moderate or extensive AI support will be labelled visually by the publisher to make the AI support for the work fully understood by all readers.

Please note, authors must carefully review and edit the results of any AI based output, because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Authors should be able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper, including in text and images produced by the AI. Humans must ensure there is appropriate attribution of all quoted material, including full citations.

Authors should not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Also chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors, because they (as any other AI-based technology) cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, and these responsibilities are required for authorship. Therefore, humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies.

Parts of the manuscript

The first page must contain:

  1. Title (lower case), without acronyms. Ideally, the title should include a maximum of 120 characters or 15 words.
  2. First name and family name of each author, separated by commas;
  3. Affiliation(s) of each author (in English);
  4. Acknowledgments;
  5. Full name and full postal address of the corresponding author. Phone, fax number and e-mail address for the correspondence should also be included;
  6. Three to five key words.

The second page should contain:

  1. Authors' contributions, e.g., information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in the study (http://www.icmje.org/#author);
  2. All the above-detailed declarations (i.e. IRB approval, data availability statement, declaration of interests, author contributions and acknowledgments);
  3. Further information (e.g., prior conference presentation).

Tables and figures

If tables are used, they should be double-spaced on separate pages. They should be numbered and cited in the text of the manuscript.

If figures are used, they must be submitted as .tiff or .jpg files, with the following digital resolution:

  1. Color (saved as CMYK): minimum 300 dpi;
  2. Black and white/grays: minimum 600 dpi;
  3. One column width (8.5 cm) or 2 column widths (17.5 cm).

A different caption for each figure must be provided at the end of the manuscript, not included in the figure file.

Other

If abbreviations are used in the text, authors are required to write full name+abbreviation in brackets [e.g. Multiple Myeloma (MM)] the first time they are used, then only abbreviations can be written (apart from titles; in this case authors have to write always the full name).

If names of equipment or substances are mentioned in the text, brand, company names and locations (city and state) for equipment and substances should be included in parentheses within the text.

Key words

Please provide 3 to 5 key words which can be used for indexing purposes.

Abstract

The authors are required to pay particular attention to preparing their abstract as this is a reflection of their work and may be the only part that is read by some readers. The abstract may not contain more than 400 words. It should be information and data rich. The abstract should be formatted with the following headings: (1) Background, (2) Methods (3) Results, (4) Conclusions. The results section of the abstract should summarize the main results supported by actual data in terms of numbers and key characteristics of the study cohort (if applicable), percentages, percent differences, important correlations, number of events analysed and event rates at typical durations of follow-up (e.g. 30 days, 6 months, and 1 or 5 years, as appropriate), hazard or odds ratios and similar information (with 95% confidence intervals for key outcomes) including also some p-values etc. For clinical studies, please always mention the number of patients and some important characteristics of the study population (e.g. % females, mean age [if relevant with SEM, SD or range], etc.). Please pay particular attention for the abstract to be straight and to the point and check whether the key messages are presented including important facts and numbers, and p-values supporting these messages. If in doubt, add more data rather than less. Please omit all "filling words" used for style such as "thus", "therefore", "moreover" and the like.

Text

Manuscripts should be submitted in Word. Preferred font: Times New Roman or Arial.

Declaration of interest

A declaration of interest statement must be included in the manuscript after any “Acknowledgements’ and ‘Funding’ sections. If there is no conflict of interest, authors must include ‘Declaration of Interest: none declared’. Submissions that do not include this section will not be sent for peer review

References

References should be prepared strictly according to the Vancouver style. References must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first cited in the text (not alphabetical order), and they must be identified in the text by Arabic numerals in superscript. References in the main text must always be cited after dots and commas.
References to personal communications and unpublished data should be incorporated in the text and not placed under the numbered references [Example: (Wright 2011, unpublished data) or (Wright 2011, personal communication)]. Where available, URLs for the references should be provided directly within the Word document.

References in the References section must be prepared as follows:

  1. References with up to 6 authors should list all authors with their initials;
  2. References with more than 6 authors should list the first 3 authors with their initials followed by et al.
  3. Title style: sentence case; please use a capital letter only for the first word of the title;
  4. Journal titles mentioned in the References list should be abbreviated according to the following websites:
    1. ISI Journal Abbreviations Index (http://library.caltech.edu/reference/abbreviations);
    2. Biological Journals and Abbreviations (https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/bioscience-journal-abbreviations);
    3. Medline List of Journal Titles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?term=currentlyindexed);
  5. Put the year after the journal name;
  6. Never put month and day in the last part of the references;
  7. Cite only the volume (not the issue in brackets);
  8. Pages have to be abbreviated, e.g., 351-8.

Examples:

Standard journal article
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med 2002;347:284-7.

Proceedings
Christensen S, Oppacher F. An analysis of Koza's computational effort statistic for genetic programming. In: Foster JA, Lutton E, Miller J, Ryan C, Tettamanzi AG, eds. Genetic programming. EuroGP 2002: Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Genetic Programming, 2002 Apr 3-5, Kinsdale, Ireland. Berlin: Springer; 2002. pp 182-91.

Article with organization as author
Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. Hypertension, insulin, and proinsulin in participants with impaired glucose tolerance. Hypertension 2002;40:679-86.

Books
Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis, MO: Mosby; 2002.
Bjørn Lomborg, ed. RethinkHIV - Smarter ways to invest in ending HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2012.
Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, eds. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; 2002. pp 93-113.

Manuscript submission

Submission of a manuscript implies:

  • That the work described has not been published before;
  • That it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else;
  • That its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out.

Accepted manuscripts

Manuscripts submitted and accepted for publication will be published as open access articles, immediately free to read, download and share.

Early view

Early View articles are complete full-text articles published online in advance of their publication in an issue. Early View articles are the version of record and are complete and final. They have been fully reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and the authors’ final corrections have been incorporated. As they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. Early View articles are given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the article to be cited and tracked before it is allocated to an issue. After issue publication, the DOI remains valid and can continue to be used to cite and access the article.

Permissions

In case extracts (text passages/figures/tables) from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright holder(s) and credit the source(s) in the article. A copy of the written permission has to be provided before publication (otherwise the paper cannot be published) and appropriately cited. The procedure for requesting permission is the responsibility of the Authors. Please be aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that the publisher will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions. In such cases, material from other (free) sources should be used.

Posting of unrefereed manuscripts to a community preprint server (e.g. arXiv or bioRxiv) by the author does not preclude consideration for publication. Authors who post to a community preprint server should identity the preprint server and include the accession # or DOI in their cover letter. Upon publication, authors should request that the respective community preprint server acknowledges that the article has been published and add that the journal reference [including DOI link to the published article] is included.

Editorial review and acceptance

The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to our readership. Except where otherwise stated, manuscripts are peer-reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers and the Editor. Final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editorial Board, who reserves the right to refuse any material for publication.

Manuscripts should be in a clear, concise and direct style. Where contributions are judged as acceptable for publication based on content, the Editor and the Publisher reserve the right to modify typescripts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition and improve communication between author and reader. If extensive alterations are required, the manuscript will be returned to the author for revision.

Peer-review policy

All submissions to Somali Journal of Science, Technology and Society are first checked for completeness (see Author Guidelines) before being sent to an Editor, who decides whether they are suitable for peer review. If an Editor is on the author list or has a competing interest in a particular manuscript, another member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to oversee peer review. When making a decision, Editors will consider the peer-reviewed reports, but they will not be bound by the opinions or recommendations contained in them. A single peer reviewer's or the Editor's concern may result in the manuscript being rejected. Peer review reports are sent to authors along with the editorial decision on their manuscript.

Please see the About the Journal page for more information.

Authorship and contributorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to: i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data, and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published; and iv) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions. Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading. Authors can find detailed information on the Publisher's website.

Changes in authorship
Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal Editor:  Authors are requested to sign and send to the Editors a statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author(s) to be removed or added.
Please note that if your manuscript is accepted you will not be able to make any changes to the authors, or order of authors, of your manuscript once the editor has accepted your manuscript for publication. 

No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor.

Role of the funding source
Authors are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, it is recommended to state this.

Obligation to register Clinical Trials 
The ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/faqs/clinical-trials-registration/). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.

Protection of human subjects and animals in research
When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. An Informed Consent statement is always required from patients involved in any experiments. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.  Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.

Manuscript categories and criteria

The Somali Journal of Science, Technology and Society journal accepts the following categories of articles:

Original Articles should not exceed 4000 words (excluding abstract, references, tables and figures) and may include up to 8 figures and/or tables and up to 40 references. Additional figures, tables and references should be submitted as supplement. The article should be divided into the following sections: Title page, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Acknowledgements (funding, declaration of interest).
The abstract of Original Articles should be divided into the sections 1) Background, 2) Methods, 3) Results, 4) Conclusions and should not exceed 400 words. Note: the abstract needs to be data-rich and contain all main study results (see above).
Original Articles include the following:
- Guidelines
- Consensus reports
- Scientific statements
- White papers
- Hypotheses
- Epidemiology studies
- Clinical research studies
- Translational research
- Basic science studies
- Meta-analyses
- Trial design papers
- Reports on clinical trials
Note: Report clinical trials according to the CONSORT recommendations. All trials have to be registered with ClinicalTrials.gov or similar.

Reviews should not exceed 6000 words (excluding abstract, references, tables and figures) and may include up to 8 figures and/or tables and up to 120 references. Additional figures, tables and references should be submitted as supplement.
No particular format is required; headings should be used to designate the major divisions of the paper.
The abstract can be unstructured and should not exceed 400 words. Note: the abstract needs to be data and information rich (see above).
Reviews include the following:
- Literature review
- State-of-the-art reviews
- Systematic review
- Meeting reports
- Mini-reviews / Facts and numbers reviews
Note: Mini-reviews and Facts and Numbers reviews should not exceed 1500 words (excluding abstract, references) and have no more than 3 tables and figures, and they may include up to 40 references

Case Reports should not exceed 1500 words and may include up to 20 references. Case reports should include title page, an unstructured abstract with no subheadings (not exceeding 250 words), keywords, an introduction, a description of the case(s) under the heading, ‘Case Report’ and a discussion of the findings in the context of current practice, acknowledgements (funding, conflict of interest).
The case report should be relevant to the scope of the journal and should provide new insights into the diagnosis, treatment, or management of a particular condition. It should describe a unique or rare case that has not been previously reported in the literature.

Editorials should not exceed 1500 words (excluding references, tables and figures) and include typically one, with exceptions two figures and/or tables and up to 20 references. Editorials do not contain an abstract.
Editorials include the following:
- Commenting on a paper
- Commenting on an issue of general medical relevance
- “Debate” items

Letters to the Editor should not exceed 750 words. No abstract and up to 10 references.