Index-Based Assessment of Groundwater Vulnerability, Metal Pollution and Human Health Risk: A Case Study of Oghe Area, Southeastern Nigeria

The article writing rules for JOTCSA are fairly simple and are explained in the article template below. Downloading the article template file is highly recommended. Most of the issues are outlined in the template file. 

Please note that we have adopted a new heading system with numbers, starting from 10(1). Please check the article template below.

A CHANGE IS ANNOUNCED TO ALL USERS OF JOTCSA, EFFECTIVE ON JULY 03, 2023

The JOTCSA editorship has decided to take some precautions for the well-being of the journal and their users.
It has recently been decided that the article file will contain all figures and tables in their original positions. In addition, upload the images and tables in your article embedded into a Microsoft Word or Libreoffice Writer document.
 

1) All figures, schemes and tables should be in a proper format. Images might be tagged image format, TIF (with LZW compression), and portable network graphics, PNG (maximum compression). A freeware software named Irfanview, available at https://www.irfanview.com, can simply create TIF or PNG images for you. Firstly, try right-clicking on an image present in your word-processor file and saving as an image file. 
 

2) You may choose from Microsoft Word .DOC version and Libreoffice Writer .ODT version. 
 

3) A common problem: Please make the numbers and orders of authors in your article stay the SAME at all times. Double check your authors and their orders when you are ready to submit your article. There has been much debate and please do NOT add or remove authors nor change their orders.
 

4) Please do not submit your works if you have not declared your reviewer suggestion forms. If it is, by any way, not possible to suggest reviewers at the submission stage, please do not forget to upload the suggestion forms to the Files tab. Also important is that reviewers working in the same department of the author will not accepted and therefore cannot be suggested. Additionally, you cannot select two reviewers working at the same department.
 

5) Kindly direct your queries about the state of your manuscripts to the section editor. They can much more information than the managing editor, who can only provide the already-seen status reports when you log in and see for yourself. It is also possible that the section editor can stop insisting in a non-responding reviewer and assign another; so your query might work for the better.

Please do not hesitate to contact the managing editor at jotcsa@turchemsoc.org for anything you wonder about publishing your paper.

Additional Information of the Guide for the Authors, for Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section A: Chemistry (JOTCSA)

The journal management recommends that all authors (not only the corresponding author) register to ORCID at https://orcid.org/register and get a free ORCID ID. The registration process takes about only a couple of minutes. The corresponding author will complete the document of ORCID ID and e-mail addresses for editorial use. CTRL-clicking on the ORCID image next to the author name will enable the reader to view the ORCID profile of the given author. Please also note that you may not give the same ORCID ID to one or more authors in your article.

We prefer that the authors use "Zotero" (https://www.zotero.org/, free of charge) or "Endnote" (https://www.endnote.com/, commercial), or similar online software like Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com/?interaction_required=true, free of charge), for the generation of bibliographic list and citations. We are using the "Vancouver" citation style, which is available in all softwares mentioned above. After preparation of the article, please use the "convert citations to text" feature of the reference manager you use. 
 

We are using Intihal.net (formerly, we used iThenticate) plagiarism software and our maximum allowed score for the document is, depending on the conditions of the article,  about 20-25%. We look at the document and if we see a pattern of plagiarism, we return the document. If not, we continue the process. In cases with high similarity, it is recommended that the author works with article editing firms to lower the score.

Please do not submit PDF copies of your articles for preliminary control. We accept Microsoft Word DOC, Microsoft Word DOCX, and LibreOffice ODT. We directly work on the manuscript, forming changes that are trackable.

Please do not submit your work again from the very beginning, if the management requires that you prepare a revision. Just browse to your existing submission and use the upload module to upload the newer version. If you are stuck, please send the revised article with an e-mail to the managing editor at jotcsa@turchemsoc.org.

Our journal will use, beginning from 10(1), a manual heading-based system with numbers, like 1. INTRODUCTION, 2.1. Materials and Methods, etc. More information will be found in the template file.

You may download the article templates, depending on your word processor, from the link below. Kindly recall that we do not have any LaTeX templates for now:
 

📝 article_template_word.docx 
(please contact the editorial office at jotcsa@turchemsoc.org for open document, ODT, form of this file). 

📝 APC_CONSENT_FORM.docx 

*Potential reviewer recommendation form 

Reaction schemes usually used for reactions and related material will use Arial or Verdana, preferably at 9 or 10 points, inside the figures. Our journal recommends that authors use "Chemdraw" or "ChemSketch" or "MarvinSketch" softwares. Directly pasting from the drawing application into the word processor software is NOT recommended. Please use the "paste special" feature to paste it as a metafile image.

Citing: Our journal uses a number-based reference system, and the number is given in normal parenthesis like (17). Other examples include (1-3, 17), (1-3, 17, 19-21), etc. The above-mentioned reference managers have the required tools to create citations in the text. When inserting a new paragraph, the manager will safely rearrange the citations, refreshing the numbers. 

For presentation of proton or carbon nuclear magnetic resonance data, please see the article template above.

The words Scheme 1, Figure 1, etc., will have a full stop at the end of the caption. The caption text will be centered on the page.

Supplementary information: The authors are encouraged to use supplementary information, for detailing the study with spectral data, crystal structure refinement data, and other types of material should you recommend including. All types of synthetic procedures will be included in the main text. Supplementary files will be added as a new file by the editors.

Usage of the units: The units will be, where possible, SI-based and the style g/mL will be preferred over g.mL-1. Please do not mix these two and be consistent throughout the manuscript about using the units.

Journal's Ethical Principles and Rules

Our journal adheres to international standards and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) standards and publishes articles by referring to them.

ETHICS

Guidelines for Editors: An editor (editors and section editors) should objectively evaluate all articles submitted for publication, evaluating each on its own merits, regardless of race, religion, nationality, gender, seniority, or institutional affiliation. An editor should review and deal with a manuscript submitted for publication at reasonable speed. The editor has sole responsibility for accepting or rejecting an article for publication. The editor may seek assistance on an article from experts selected for their expertise and fair judgment. Until the review process is complete, the editor should not disclose any information about the manuscript under review to anyone other than the author and appointed reviewers. Intellectual independence of the authors should be respected.

Authors: Our journal considers the person responsible for at least a part of the work as the author. Authors should be able to explain the problem in the study in depth. All authors for our journal are responsible for the content they submit. The corresponding author is responsible for accepting all authors from the first submission of the article and informing them about the submission process. If accepted, all authors are obliged to grant the publishing license on their behalf. Our journal assumes that the submission of the article is the complete agreement of all authors. For articles with more than 8 authors, all authors must make a statement, detailing what their contribution to the article is.

It is not acceptable for JOTCSA to consider for publication anything that has been previously published, in whole or in part, in other journals. Simultaneous submissions to JOTCSA and any other journal is considered a gross misconduct and all authors are strictly prohibited and all previous publications in JOTCSA are publicly retracted. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated in the same way. Multiple articles that cover closely related topics and/or variables are not recommended (if they can not be included in a single article).

For studies involving biological materials from animals and humans, the authors should state in their articles (preferably in the Acknowledgments section) from the authorized committee of their institution, as well as from the biological material donors or their relatives, that they performed the study in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and submit “informed consent forms” obtained from the ethics committee.

Reviewers: JOTCSA invites colleagues to review their submissions based on their expertise, curriculum, and willingness to voluntarily review. By agreeing to review a draft, the referee commits to doing so in a timely manner. Delays are extremely negative for the review process and make it take much longer than it should. When asked to reply to an invitation email from a reviewer, they are kindly wanted to respond to the invitation email by stating whether they are willing to review the article. This is a gesture of courtesy and avoids delays. By agreeing to review a manuscript, the referee declares that there are no conflicts of interest and that their review is for the enrichment and advancement of science. Reviewers who accept our requests and respect deadlines are scored positively and any final submissions they can submit to JOTCSA are given priority.

Journal's Publication Policy: Our journal charges article processing fee (APC, 50 USD or 50 EUR for each article). The journal uses a double-blind peer-review policy to evaluate articles. The author presents their material and a secretary makes an initial assessment of it and decides whether the article is suitable for further processing or a decision of rejection has been made. The same is true for all articles with a similarity score higher than 20% by Intihal net (formerly, we used Ithenticate). It is welcome if the author decides to resubmit the material after substantial revision. When the article is accepted for peer review, the editor-in-chief decides who will be the section editor and forwards the article file to them. The section editor calls at least two referees who are experts in their fields and waits for their evaluations under considerable period of time. The section editor collects the evaluations from the referees, makes a short list of the referees' suggestions, and sends the decision (acceptance, minor revision, major revision, rejection) to the author along with the article. These operations are performed by Dergipark, so great time is saved. The author receives the report and starts working, answers the questions, and submits the corrected article and the processed report. In some cases, the section editor finds this sufficient and does not need to send the revised material again to the reviewers. Otherwise, the referees comment on the revision and make their final decision. There are rare occasions when a revised draft needs additional editing sessions and the process starts over. After revisions, the article is likely accepted and forwarded to the copyeditor, who examines the use of English and makes corrections to the article. The copied article is forwarded to the Layout Editor, who creates the final view of the draft and the final PDF file. The final PDF file is exported to the proofreader and retrieved as needed as a list of revisions or markup directly on the PDF. The PDF file is corrected and submitted ready for publication, the short name of the PDF file is set, the reference list is checked, the author list is checked, and the ORCID IDs are entered. As the last step, the title, abstract, publication date, and page range are checked and the DOI name is requested. If all go well, the journal system allows the applicant to have a DOI name, then the article is registered in a journal issue, the ranking is determined, and the process is approved. The article is published and can be viewed on the journal's website. If something still needs to be fixed, the process starts again and the corrected article PDF replaces the old one. It should be noted that if the issue is published, there are five extra days to make changes. No changes are allowed after this period and the Erratum document should be issued and published in the next issue.

The time it takes to evaluate an article varies from article to article; however, it takes between two and four months to get results. Exceptions occur when a reviewer responds quickly or when the author prepares the report a few days after receiving it. In these cases, the assessment only takes a month or two. On the other hand, reviewers and authors may have delays, partly because the e-mail is caught by the junk mail filters and they are not aware of the progress; therefore undesirable delays occur. A similar reason is that the e-mail address of the reviewer or author is blocked or exceeded the quota, so the message never reaches the user.

Conflict of interest: Authors should declare their conflict of interest (if any) at the end of the article. It should also be declared that there is no conflict of interest.

If there is a conflict of interest, the author or authors should be specific and state any financial affiliation of all authors of the article with any sponsoring organization and any for-profit interests represented by the organization and any product discussed or debated or for-profit.

Withdrawal: There is a form prepared by Dergipark that editors can fill in regarding issues of withdrawal, and Dergipark will be informed.

Sometimes it can be done to make a change that has already been published. The journal's editorial team and staff (if necessary) work together to make necessary changes according to the journal's policies and COPE's guidance.

Necessary changes (minor errors do not count here) include a post-publication statement, which is permanently linked to the original article. The mentioned changes may be an update notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction notice, or a removal notice (which is considered very rare).

To ensure transparency in records and ensure the integrity of recorded records, post-publication notices are added to original articles. Access to all post-broadcast announcements is free, starting from the broadcast content.

Version of Record

The published article "Version of Record" is the final, definitive, and reproducible version in the collected records.

The Record Version of this product consists of the following items:

a) The article in its final form, including (but not limited to) abstract, text, references, bibliography, tables without groups, drawings and data, and revised and accepted after peer-review.
b) Supplementary material (if any)
Authors should inform the journal as soon as possible if they find errors in their published articles. It becomes especially important to interpret the data or find errors in the information presented that will change the data. The corresponding author has the responsibility of organizing a physical or virtual meeting of all co-authors before any written development requests are made.

In particular, the corresponding author is free to make corrections if he/she considers that the article needs to be corrected. In such a case, the run manager or managing editor should be contacted.

Notification of change
Preparing a record statement for the equipment requirement of an error or omission in which the interpretation of the article may be affected but the scientific integrity or the original structure can be preserved intact.

The corresponding author and all other authors must write and approve the improvement of their articles. It is very rare that an error in the publishing process will be requested by the system rules journal for a correction notice without the direct integrity of the authors. In this very rare case, the journal will do its best to inform authors.

Changes sometimes lead to a full review of the manuscript and, if there are errors in question, the authors should provide further information before the revision is approved.

The journal will distinguish between major and minor mistakes. Update notices, major errors or omissions, changes to the comments of the article are considered changes, but the overall integrity of the representation remains intact. Minor errors are considered errors or omissions that do not impair the reliability of the article's interpretation or the reader's interpretation.

Major bugs will always have a separate notice of errors along with the article. This notice should contain the details of the error and report its registration in the version of records.
Under these conditions their journal will:

a) Correct the online article.
b) Publish the corrected version electronically in a separate correction notice.
c) A footnote showing the electronic links of the correction notice is added to the article.
d) Separate the update notice into pages and publish the updated version of the journal.
e) Provide free viewing of the notification.
f) A separate correction notice may not be added to minor errors. Instead, a footnote will be added to the article giving the reader detailed information that the article was scanned.
g) Concerns regarding the integrity of a published article should be reported to the Editor or via e-mail through the Publisher.

Retractions

A Retraction notice is issued if a grave error (e.g. in developments or analysis) invalidates the results in the product or if there is a misconduct in research or publication (e.g. research without the necessary ethical approvals, acceptance data, natural images, plagiarism, duplicate publication, etc.).

It is determined in accordance with the journal's policies and COPE rules. Following the decision, a comprehensive investigation will be conducted by the journal’s editorial team in collaboration with the publishing editorial team. Authors and institutions may request that their justifications combine the retraction criteria and that their individual articles be added back.

Retractions should be made to correct edits and should not be interpreted as punishment for authors.

They will not be able to withdraw from:

a) Abuse (e.g., data forgery or image manipulation) or error (e.g., miscalculation or selective error) results in no one being trustworthy or there is clear evidence.
b) Findings have previously been published elsewhere without appropriate reference, permission or justification (e.g. unnecessary or duplicate publication conditions).
c) The research is an organization of plagiarism.
d) The editor no longer has confidence in the existence or integrity of the articles.
e) There is evidence or concerns that authorship has been demonstrated.
f) The published reference manipulation is clearly visible.
g) Where there is evidence of negative peer reviews or systematic manipulation.
h) Evidence of an unethical link will not be changed or evidence of a violation of publication policies will not be distorted.
i ) Authors have deliberately provided false or inaccurate information or violated a warranty provided by Author Publishing.

Once an article completes the inclusion process, the journal will perform the following actions:
a) Add a “withdrawn” watermark to the published Registration Version of the article.
b) Publish a separate retraction notice on the journal website titled 'Retraction: [article title]' which will give credit to the article.
c) Separate the retraction statement into pages and publish the journal's online features.

Expressions of concern

At some temperature, an Expression of Concern is provided in which concerns of a serious nature are expressed (using dissemination of research or publication elsewhere), but are disregarded when the outcome of the investigation is not certain or due to various complexities the investigation will not be considered for review. A significant period of time has been completed. This may be due to ongoing institutional investigations or other circumstances beyond the journal's control.

Once the investigation is complete, a Retraction or request may be received following the original article as well as the Expression of Concern. All broadcasts will remain part of the permanent wallet.

Explanations of statements are taken into account as follows:

There are tentative findings regarding authors' research or publishing misconduct, but it is necessary to inform readers of what the concerns are.

There are well-founded concerns that the findings are unreliable or that abuse may occur, but there has been limited cooperation between the authors' institution(s) where concerns have been raised.

Allegations of misconduct are made in relation to an investigation that was not fair, systematic or accurate or unclear in relation to the publication.

An investigation is ongoing, but a resolution will not be found for a long time and concerns are expected to inform existing readers.

The Expression of Concern will be linked back to the relevant published article.

Removal of Article

In a rare version where issues are not retracted or resolved via information of notification will be removed. Journal management will consider publications of a widely published article that:

a) The article contains content that may pose a risk of serious harm if ignored or followed.

b) The article contains content that violates the privacy rights of an employment agreement.

c) The article is defamatory or violates other legal rights.

d) An article is subject to court decision.

If an article from JOTCSA is published, a cease and desist notice will be served instead.

Updates and scientific discussions on published articles

Attachments

An addendum is an announcement of the addition of information to an article.

Addenda do not contradict the original publication and are not used to correct errors (for which a confirmation notice will be issued), but where the author needs to pack or add some important information, this may be published as an addendum.

Appendices are peer-reviewable according to journal policy and are sometimes subject to oversight by journal editors.

All appendices are electronically linked to the published article to which they refer.

Comment (including reply and reply threads)

Comments are short articles that outline an observation on a published article. If a comment on a published article is forwarded to the operation of the journal, it may be subject to peer review. The comment will be shared with the authors of the published article, who are invited to submit a response.

This response of the author may again be subject to peer review and will be shared with the commenter who may be invited to send a response. The response may be peer reviewed and shared with the authors of the published article. No further correspondence will be pursued for publication. The editor may decide to reject correspondence at any time before the comment, response or response is finalized.

All posted comments, replies and replies are linked to relevant published articles.

Pop-up notifications

If the Publishing Ethics and Integrity team deems it necessary, an open notice may be temporarily added to the online version of the article to prompt readers to investigate and report the article. This is not a permanent note (unlike an Expression of Concern, application, or Withdrawal notice), but is because you are continuing an investigation. Please note that among these, they were not included in the researched article.

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

Creative Commons Attribution License: Our journal will use a “CC BY-NC-ND 4.0” or “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” license. This license requires that reusers give credit to (mention of) the creator. It allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form and for noncommercial purposes only.

In the license, the abbreviations mean the following:
BY: Credit must be given to you, the creator.
NC: Only noncommercial use of your work is permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.
ND: No derivatives or adaptations of your work are permitted.

For your information,
Prof. Dr. Hasan KÜÇÜKBAY
Chief editor, JOTCSA