Submissions

Author Guidelines

Author guidelines

Authors submitting papers for publication to Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society should first verify that their submission complies with the following requirements:

Different types of work will be accepted:

• Articles must be original, complete and fully-developed theoretical or empirical works.
• Viewpoints should take the form of essay, in which an innovative view is put forward dealing with a debate in the field of study of the journal, or providing analysis of a current social or cultural phenomenon.
• Reviews: book reviews.
• Profiles: interviews or comments on an intellectual figure of special relevance.

The works are to be submitted in OpenOffice Writer (odt) or Microsoft Word (doc) through the magazine's website. No other means of submission will be accepted, nor will correspondence be maintained regarding originals submitted outside the portal or in any other format.

Non-textual elements (tables, charts, maps, graphs, and illustrations, etc.) contained in the work will be inserted in the corresponding place in the text. In addition, editable graphs in OpenOffice Calc (ods) or Microsoft Excel (xls) format and maps, and illustrations or images in jpg or tiff formats at 300 DPI will be sent separately as a supplementary file. All elements will be numbered and titled, the font will be specified at the foot, and explicit references will be made in the text.

The submitted works will be unpublished and cannot be submitted for consideration to other journals while undergoing the review process of Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society. Exceptionally, the Editorial Board may decide to publish and / or translate a previously published text for reasons of scientific interest and / or the dissemination of particularly noteworthy contributions.

Monographic issues

Debats may publish monographic issues. This section is also open to proposals from the scientific community. The acceptance of a monographic issue is subject to the presentation of a project with the objectives and topics of the monographic issue as well as a detailed list of the expected contributions or method to call for papers. In the event that the proposed monographic issue is accepted by the Editorial Board, the director of the monographic issue will be responsible for requesting/calling for and receiving the originals. Once received, the articles will be submitted to the journal for review. The review process will be undertaken by experts following the double-blind review method. All works sent to Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society will be reviewed according to criteria of the strictest scientific quality. For more detailed information on the process of coordination and peer review of a monographic number, those interested should contact the Editorial Board of Debats.

Languages

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society is published in its paper-print version and its digital version in Valencian-Catalan and Castilian/Spanish.

The submitted works must be written in Valencian-Catalan, Castilian/Spanish or English. Should an article receive a positive review by anonymous reviewers and be approved by the Editorial Board, Debats. Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society will undertake the Valencian-Catalan or Castilian/Spanish translation.

The monographic issues will be translated into English and a print issue with be published yearly with this monographic content.

Format and extension of the journal

The articles and papers proposed for publication in Debats will be accompanied by a cover letter specifying the following information:

• Title, in Valencian-Catalan or Castilian/Spanish, and in English.

• Name of author(s)

• Institutional affiliation: university or centre, department, unit or research institute, city and country.

• E-mail address. All correspondence will be sent to this e-mail address. Should articles have multi-authorship, the corresponding author should be specified.

• Short biographical note (60 words maximum) specifying the highest qualifications awarded (and by which university), current position and main lines of research. Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society may publish this biographical note to complement the information related to the corresponding article.

• Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID): Should authors lack this ID Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Societyrecommends all authors to register at Please http://orcid.org/ to obtain an ORCID.

• Acknowledgments: Should you include acknowledgments, these will be placed after the abstract. The extension will not exceed 250 words.

The main text of the article will be preceded by a summary of 250 words maximum (which will clearly and concisely state the objectives, methodology, main results and conclusions of the work) and a maximum of 6 keywords (not included in the Title, and which must be internationally accepted terms in the scientific disciplines and / or habitual expressions of bibliometric classification). If the text is written in Valencian-Catalan or Castilian/Spanish, the abstract and the keywords shall also be included in English. If the original text is written in English, the Editorial Team will translate the title, abstract and key words into Valencian-Catalan and Castilian/Spanish if the author does not provide this translation.

Submitted articles must be anonymised: all citations, acknowledgments, references and other allusions that may directly or indirectly allow author identification will be deleted (under an anonymity label). The Editorial Team of Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society will ensure that all texts fulfil this requisite. If the article is accepted for publication, then the non-anonymised version will be sent to the journal, should it differ from the one sent previously.

Except in exceptional cases, articles will have an approximate extension of between 6,000 and 8,000 words including footnotes, but excluding title, abstracts, keywords, graphics, tables and bibliography.

Viewpoint shall consist of texts each with an approximate length of 3,000 words, including footnotes and excluding the title, abstracts, keywords, graphs, tables and bibliography. One of the texts should introduce the contribution that is subject of debate, made by the author of the same or by the coordinator of the debate.

Book reviews shall have an extension of 3,000 words maximum, and the following information shall be specified at the beginning: author, title, place of publication, publisher, year of publication and number of pages. It should also include the name and surnames, institutional affiliation and the e-mail address of the author of the review.

Interviews or Profiles shall have a maximum extension of 3,000 words, and at the beginning will specify the place and date of the interview and the name and surnames, the institutional affiliation of the person interviewed or the subject of the Profile. It should also include the name and surnames, institutional affiliation and the email address of the author of the interview or profile.

Text formatting should be as follows:

• Font type and size: Times New Roman 12.

• Text with justification and spacing of 1.5, except footnotes.

• Footnotes shall be consecutively numbered at the bottom of the page, not at the end of the text. We recommend minimum usage of footnotes and such use should be explanatory and not contain bibliographic citation.

• The pages will be numbered at the foot as of the Abstract starting with number 1 (the cover sheet with the author information will not be numbered).

• The beginning of paragraphs shall not be indented.

• All abbreviations will be defined the first time they appear in the text.

Each section of the text shall not be numbered and shall be written as follows:

• BOLD, UPPERCASE, SPACEd above and below.

• Italic, spaced above and below.

• Italic, spaced above and below, text begins after a space by way of example, The text begins here.

Citations/References shall follow the APA (American Psychological Association) guidelines.

• Citations/References will appear in the text, avoiding footnotes with a purely bibliographic function.
• Citations/References will appear in parentheses, including the surname of the author, year; for example, (Bourdieu, 2002).
• When two works by the same author coincide in the year of publication, they will be distinguished with lower case letters after the year; for example, (Bourdieu, 1989a).
• If there are two authors, their surnames should be joined by «and»: (Lapierre and Roueff, 2013); when there are more than two authors, the surname of the first author should be followed by «et al.» (Bennet et al., 2005), although in the final bibliographic references can include all the authors.
• The verbatim quotations will be quoted and followed by the corresponding reference in parenthesis, which will necessarily include the cited pages; should they exceed four lines, they will be transcribed separately from the main text, without quotes, with a larger indentation and a smaller font size.

The complete list of bibliographic references will be placed at the end of the text, under the heading «Bibliographic references». The references will be written according to the following guidelines:

• Only those works cited in the text will be included, and all cited works should be referenced in the final list.
• All references with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) shall be placed at the end.
• Alphabetical order shall be observed taking the author's last name. In the event of several references by the same author, they will be arranged chronologically according to the year of publication. First, the author's references will be included, secondly the works compiled by the author, and thirdly those of the author with other co-authors.
• French indentation shall be applied to all references.

The citations/references in the text will be made following APA (American Psychological Association) guidelines according to the reference document:

• Books: Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
• Journal article: 
• One author: Hirsch, P. M. (1972). Processing fads and fashions: An organization-set analysis of cultural industry systems. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 639-659.
• Two authors:  Bielby, W. T. and Bielby, D. D. (1999). Organizational mediation of project-based labor markets: Talent agencies and the careers of screenwriters. American Sociological Review, 64(1), 64-85.
• More than authors: Dyson, E., Gilder, G., Keyworth, G., Toffler, A. (1996). Cyberspace and the american dream: A magna carta for the knowledge age. Information Society, 12(3), 295-308.
•  Book chapter: DiMaggio, P. (1991). Social structure, institutions and cultural goods: The case of the united states. En P. Bourdieu, & J. Coleman (Eds.), Social theory for a changing society (pp. 133-166). Boulder: Westview Press.
• Internet references:  Raymond, E. S. (1999). Homesteading the noosphere (on line). http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/, access 15 April 2016

Authors of original works are requested to adapt their bibliography to follow the APA guidelines. Texts that do not conform to these guidelines will be returned to authors to make the necessary changes.

Selection and publication criteria

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society publishes academic papers of rigorous theoretical and empirical research in the fields of social sciences and the humanities in general. However, some monographs may incorporate some contributions from other disciplines related to the theme of culture, power and society, such as history, political science and cultural studies.

Peer-review will be undertaken by expert academics and will follow the double-blind method for the articles in the monographic section entitled Quadern and in the miscellaneous research articles entitled Articles. All of the work in these sections sent to Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society shall be evaluated according to criteria of the strictest scientific quality.

Formatting and presentation errors, non-compliance with the journal's standards or spelling and syntactic errors may lead to rejection of the work prior to review. On reception of a text meeting all the formal requirements, receipt will be acknowledged and the review process will begin.

In a first phase, the Editorial Team will carry out a general review of the quality and appropriateness of the scope of the work and may directly, without external review, reject works that are of an ostensibly low quality or that make no contribution to the scope of the journal. In this initial review, the Editorial Team may require assistance, if deemed necessary, from the members of the Editorial Board or the Scientific Board. The proposals put forward for discussion may be accepted after passing this preliminary review phase without the need for external peer-review.

The articles that pass this first review will be sent to two external reviewers, specialists in the corresponding research line or topic. In the event that the evaluations are discrepant, or for any other reason deemed necessary, the Editorial Team may send the text to a third reviewer.

According to the reviewers’ reports, the Editorial Team may take one of the following decisions, which will be communicated to the author:

1. Accepted for publication in the current version (or with slight modifications).
2. Accepted for publication subject to revision. In this case, publication will be subject to the author making all the changes requested by the Editorial Team. The deadline for making said changes will be one month, and a short report should be attached on resubmission explaining the changes made and how they fit the requirements of the Editorial Team. The proposed changes may include the conversion of a proposed article into a research note / bibliographic note, or vice versa.
3. Non publishable, but with the possibility to rewrite and resubmit the work. In this case, the re-submission of a new version will not imply any guarantee of publication, but the review process will restart from the beginning.
4. Non publishable.

In the event that a paper is accepted for publication, the author must revise the galley proofs within a maximum period of two weeks.

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society annually publishes a list of all persons who have made anonymous reviews as well as the statistics of accepted, revised and rejected articles and the average length of time between receipt of an article and communication to the author of the final decision.

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society may make public, in the event, any scientific malpractice: plagiarism, falsification or invention of data, individual appropriation of collective authorship or duplicate publication.

Publishing ethics, good practices, detection of plagiarism and/or scientific misconduct

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society is committed to complying with good practices and ethics in publication. These are understood as:

- Authorship: in the event of multi-authorship, the participation of all authors must be acknowledged, all authors must agree on the submission of the article and the author who is responsible must ensure that all authors approve the revisions and the final version.

 - Publication practices: the author must make known any previous publication of the article, including translations or simultaneous submissions to other journals.

 - Conflict of interest: authors must declare financial support of the research and any commercial, financial or personal relationship that may affect the results and conclusions of the work. In these cases, a statement should be included in the article stating such circumstances

 - Review process: the Editorial Board must ensure that the published research papers have been reviewed by at least two specialists in the field, and that the review process is fair and impartial. Therefore, it must ensure confidentiality of the review at all times and the non-existence of conflicts of interest of the reviewers. The Editorial Board shall base its decisions on the reasoned reports prepared by the reviewers.

The journal will implement mechanisms and double-check to detect plagiarism and/or scientific malpractice. Plagiarism is understood as:

• Present others’ work as your own

• Adopt words or ideas from other authors without due recognition

• Absence of quotation marks in a literal quotation

• Provide incorrect information regarding the true source of a citation

• Paraphrasing of a source without mentioning the source

• Abuse of paraphrasing, even if the source is mentioned

The practices constituting scientific malpractice are as follows:

• Fabrication, falsification, or omission of data and plagiarism

• Duplicate publication and self-plagiarism

• Individual authorship of collective authorship

• Conflicts of authorship

Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society may make scientific malpractices public should they be discovered. In these cases, the Editorial Board reserves the right to withdraw those previously published articles when the lack of reliability is determined subsequent to publication, due to involuntary errors or to fraud or the aforementioned scientific malpractices. The objective of such withdrawal is to correct any previously published scientific production, ensuring integrity of the works. The conflict of duplicity, caused by the simultaneous publication of an article in two journals, will be resolved by determining the date of receipt of the work in each journal. If only a part of the article contains an error, it can be corrected subsequently by means of an editorial note or admission of errata. In the event of conflict, the journal will ask the author or authors for explanations and relevant evidence for clarification, and will make a final decision based thereon.

The journal will publish a communication in its printed and electronic versions regarding the withdrawal of a particular text, stating the reasons for taking such a measure, in order to distinguish malpractice from involuntary error. Likewise, the journal will notify the withdrawal to the officials of the institution to which the author or authors of the article belong/s. As a preliminary step to the final withdrawal of an article, the journal may publish a communication of irregularity, providing the necessary information in the same terms as in the case of withdrawal. The communication of irregularity will be maintained for the minimum time required, and will conclude with its withdrawal or with the formal retraction of the article.