General and Ethical Rules

Instructions for Authors

Introductory Remarks

The ethical statements for JCAM are based on the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers and the Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, https://publicationethics.org). In many cases we have taken some ethical rules from the home pages of other journals since we deeply agree with the contents of these rules which otherwise reflect clearly the mentality of COPE. We would like to emphasize that it is obligatory to agree upon the rules of ethical behavior for those (authors, editors, reviewers and publisher) who take part in the publishing process of a paper submitted to JCAM.

Authorship and Publication

  • Submission of a manuscript implies that each author follow the ethical standards valid for the authors of JCAM.
  • A manuscript should be submitted by using the format requirements detailed below under the title Instructions to Authors.
  • Submission of a manuscript implies that the paper has not been published, nor is being considered for publication elsewhere, and that permission for publication, if needed, has already been obtained from the appropriate sources.
  • The editors and the reviewers should evaluate the manuscripts on the basis of their intellectual content without regard to race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, seniority, citizenship, professional association, institutional affiliation, professional association, or political philosophy of the author(s).
  • Each paper submitted to the journal is peer-reviewed by at least two international reviewers who are experts in the field of the paper and will make a recommendation to accept, revise or reject the manuscript. The review process may take two to three months. As soon as we receive the referee's report, we inform the corresponding author of the editorial decision via e-mail.
  • Reviewing the manuscripts is an essential step in the publication process. The factors that should be taken into account in a review are: relevance, significance, originality, readability and language.
  • The possible decisions include: acceptance, acceptance with minor or major revisions, and rejection.
  • If the authors are advised to revise and resubmit a paper, there is no guarantee that the revised paper will be accepted.
  • Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed.
  • Acceptance of a paper is constrained by the legal requirements that are in force concerning libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
  • The editors and the members of the Editorial Board will not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the authors of the manuscript, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Responsibilities and duties of authors

  • A paper should contain the results of original research. The authors should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion as regards its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to make it possible to replicate the work and the results achieved. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
  • The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
  • Authorship should be limited to those who have significantly contributed to the research reported in the paper. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author should ensure that the co-authors are all included on the paper, and that the co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.
  • Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. The submitted manuscript should not contain plagiarized material or falsified research data.
  • The authors of JCAM may be asked to participate in the peer review process.
  • Authors must notify the editors of any conflicts of interest.
  • An author should make no changes to a paper after it has been accepted. If there is a compelling reason to make changes, the author is obligated to inform the editor directly of the nature of the desired change. Only the editor has the final authority to approve any such requested changes.
  • Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors. If an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his or her own published work, it is the author???s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.

Responsibilities and duties of reviewers

  • Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.
  • Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself (herself) from the review process.
  • Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author. A reviewer of a manuscript should judge objectively the quality of the manuscript and respect the intellectual independence of the authors. In no case is personal criticism appropriate.
  • Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  • Reviewers should also draw the editor's attention to any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
  • A reviewer should assist the editors in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Responsibilities and duties of editors

  • Editors may recommend the acceptance or revision or rejection of a manuscript by conducting peer review themselves, based on their own knowledge and expertise, or by taking assistance and advice from reviewers who are experts of the same field. Manuscripts may, however, be rejected without review if considered inappropriate for JCAM.
  • A JCAM editor who authors or co-authors a manuscript submitted for consideration to JCAM shall not review that work. If after publication, the editor-author's work merits ongoing scientific debate within the journal, the editor-author shall accept no editorial responsibility in connection therewith.
  • Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
  • Editors should guarantee the quality of papers and the integrity of the academic record.
  • Editors should base their decisions solely one the papers' importance, originality, clarity and relevance to the scope of JCAM.
  • Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason.
  • Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
  • Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines.
  • Editors should act if they suspect misconduct, whether a paper is published or unpublished, and make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
  • Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions, they should have proof of misconduct.
  • Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers and board members.
  • The editors will be guided by CORE's Guidelines for Retracting Articles when considering retracting, issuing expressions of concern about, and issuing corrections pertaining to articles that have been published.
  • Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used in the research of the editors or the members of the editorial board without the express written consent of the author.
  • If the editor is presented with convincing evidence that the main substance or conclusions of a paper published in the journal are erroneous, the editor should facilitate publication of an appropriate paper pointing out the error and, if possible, correcting it.

Format requirements

  • Papers should be written in standard grammatical English using US spelling. The length of a paper is not limited, nevertheless authors are encouraged to write concisely. Short communications or discussions on papers published in the journal must not be longer than 2 printed pages.
  • Each manuscript should be provided with an Abstract of about 100--300 words, reporting concisely on the objective and results of the paper. The English Abstract is followed by the Mathematical Subject Classification -- in case the author (or authors) give the classification codes -- and then the keywords (no more than six).
  • References should be grouped at the end of the paper in numerical order of appearance. Author's name(s) and initials, paper titles, journal name, volume, issue, year and page numbers should be given for all journals referenced.
  • Manuscripts should be submitted to one of the editors - see the Item Contacts - or to the member of the Editorial Board Balázs Tóth (balazs.toth@uni-miskolc.hu).

Electronic Submissions

We prefer electronic submissions to submission of papers in printed form. There are two categories of electronic submissions

  • LaTeX

  • MS Word

We encourage our authors to prefer LaTeX to MS Word.

Instructions for LaTeX users

The technical requirements will all be satisfied automatically if you use our JCAM sample papers -- please download JCAMArticle.zip -- or our AMS-LaTeX sample papers -- please download AMSArticleForJCAM.zip as templates and prepare your bibliography by using bibTeX and our bibliography style file JCAM.bst. We remark that bibliography style file is also included in the zip files JCAMArticle.zip and AMSArticleForJCAM.zip

Why LaTeX?

The best way to create well-structured manuscripts containing mathematics is to use LaTeX and or its variants. In this way the author can concentrate on the meaning rather than the form of a text; that is why we need a powerful and convenient software which has the capability to perform routine jobs such as equation labelling and referencing, label (re)numbering, automatic insertion or change of mathematical environments, re-numbering of bibliographical references, bibliography database search, etc. easily, without effort. There are a number of LaTeX systems which can be run under WinXX or Linux operating systems. However in some respects Scientific Word and Scientific Workplace have become standards for typesetting high quality documents in engineering sciences and mathematics.

Scientific Word and Scientific Workplace

Making use of Scientific Word or Scientific Workplace you can typeset complex technical documents with LaTeX, the industry standard for mathematics typesetting under WinXX (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) operating systems. Because of its superior precision and quality, publishers and writers of scientific material use LaTeX extensively. When you typeset, LaTeX automatically generates footnotes, indexes, bibliographies, tables of contents, and cross-references.

You don't have to learn LaTeX to produce typeset documents, because Scientific Word or Scientific WorkPlace communicate with LaTeX for you. Consequently you can concentrate on what you do best�creating the content of your document�without worrying about LaTeX syntax. You don't need to understand LaTeX to produce beautifully typeset material, but if you do know TeX or LaTeX commands, you can use them in your Scientific WorkPlace or Scientific Word documents to make the typesetting even more precise.

Each of the sample documents provided for you in the zip files JCAMArticle.zip and AMSArticleForJCAM.zip can be red in under Scientific Word or Workplace where they serve as templates, i.e., you can reedit each when typesetting your manuscript.

You are well advised to read the file ReadmeFirst.txt obtained after you have unpacked our zip files. Then print the pdf file which explains in detail how to reedit our sample papers when you typeset your manuscript.

MiKTeX

If you have familiarity with LaTeX commands you can choose the free MiKTeX. This excellent software is designed for Win XX operating systems. You can use MiKTeX with the editor TeXnicCenter which is a feature rich integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) freely available under GPL.

It is a further possibility to use MiKTeX with WinEdt (shareware) which is a powerful, extremely flexible and versatile native editor and shell for MS Windows with a strong predisposition towards the creation of [La]TeX documents (and much more!)...

WinEdt provides an integrated development environment and is widely used as a front-end for compilers and typesetting systems, such as LaTeX. WinEdt's highlighting schemes can be customized for different modes. WinEdt's Spell Checking functionality supports multi-lingual setups, and dictionaries (word-lists) are available for many languages.

The sample documents provided for you in the zip files JCAMArticle.zip and AMSArticleForJCAM.zip can also be reedited with ease making use of TeXnicCenter or WinEdt.

PDF files for LaTeX users

If you are a LaTeX user you can typeset your paper in the format of our journal with or without bibtex. Please read the following files which provide you with detailed information -- we would like to emphasize that these files are also included in the zip files have been made downloadable and mentioned above:

Papers typeset making use of the the standard amsart document class are also accepted for consideration.

Instructions for MS Word users

Please use MS Word 6.0 or higher. If you prefer MS Word to LaTeX you are requested to use it with MathType 4.0 or higher (the latest version has the number 5.2). You are kindly asked to use MathType for typesetting both in line equation and displayed equations. Even if an equation is very short you should typeset it by MathType.

The reason for this is twofold: (a) an italic character differs from a mathematical italic character (b) your MS Word document will be converted to LaTeX be using Scientific Workplace 5.0 which converts correctly the equations typeset by MathType.

Some of the technical and format requirements will be satisfied automatically if you use our sample MS Word sample paper -- please download MSWordSample.zip as a template.

Manuals

Please provide us with visit the proper mathematical subject classification codes. Click on the blue part of the previous sentence to find them.

We recommend you to use the following excellent reference material, available from the American Mathematical Society, when preparing your electronic manuscripts:

  • AMS-LaTeX User's Guide
  • Short Math Guide for LaTeX The Short Math Guide for LaTeX is a concise summary of the essential features in LaTeX for writing math formulas, including features provided by the packages amssymb and amsmath. This is not a mere listing of everything available but a careful selection of the LaTeX commands that are especially recommended for authors' use. There is also some discussion of certain common uses and misuses of various commands that should be avoided for reasons of typographical quality or logical markup.
  • Instructions for Preparation of Papers and Monographs in AMS-LaTeX (pp. 1-6)

Here are some more links to documentation. Most of them are available from CTAN.