These guidelines set out the requirements for preparing manuscripts submitted to Socioinformatics. They follow the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS), and the journal's interdisciplinary focus. Authors are expected to read this document in full before submitting; manuscripts that do not comply may be returned without being sent for review.
1. Focus and Scope Fit
Socioinformatics is an interdisciplinary journal that examines how artificial intelligence and data engineering transform social phenomena and how social structures, in turn, shape these technologies. Before submitting, authors should assess whether their manuscript fits the journal's scope using the criterion below.
The common denominator of the scope
Every manuscript submitted to the journal must have a social-scientific research question, theory, or method. Artificial intelligence and data engineering must appear either as the object of study (its social effects, governance, meaning, and power relations) or as the analytical instrument (a computational social-science method).
Within scope
• Theoretical work that rethinks social-science theory in the face of algorithmic systems.
• Original empirical research drawing on digital trace data, computational methods, or field and archival data.
• Methodological work on validity, bias, reproducibility, and ethics in adapting computational methods to the social sciences.
Out of scope
• Applied work that reports only model performance (accuracy, F1, etc.) without posing a social-scientific question.
• Descriptive pieces that treat technology merely as background and offer no original theoretical or empirical contribution.
• Purely engineering or algorithm-development work and technical reports without a social dimension.
The scope is organised around thirteen strategic areas (A–M). The detailed taxonomy of these areas and the cross-references between them are provided on the journal's Aims and Scope page and in the accompanying list of subject areas.
2. Article Types
The journal considers work in the following types and lengths. Word counts refer to the main text and exclude the abstract, references, and table and figure captions.
• Research Article. Original empirical or computational findings (approximately 6,000–9,000 words).
• Theoretical Article / Review. Work that develops a conceptual contribution or critically synthesises a body of literature (approximately 6,000–10,000 words).
• Methods and Data Article. Work documenting a dataset, data pipeline, measurement instrument, or computational method for social-science research; sharing the underlying data and code is mandatory (approximately 4,000–7,000 words).
• Perspective / Commentary. An opinion on a current development, a short agenda-setting intervention, or a critical reply to previously published work (approximately 2,500–4,000 words).
• Book Review. A review of a book within the journal's scope published in the last three years (approximately 1,500–2,500 words).
3. Language and Abstract
• The journal publishes exclusively in English and accepts manuscripts written in English only.
• Each manuscript must include an English abstract (150–250 words) and 5–7 English keywords.
• Consistent British or American spelling should be used throughout. Manuscripts must be written in clear, publishable English; professional proofreading or language editing before submission is strongly recommended, particularly for authors writing in a second language.
• Language quality that impedes review may lead to a manuscript being returned for editing before assessment.
4. General Formatting
• File format: Microsoft Word (.docx). Page: A4; margins 2.5 cm.
• Body text 11–12 pt, 1.5 line spacing, justified; headings numbered and applied at consistent levels.
• Tables and figures must be cited in the text, numbered, and include their own source. Figures should also be supplied at a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
• Recommended structure for empirical research articles: Introduction, Related Literature / Theoretical Framework, Method, Findings, Discussion, Conclusion. Theoretical work may use a free structure suited to the argument.
5. Referencing
The journal uses the APA 7 (American Psychological Association, 7th edition) citation and reference style. Author–date order is required for in-text citations. A DOI must be added to every reference where one exists.
• Research outputs such as software, models, datasets, and code must also be cited in the reference list, together with version and access information.
• When a large language model is used as a tool, it is documented in the Method section and in the AI Use Declaration rather than in the reference list (see Section 8).
6. Research and Publication Ethics
The journal adopts the principles and flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors accept the following obligations:
• The work must be original, not under simultaneous review elsewhere, and not previously published.
• For research involving human participants, the relevant ethics-committee approval must be obtained; the approving board, date, and decision number must be stated in the Method section.
• Informed consent obtained from participants must be documented; studies involving vulnerable groups must describe the additional safeguards applied.
• Where a study collecting data after 2020 requires ethics-committee approval, that approval is mandatory; where approval is not required, this must be declared with justification.
7. Digital Trace Data and Data Ethics
Given the journal's focus, many studies use social media, platform records, or other digital trace data. For such data, authors are expected to:
• Explain the method of data collection and its legitimacy with respect to the platform's terms of use and applicable data-protection law (e.g., GDPR / national equivalents).
• Minimise personal data; anonymise or remove direct quotations, usernames, and any detail that could enable re-identification unless strictly necessary.
• Recognise that public availability does not equal consent to research use, and take the principle of contextual integrity into account.
• Discuss potential harms and mitigation strategies where sensitive groups or topics are involved.
8. Artificial Intelligence Use Declaration
As a journal that takes artificial intelligence as both its subject and its method, we expect exemplary transparency in the use of generative AI tools throughout the research and writing process.
• Authorship. AI tools cannot be listed as authors; responsibility and accountability rest with human authors alone.
• Declaration. If generative AI was used for text generation, coding, translation, data labelling, or analysis, the tool, version, and purpose of use must be described in a dedicated 'AI Use Declaration' section.
• Methodological use. When AI is used as an analytical instrument (e.g., content coding with a large language model), the prompt design, version, date, inter-coder reliability, and human validation must be reported in the Method section.
• Accuracy. The accuracy of AI outputs, the authenticity of sources, and any biases are the authors' responsibility; manuscripts containing fabricated references or unverified output will be rejected.
9. Data and Code Availability (Open Science)
The journal treats reproducibility as a marker of quality and encourages open-science practices.
• As far as ethical and legal constraints allow, authors are invited to make their data and analysis code openly available in a persistent repository (e.g., an institutional archive or a recognised open-data repository) with a DOI.
• Every article must include a brief 'Data and Code Availability' statement reporting the access status of the data and code. Where data cannot be shared, the reason must be given.
• For sensitive data that cannot ethically be shared, alternatives such as anonymised derivative data, synthetic data, or an access protocol are recommended.
10. Similarity and Plagiarism
• Every submission is screened with similarity-detection software. The similarity ratio (excluding the reference list) is expected to remain below a reasonable threshold; a high concentration of similarity to a single source is examined even when the overall ratio is low.
• Manuscripts in which plagiarism, self-plagiarism, fabrication, or falsification is identified are handled under the COPE flowcharts and rejected.
11. Authorship, Contribution, and Conflict of Interest
• Authorship criteria follow the ICMJE recommendations; each author must have made a meaningful contribution to the work. Contributions are declared using the CRediT taxonomy.
• ORCID is mandatory for all authors.
• Conflicts of interest and financial support (including funder and project number) must be disclosed in a separate section; where none exists, this too must be declared.
• The corresponding author manages the submission and correspondence and confirms that all authors have approved the manuscript.
12. Copyright and Licensing
The journal follows the Diamond open-access model: no article-processing charge (APC) or submission fee is charged to authors, and no access fee is charged to readers. Publication costs are met by the publishing institution.
• Published work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence; copyright remains with the authors.
• Authors retain the right to archive and share their work, with due attribution, in any repository of their choosing.
13. Evaluation Process
1. Preliminary check: the editor assesses the manuscript's fit with the scope and its formal and ethical requirements.
2. Double-blind review: manuscripts passing the scope check are evaluated by at least two independent reviewers; author and reviewer identities are mutually concealed.
3. Decision: an accept, revise, or reject decision is made in light of the reviewer reports. No guarantee of timing, issue, or publication is given.
To preserve blind review, authors must avoid self-identifying statements in the main file; author details and acknowledgements/funding statements must be provided on a separate title page.
14. Submission
All submissions are made online through the DergiPark system. At submission, authors are asked to provide: (i) a main text stripped of author information, (ii) a title page, (iii) ethics-committee approval (where required), and (iv) a copyright/licence and contribution declaration form.
Enquiries are handled through the journal's edito