Publication standards

The Editorial Management Team may reject articles that do not meet the requirements of the checklist, that present formal or methodological deficiencies, or that do not make a relevant or interesting contribution to the thematic areas of the journal.

Authors will be notified of the rejection of their article, with no possibility to resubmit, and no further correspondence will be pursued with them.

Reception and processing of articles

The reception of manuscripts will be suspended between December 20 and January 8 and between July 20 and August 20. For formal purposes, any documents sent within these dates will be managed as if they were received on January 9 and August 21, respectively.

Please note that the first editorial filter can take up to 45 business days depending on the number of articles received.

If you have any questions regarding the submission of the material, please send an email to info@revista-apunts.com

Manuscript submission process:

STEP 1. START: submission check; authors transfer ownership rights and can make comments to the publisher.
STEP 2. UPLOAD DOCUMENTS: the original article (.doc .docx) sent for review is uploaded, as well as any translations available to the other languages.
STEP 3. ENTER METADATA: you must fill in the authors’ personal details and indicate the author to be contacted.
STEP4. UPLOAD ADDITIONAL FILES:
- Title page in Microsoft Word document or similar (please avoid PDF). This document helps the editorial manager’s task. It contains the authors’ identification data, affiliation and contact details, and it specifies the author to be contacted.
- High quality graphics, images and videos to enhance the article (optional).
STEP 5. CONFIRMATION: final step in which the submission is confirmed.

Specification of files to be submitted on the online platform

Title page

A single copy (.doc/docx) must be sent to the journal’s editors, which shall contain:

Title of the work. 15 words maximum.
Type of article: research article, review or scientific letter, indicating the section for publication.

Authorship, affiliations and scientific identifiers.
- Authorship: in the case of authors who have two family names, please note that international search engines use the second family name by default. We advise that you provide a single family name or use a hyphen between them.
- Affiliations: they should be those officially recognized by each institution.
- You must include personal research identifier Publons (ResearcherID) and/or Orcid.
Contact author. Please indicate the e-mail address and telephone number of the person designated as the contact person between the publisher and the other authors.
All authors must state:
- It is an original piece of work.
- It has not been previously published in full or partially.
- It is not under review in any other publication.
- All authors are responsible for the final version of the article, to which they have contributed.
- By being accepted for publication, all copyrights are transferred to the Instituto Nacional de Educación Física de Cataluña (INEFC), who assumes all exclusive rights to edit, publish or replicate it in any format, and without whose permission none of the materials that comprise it may be replicated in whole or in part.

Article

Format

The manuscript must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document (.docx) or similar (PDF is not accepted), imperatively in one column format and with a continuous line number for reviewers to provide their suggestions.

Font and size:

Sans Serif fonts such as Calibri 11, Arial 11 o Lucida Sans Unicode 10.
Serif fonts such as Times New Roman 12, Georgia 11 or Computer Modern normal 10 (predetermined font for LaTeX).

Line spacing: double-spaced (2.0) for the whole text except for footnotes. Margins: 2.54 cm. Indent: indent with the tab key on the keyboard or indent the first line at 1.25 (do not use the space bar). Text alignment: left.

Total number of words

Articles should not exceed a maximum of 4,000 words, excluding the title, authorship, abstract, tables, figures, acknowledgements and references, and should have no more than 8 tables or figures.

Articles for the Scientific Notes section, which are published in English only, must contain a maximum of 1,500 words, excluding the abstract, keywords and acknowledgements, and no more than 8 tables or figures.

Figures not produced by the author must be correctly referenced.

Languages

The document must be sent in its original language (Catalan, Spanish or English). If a translation into any of these three languages is available, please attach it after the original text, in the same file.

Title

The title should not exceed 15 words and should be clear and understandable to specialist readers. It has to include the object of study (the subject matter) and, if applicable, the method used.

Authorship and affiliations

Authorship: international search engines use family name by default. We advise that you provide a single family name or join both family names with a hyphen. Affiliations: they should be those officially recognized by each institution. You must include personal research identifier ResearcherID (Publons) and/or ORCID.

Summary

The abstract should have a maximum of 250 words and should not include references; it should be written in the past tense. It should not be divided into sections but should contain relevant information on the interest of the study, the objectives, the method and main results obtained.

Key words

A maximum of 6, and we recommend they coincide with international descriptors (Thesaurus/MeSH, Inderscience). They must not coincide with the title of the article.

Sections

Introduction: this may include a maximum of two sub-sections and state the object of the study; it should be written in past tense.
Methodology: written in past tense; this section must include:
- Participants: if applicable, the name of the Ethics Committee that has approved the study and the code issued must be indicated.
- Material and instruments. Procedure.
Data analysis: written in past tense.
Results: written in past tense.
Discussion.
Conclusion: the text should summarise the study’s main contributions and may include limitations and prospects for the future.
Acknowledgements.
References: 35 maximum, following the APA regulation, 7th edition, and including the DOI of each reference (with https://). In the Scientific Notes section, a maximum of 20 references.
In order to facilitate the reading of the article, references in the text with more than two authors should be indicated from the first time they appear as (first author et al., year). References to only two authors must be shown as (author and author, year).

Method notice

Articles that provide a test validation must justify its validity with more than two of the five types of evidence as established in APA’s “The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” in 2014, referring to content, response process, relationship with other variables, consequences and internal structure, in addition to clearly establishing the theoretical model that justifies the use of Confirmatory Factor Analysis.

Articles that provide a systematic review must apply the appropriate protocol to the type of designs considered in the systematic review, even if meta-analysis is not applied. This implies the use of a risk-of-bias (ROB) assessment system appropriate to the design of the studies analyzed, the presentation of a flowchart that includes the reason for excluding all the documents that are left out of the review and the specification of the observed heterogeneity between papers as systematically as possible (or by appropriate calculation, in the case of meta-analysis). The website https://www.equator-network.org/ may serve as a guide to locate the right guide, among the reporting guidelines they offer. In addition, there are adaptations of these guides for typical designs of disciplines such as psychology and education. Due to the journal’s type of indexation, it is required that Web of Science (WoS) is included as one of the databases used.

APA regulation reference examples

Review policy

The articles’ follow-up is as shown:

Following the reception of each article, and once the Policy of Screening for Plagiarism has been applied, authors will be informed, within 45 days, whether the text will proceed to the first evaluation by scientific reviewers, or whether it has been rejected.

In the event that the manuscript presents formal or methodological deficiencies or does not make a relevant or interesting contribution to the thematic areas of the publication, the authors will be notified of the rejection of their article, with no possibility to resubmit it, and no further correspondence will be pursued with them.

If the manuscript is approved to undergo the peer review process, it will be returned to the authors for editing within 30 days, always in accordance with the formal and ethical criteria of the checklist. As many revisions will be made as required by the reviewers. The date of reception of the article will be the date of acceptance for publication.

In case of disagreement between the two reviewers of the evaluated article, either a third reviewer or another assessment by the Editorial Management Team will be assigned.

Once the article has been definitively accepted, PDF copies will be sent to the contact author before publication, who must review them within a maximum period of 5 days.

Authors’ rights and responsibilities

The copyright of the articles published in Apunts Educación Física y Deportes are the property of the journal and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

The Journal is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of any article or contribution. The Journal is not responsible for the links and hypertext which, in some articles, provide access to features and services offered by third parties on other websites.

Manuscripts must be original and cannot be under concurrent review for publication in other journals or editorial bodies.

The Journal will not accept previously published material. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to partially replicate material (text, tables, figures or videos) from other publications, as well as for correctly citing their source.

We highly recommend the use of non-sexist language in all texts submitted for publication. For papers written in English, the guide published by the American Phylosophical Association can be used as an orientation.

Texts with a content promoting any kind of social, racial or ethnic, political, sexual or gender identity, political or religious discrimination will not be published.

The total size of the sample must be specified, as well as, in parentheses, the gender and its average and standard deviation of age, weight, height, etc.; as well as whether the conclusions have taken into account possible differences between sexes.

In the case of research with participants, authors should mention in the methods section:

a) The provision of informed consent.

b) The full name of the Ethics Committee that has approved the research and, if any, the code issued. Authors may attach a copy of the authorization.

Articles that have obtained funding or financial support for publication must have the permission of the institution involved.

Apunts Educación Física y Deportes denies any responsibility for possible conflicts that may arise from the authorship of the works published in the journal.