Author Guidelines

Eligibility requirements for educational manuscripts

Eligibility screening should record strictly relevance to higher education and the integrity of the submission file before reviewers are invited.

These guidelines apply to every submission and should be read with aims and scope, article types, ethics, data, AI, and peer-review policies. The template organizes the manuscript but does not replace the requirement for an original contribution to higher education scholarship, appropriate method, and verifiable evidence.

The corresponding author checks file completeness; all authors remain responsible for accuracy and declarations. The editorial office may return incomplete files before editor assignment.

General requirements

Manuscripts must be original, unpublished, relevant to a higher education research problem, and submitted exclusively through OJS using the official DOCX template. Calibri 11, 1.15 line spacing, and APA, 7th edition style are required.

Review file

The manuscript must be anonymized. Authorship and affiliation details are entered separately. The title, a 150-to-250-word abstract, and three to five keywords must be provided in Spanish and English.

Structure

Empirical articles include Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, and References. Reviews and essays follow the structure specified for their type. Results must not be mixed with citations or interpretation belonging in the discussion.

Statements

Author contributions using CRediT.

Funding and conflicts of interest.

Ethics approval and informed consent when applicable.

Availability of data, materials, and code.

Use of artificial intelligence.

Citations

Citations use the author–date system and references follow APA, 7th edition. Every in-text citation must match an identifiable reference and vice versa.

Relevance and contribution

Before submission, authors must verify that the study states an explicit higher education research problem, presents a testable question or objective, and demonstrates new knowledge. Merely involving students, teachers, or institutions does not make a study educational; the analysis must connect to teaching, learning, curriculum, assessment, inclusion, management, policy, or educational quality.

Technological, health, economic, or social research is eligible only when it substantively evaluates an educational dimension. The journal does not accept application descriptions, unanalyzed institutional diagnoses, opinion pieces, promotional materials, or manuscripts whose contribution merely repeats known findings.

Content and transparency

The title should be informative; the structured abstract states objective, method, main findings, and conclusion without citations; and keywords support retrieval. The introduction defines the gap; methods permit appraisal or replication; results present evidence without literature discussion; discussion interprets and compares; and conclusions answer the objective without citations or unjustified causal claims.

Every manuscript discloses CRediT authorship, funding, conflicts, ethics approval or exemption, consent where applicable, data availability, and artificial-intelligence use. Limitations are explained in terms of their possible effect rather than listed perfunctorily.

Preparation and submission

The anonymized file uses the official template, Calibri 11, and 1.15 line spacing. Names, affiliations, acknowledgements, and identifying properties are removed. Tables and figures are editable, numbered, cited before appearance, and accompanied by a source or note. References follow APA, 7th edition, and every entry corresponds to a text citation.

OJS submission includes the authorship file, originality letter, contribution statement, and applicable forms. Revisions include the manuscript format requested by the editor and a point-by-point response. Noncompliance may lead to technical return before peer review.

Responsibility after submission

The corresponding author monitors OJS communications, responds within deadlines, reports authorship or conflict changes, and approves proofs. Authors must not submit the work elsewhere simultaneously or withdraw it to evade an ethics inquiry.

Acceptance depends on merit, not formal compliance alone. The journal may request data, permissions, translations, statistical checks, or further corrections when needed for clarity, integrity, and relevance to higher education.

Preparing an OJS submission

Select the article type and check length and structure.

State the higher education research problem and contribution in the title, objective, and discussion.

Prepare an anonymized manuscript in the template using Calibri 11, 1.15 spacing, and APA, 7th edition.

Separate authorship, affiliation, ORCID, and acknowledgements.

Complete CRediT, funding, conflict, ethics, consent, data, and AI statements.

Verify tables, figures, citations, references, permissions, and supplements.

Submit only through OJS and respond within deadlines.

For revisions, provide a point-by-point response and requested files.

Files and declarations accompanying a submission

A completed submission checklist.

Separate anonymized manuscript and authorship file.

Required statements and letters in OJS.

A similarity report and editorial screening record.

Reviewer response and version history.

Updates to author instructions

The guidelines are revised when the template, reporting standards, ethics requirements, or production change. The current version states its update date. Substantive changes are not applied retroactively without notice and reasonable time to adapt.

Demonstrating a substantive tertiary education contribution

In the introduction, authors explain which of the seven areas their manuscript addresses and why the problem concerns higher education; recruiting university students alone does not make an unrelated question eligible. A single-university study should justify its theoretical, methodological or comparative relevance without claims that exceed the design.

Systematic reviews use reproducible searching, eligibility, appraisal and synthesis procedures; PRISMA 2020 or PRISMA-ScR are reporting guidelines, not substitutes for a research method. Anonymized manuscripts and separate author records must agree on title, article type, version and declarations without embedding identifiers in file properties.

Pre-submission consistency check

The corresponding author ensures that title, abstract, keywords, author order, names and affiliations recorded in OJS match the authorship file and the version intended for publication. The anonymized manuscript must not contain names, revealing acknowledgements, digital signatures or identifying Word comments. Tables, figures, appendices and supplements are checked for unauthorized personal data.

Requirements by research design

Empirical work reports design, setting, participants or corpus, analytical procedures and limitations. Systematic reviews specify eligibility criteria, sources, search strategies, selection and synthesis; PRISMA may inform reporting where appropriate but is not a research method. Scholarly essays advance an original thesis, critically engage the literature, address relevant objections and clarify the limits of their claims.