ISSN 1517-9702 printed version
ISSN 1678-4634 on-line version

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS

• Scope and editorial policy
• Preparation of originals

Educação e Pesquisa publishes only previously unpublished articles in the field of education and does not consider manuscripts concurrently submitted for publication in books or other periodicals in Brazil or abroad. The journal reserves the right not to publish articles submitted by the same author at intervals of less than two years. Manuscripts are assessed first by the members of the editorial board. The manuscripts which do not comply with the editorial criteria of the journal are returned to their authors. The others are assessed by reviewers appointed by the editorial board. Manuscripts must be submitted via the journal's page in SciELO publishing system (http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php).

The time frame necessary for submissions to complete the review process - and be selected or rejected - varies according to the complexity of the reviews and possible changes suggested and implemented. The dates of receipt and approval of each article are stated in the published text. For each of the journal's issues, the editorial board establishes the criteria of organization of the articles approved.

Guidelines for manuscript submission

Upon submission of an article, authorship and the author’s institutional affiliations must be filled out in proper spaces in SciELO System and should not be mentioned in the text, which will be submitted to blind peer review. Any references that enable reviewers to infer indirectly the authorship of the work are not accepted either. Authorship information is recorded separately, as metadata, and it is accessed only by the editors.

When preparing the manuscript, the following guidelines should be followed:

The manuscript can be submitted in Portuguese, Spanish or English. It should be typed in Word for Windows, Times New Roman font, 12-point font size, 1.5 line spacing. All the manuscript pages should be numbered sequentially. The body of the manuscript should have a minimum length of 35,000 and a maximum length of 50,000 characters, including spaces and not including the abstract.

The title of the manuscript should have 15 words or fewer.

The abstract should contain between 200 and 250 words and describe, in an informative manner and without listing topics, the following items: general theme and research problem; objectives and/or hypotheses; methodology; main results and conclusions. It is recommended that the abstract should be written as a single paragraph, in the active voice, in the third person of the singular, in concise and affirmative sentences. The following items should be avoided: neologisms, bibliographical citations, symbols and abbreviations except those in common use, as well as formulae, equations, diagrams etc., unless absolutely necessary. The journal does not require an English version of the abstract along with the original text; if an article is accepted for publication the journal will provide an English version of its abstract.

The article should have 3 to 5 keywords.

Possible acknowledgements should be cited with the title, but in a footnote, and without any direct or indirect reference to the authorship.

Tables, charts, graphs, and figures (photos, drawings and maps) should be numbered with Arabic numerals in the order in which they appear in the text and should include appropriate headers. Legends should appear right below each figure. Maps should contain graph scales and legends.

Images must be grayscale, be scanned electronically in JPG format with 300 dpi or higher resolution and have dimensions that allow reducing or enlarging them without impairing their readability. All images must be submitted as separate files and named according to their references in the text (e.g., Graph 1).

Explanatory footnotes should be avoided and used only when strictly necessary for understanding the text. Their maximum length should be three lines. Notes should be numbered in Arabic numerals according to the order in which they appear in the text.

Citations in the text should meet the following criteria:

a) quotations of up to three lines should be run in – integrated into the text in the same font size as the text - enclosed in quotation marks and be followed by the following information in parentheses: last name of the author of the quote, the year of publication and page numbers;

b) quotations longer than three lines should be set off as block quotations – that is, in a new paragraph with a hanging indent of 4 cm on the left, 11 point font, without quotation marks;

c) if there is no quotation, but just a reference to some work, the author’s last name should be cited in parentheses in capital letters along with the year of publication.

References must conform strictly with the technical standard NBR6023 of August 30, 2002 of the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT). Only works cited in the text should be included in the reference list, under the heading References, at the end of the article and on a separate page.

Statistical methods

When employed, statistical methods must be described in sufficient detail to allow a competent reader access to the original data and verification of the results presented, whilst avoiding excessively technical language and presenting results with enough clarity so as to facilitate their understanding by a non-specialized reader. This guidance to authors requires steps such as: seeking, as much as possible, to quantify the results and present them with corresponding indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (for example, confidence intervals); avoiding relying solely on statistical inference tests that convey no relevant quantitative information; discussing the eligibility of the experimentation units; supplying detailed information about randomization and about the observations; discussing the reasonableness of the results, as well as the possible limitations of the method used; specifying the software employed; restricting tables and graphics to the amount necessary to explain the foundations of the article and their robustness; avoiding tables with too many topics and duplication of data; defining statistical terms, abbreviations and symbols used in the article.

Peer Review Process

The articles received for their eventual publication in Educação e Pesquisa will be previously read by the Editorial Commission. The articles that do not meet the editorial requirements shall be returned, and the rest of them will be forwarded to three evaluators for their analysis. At the most, one of the evaluators will be a member of the School of Educaton of the Universidade de São Paulo, to which the journal is subordinated. All evaluators have at least a doctor’s degree and belong to various scientific institutions. The names of the authors, the evaluators and the institutions they belong to will remain undisclosed throughout the entire process. The journal publishes annually the names of its body of evaluators ad hoc.

The aspects that guide the evaluation of the articles are: theoretical and empirical content, author’s knowledge of scientific literature, current relevance of the topic, contribution to the specific area of knowedge, originality of the approach, text structure and writing style. The evaluators may recommend the integral acceptance of the text or its rejection, or they may suggest modifications for a new evaluation. The Editorial Commission may submit such suggestions to the author of the article, and after the changes have been included, the Commission will send the article again to the evaluators for a final evaluation.

Authorship

Author is understood here as anyone who has effectively taken part in the conception of the study, in the development of the experimental sections, in the analysis and interpretation of data and in the final writing. It is recommended that the total number of authors should not be greater than four. If the number of authors is larger than that, the editor in charge must be informed of the degree of participation of each author. In the case of doubt about the compatibility between the number of authors and the results presented, the Editorial Committee has the right to question the participation of authors and to refuse submission at its discretion.

By submitting an article for publication in Educação e Pesquisa the author agrees to the following terms

1. The author holds the article copyrights, but its publication in the journal automatically implies the author’s agreement to release its complete copyright to the journal’s first issue, without financial compensation.
2. The ideas and opinions expressed in the article are the author’s exclusive responsibility and they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Journal.
3. After the article’s first publication, the author is authorized to assume additional contracts, independent from the journal, to publish or present the work through other means (e.g. in an institutional repository or as a book chapter), as long as a complete quote of the authorship and of the original publication are provided.
4. The author of an article published in the journal has the right to, and is encouraged to, distribute the work online, always quoting its first publication in the journal.

Conflicts of interest and research ethics

When the research developed or the publication of the article may raise doubts about potential conflicts of interest, the author should declare in an endnote that no links to funding agencies or to commercial or political institutions have been omitted. Similarly, the institution to which the author is associated, or that has collaborated in the conducting of the study, should also be mentioned to guarantee that there are no conflicts of interest with the results being presented. It is also necessary to inform that the interviews and experiments involving human beings have followed the ethical procedures established for scientific research.

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.