Guide for the Authors, for Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section B: Chemical Engineering (JOTCSB)

We prefer that the authors use "Zotero" (http://zotero.org; free of charge) or "Endnote" (http://www.endnote.com; commercial), or a similar online software like Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/), for generation of bibliographic list and citations. Please do not try to format the bibliography by yourself. We are using "Vancouver" citation style, which is available in all softwares cited. The length of articles (except for Letters to the Editor, which tends to be much shorter than a normal research article) cannot exceed 40 printed A4 pages.

Article template file for JOTCSB

We are using iThenticate plagiarism solution and our maximum allowed score is 30%. Higher scores are not allowed and the author will be given the plagiarism report and the manuscript will be declined.

We recommend that the authors register to ORCID at https://orcid.org/register and declare their user IDs when submitting their manuscript.

As a measure over authors, please do not select titles like "Prof. Dr.", "Lecturer, PhD" and so on. 

Our journal will use a manual heading-based system without numbers. Just arrange the following items as described below:

Title: Verdana, 12 point, boldface, the first letter of each word is capitalized (except for the words which must be lowercase like Latin names for bacteria or plants, etc.).

Author names, affiliations: Verdana, 10 pt, regular typeface. Use superscripted Arabic number to differentiate between the author affiliations, placed just after the last name.

E-mail addresses: Provide the e-mail address for the corresponding author. Authors may add telephone and fax numbers if they desire.

Abstract: Verdana, 10 point, boldface. The abstract text goes right after the title and will use single paragraph spacing.

Keywords: Verdana, 10 point, regular typeface, single paragraph spacing. The number of keywords will be 3 (minimum) and 5 (maximum).

Introduction: Verdana, 10 point, boldface.

The article text will be Verdana, 10 pt.

Material and Methods: Verdana, 10 point, boldface.

If desired, "Chemicals and Apparatus" title may be used where needed. This title will also be Verdana, 10 pt, and boldface. There will be blank lines preceding and succeeding every numbered titles. The text will be Verdana 10 pt.

The texts inside tables will be 9 points. Verdana again will be used as the typeface. Just add top and bottom borders to the heading row, and bottom borders to the last row.

Schemes usually used for reactions and related material will use Verdana, preferably at 9 or 10 points, inside the figures. Directly pasting from the drawing application into the word processor software is NOT allowed. Please use the "paste special" feature to paste it as an image (metafile pictures are strongly recommended).

Citing: Our journal uses a number-based reference system, and the number is given in normal parantheses like (18), (18-22), (18, 22-24),.

The words Scheme 1, Figure 1, etc., will have a fullstop at the end. The caption text will be centered the page.

Results: Verdana, 10 pt, bold typeface will be used. After a blank line, the article text will be Verdana, 10 pt, regular and 1.5 paragraph spacing.

The title "Conclusion" will be placed around here.

The title Acknowledgment will be 10 point, Verdana, and boldface.

References title will also be Verdana, 10 point, and boldface. The reference list will be arranged with Zotero or Endnote, or a similar software according to "Vancouver" reference style. The reference list will be 9 pt, Verdana, left-aligned and single-spaced.

An example for a journal article:

27. Priestley CM, Williamson EM, Wafford KA, Sattelle DB. Thymol, a constituent of thyme essential oil, is a positive allosteric modulator of human GABA A receptors and a homo-oligomeric GABA receptor from Drosophila melanogaster. British Journal of Pharmacology. 2003 Dec;140(8):1363–72.

An example for a book:

Vasile C, editor. Handbook of polyolefins. CRC Press; 2000 Jun 21.

Guidelines for the other types of references can be found in Zotero or Endnote softwares.

Supplementary files

The authors are encouraged to use supplementary files for detailing the study with spectral data, crystal structure refinement data, and other types of material should you recommend inclusion. All types of synthetic procedure will be included in the main text.

Usage of the units

The units will be, where possible, SI-based and the style g/mL will be preferred over g.mL^-1.

Publication ethics: It is imperative that the authors comply with the national and international ethical rules in research and writing the article. More information can be found at http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines.

You can submit your works and work with the editorial staff. You are free to receive new issue alerts and read the contents.This open access chemical journal can be added to your list of journals, and you can help us about the policies we are using in order to create a perfect example of open access publishing.

Our open access policy is quite straightforward. No one should access a scholarly paper by paying money. All scholarly activities should be free to download, read, and cite.

Open Access Journals are very nice examples of this philosophy, and their most valued and important asset is the presence of a strong peer-reviewing medium. Without this, an open access journal would quickly turn into garbage.

We, managers of this journal, will keep the importance of peer-review in mind, and use this asset as much as possible, in order to make the readers meet the authors.

No private information, including the e-mails, names, or affiliations, will be shared outside this open-access journal system.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

The copyeditor will investigate the article and use a separate list of the changes to be made.   The resultant document will be converted into PDF file and submitted to the journal website. The authors will work on their copies to follow the changes and will correct them if they agree with the copyeditor.

Ethical Principles and Ethical Rules of the Journal
Our journal adheres to the international standards and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and publishes items by referring to them.

ETHICAL GUIDELINES
Guidelines for the Editors
An editor (editors, associate editors, etc.) should provide impartial consideration to all manuscripts offered for publication, judging each on its particular feature without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s). An editor should review and treat a manuscript submitted for publication with all reasonable speed. An editor takes the sole responsibility for accepting or rejecting a manuscript for publication. An editor may seek assistance on a manuscript from specialists chosen for their expertise and fair judgment. An editor should not reveal any information about the manuscript under consideration to anyone other than the author and designated reviewers until after the evaluation process is complete. An editor should respect the intellectual independence of authors.

Authors
Our journal considers a person as an author who is responsible at least for a part of the work. Authors should be able to explain the problem in study in a deep manner. For our journal, all authors are responsible for the content they submitted. The corresponding author is responsible for the agreement of all the authors and to keep them informed about the submission process since first submission of their manuscript. He/she is responsible for providing the license to publish, in case of acceptance, on behalf of all the authors. Our journal assumes that submitting the paper implies in total agreement from all the authors. For manuscripts with more than 8 authors, all the authors should provide a declaration specifying what was their contribution to the manuscript. It is not acceptable for JOTCSB to consider for publication anything that was previously published, neither entirely nor partly, in other journals. Anything sent to our journal must not be under analysis by anywhere else. Simultaneous submissions to JOTCSB and any other journal, is considered a major conduct flaw, and all the authors will be definitely banned, and all their previous publications in JOTCSB will be publicly retracted. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated in the same way. Multiple manuscripts, dealing with closely related subjects and/or variables are discouraged as long as they could figure in a single paper.

Reviewers
JOTCSB invites peers to review its submissions, relying on their expertise, curricula, and their will to review them as volunteers. By accepting to review a manuscript, the reviewer commits himself to do so in due time. Delays are extremely negative to the review process and makes it last much longer than it should. When a reviewer is requested, he/she is gently asked to answer the invitation e-mail, informing if he/she is willing or not willing to review the manuscript. It is a gesture of politeness, and it avoids delays too. By accepting to review a manuscript, the reviewer declares that no conflicts of interests do exist, and he/she is doing his/her revision for the wealth and progress of Science. Those reviewers who answer our requests, agreeing or not, and those who respect the deadlines, are scored positively, and eventual submissions they could send to JOTCSB will be treated with priority.

Journal’s Publication Policy
Our journal does not require any kinds of payments such as page charges, article processing costs, or others. The journal uses a double-blind peer review policy for evaluating articles. The author submits their material, a secretary makes an initial evaluation about it and decides if the article is eligible for further action, or a refusal is issued. Same applies to any article whose similarity score by iThenticate is higher than 31%. The author is welcomed if they decide to resubmit the material after considerable reviewing. When the article is accepted for peer review, the editor-in-chief decides who will be the section editor, and passes the article file to them. The section editor calls forth at least two reviewers, who are experts in the field, and waits for their evaluation. The section editor gathers the evaluations from the reviewers, makes a brief list concerning the reviewers’ recommendations, and sends to the author, along with the decision about the article (acceptance, minor revision, major revision, rejection). The author receives the report and starts working, making responses and sends the revised article and the processed report. In some cases, the section editor makes it enough and does not need to send the revised material to the reviewers. If this is not the case, the reviewers comment about the revision made and make their final decision. There are rare cases in which a revised manuscript needs additional revision sessions and the process starts again. After the revisions, the manuscript is most probably accepted and is passed to the Copyeditor, who examines the usage of English and makes corrections on the article. They pass the copyedited article to the Layout Editor, who creates the final look and feel of the manuscript, and the final PDF file. The final PDF file is returned to the corresponding author for proofreading and when required, a list of correction is received. The PDF file is corrected and marked as ready-to-publish, the short name of the PDF file is set, the reference list is controlled, the list of authors is checked and ORCID ID’s are entered. As a last step, the title, abstract, publication date, and page range are checked and DOI name is requested. If everything is smooth, the journal system allows the applicant to have a DOI name, then the article is registered to a journal issue, the order is set, and the process approved. The article is published and can be seen in the journal website. If there are still something to be corrected, the process begins again and the corrected article PDF is substituted for the old one.

The time required for evaluation of a manuscript changes from article to article; however, it takes an average of four months to get a result. Exceptions occur where a reviewer responds too quickly, or the author prepares the report just some days after they receive it. In these cases, the evaluation takes only one or two months. On the other hand, the delays from reviewers and authors, one reason of which is capturing the e-mail by junk mail filters and they could not be aware of the development, therefore a great lagging is experienced. A similar reason is that the reviewer’s or author’s e-mail address is blocked or over quota, so the message is never received.

Please access the Copyright Transfer Form here, as it will be necessary in the submission step.

The author is free to withdraw their article only in the pre-control stage.

Please be advised,
Prof. Dr. Satılmış BASAN
Editor-in-chief, JOTCSB