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Essential guidelines

To be considered by the editorial team, manuscripts must comply with the following guidelines.

1. Evidence. While the AJE publishes studies that use data from outside Australia, submissions are expected to make some link of the topic to the Australian context and to illustrate the relevance to the AJE readership. The link is likely to be made in the literature review and the discussion of results.

2. Language. Manuscripts should reflect the standard expected of a scholarly article in an English-language journal. English language editing services are available through SAGE author services.

3. Length and references. Manuscripts should normally not exceed 6,000 words in length, including the references section. All referencing should follow the 7th edition of the American Psychological Association Style guidelines (APA 7 style) https://apastyle.apa.org/.

4. Abstracts are to be about 100-150 words and should be supplied along with six keywords chosen from the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (4th ed.), compiled and edited by Anna Gifford and Barbara Spiller (Melbourne: ACER) and available at http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/multites2007/index.html. Remember that the abstract is not only the sales pitch that tempts the researcher into reading your article, it’s also the information that gives a search engine all the data it needs to be able to find your article and rank it in the search results page. Therefore, try to repeat the key descriptive phrases. Try to imagine the phrases a researcher might search for if your paper would be of interest to them. Google can detect abuse of this so don’t overplay it, focus on just 3 or 4 key phrases in your abstract. See also: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/help-readers-find-your-article.

5. Manuscripts are expected to be structured by the following headings:

  • Introduction/ background literature, ending with the research questions or hypotheses.
  • Methodology. The information included in the methodology section should be of sufficient detail that a reader could replicate the study, for example, the procedures undertaken, data collection tools and methods of analysis should all be described clearly with appropriate references supplied for analytic approaches, techniques and software. Description of the study sample belongs here, not in the results section. Examples of data collection tools, such as survey questions or interview schedules, should be included in appendices. When inclusion of examples is not possible, such as in cases of copyrighted materials, appropriate references for the data collection tools are expected.
  • Results, discussion. The results section should start with the answer to the first research question and subsequently answer all research questions in the order in which they were raised at the end of the background literature section. It is left to the authors to decide whether to have separate results and discussion sections. If they decide to have both, particular attention needs to be given to avoiding repetition and adhering to the word limit.
  • Conclusion. The concluding section should state the main take-away of the article. Care should be taken for the conclusion to still be related to the evidence, analyses and results reported in the article.

6. Check before submission. Authors should use the following checklists and standards before submission:

  • For quantitative research studies e.g. the STROBE checklist (Vandenbroucke et al., 2007).
  • For qualitative research studies e.g. COREQ (Tong et al., 2007) and SRQR (O’Brien et al., 2014).
  • For systematic reviews or scoping reviews e.g. PRISMA and PRISMAS-ScR.

7. Other resources

The AJE editorial team recommend making use of the above checklists and other resources available to prospective authors in structuring their manuscripts and checking for completeness of information reported in manuscripts prior to submission. Support for prospective authors is available through SAGE author services.

  1. Please ensure you carefully read and adhere to all the guidelines and instructions to authors available at http://www.uk.sagepub.com/msg/aed.htm#HOWTOSUBMITYOURMANUSCRIPT. Manuscripts not confirming to these guidelines will not be considered.
  2. Manuscripts are submitted to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aed. Before a manuscript can be submitted, you will need to create an account by clicking the second icon and providing the information requested.
  3. When submitting your manuscript you will need to upload a manuscript file with no identifying author information (designate as Anonymous Main Document) and a separate title page (designate as Title Page) with author details.
  4. An abstract of 100-150 words must also be uploaded.
  5. Figures, images and tables are uploaded as separate files.
  6. Only electronic files conforming to the journal's guidelines can be accepted. Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word (.doc or .docx), RTF, XLS.
  7. Select six keywords to describe your manuscript from the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (ATED), which is freely available on the ACER website: http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/multites2007/index.html (link opens in new window).

Manuscript Submission Guidelines

Please read the guidelines available via https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/AED, then visit the Journal’s submission site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aed to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Australian Journal of Education will be reviewed.

There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal.

As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere.