About the review

 Objective

 

The aim of the journal is to disseminate the results of relevant research on the multidisciplinary subject matter that characterises its editorial project, through the publication of miscellaneous or monographic issues. Each year, one volume is dedicated to a monographic theme and another is reserved for articles on a variety of subjects. It publishes articles written in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian and French, with the possibility of publishing versions of the same article in more than one language.

 

Originality

 

Articles proposed for publication in the journal must be original and unpublished. In order to ensure compliance with these requirements, specific means of plagiarism and self-plagiarism control are used (using programmes such as Turnitin or Urkund). Articles in which these filters show a high similarity to published copyrighted texts will be rejected.

 

Editorial Team

 

The Editorial Team is made up of specialists from different disciplines of the Social Sciences, in accordance with the multidisciplinary perspective that characterises the journal. In addition to its multidisciplinary nature, after its latest renewal, its composition respects gender parity, as well as the internationalisation of its members, with the presence of experts from different countries. The editorial team is divided into an Editorial Board, in charge of the practical running of the journal, and an Advisory Board, which contributes its experience to the development of the editorial activity.

 

Editorial policy

 

In the case of the monographic issues, the Editorial Team decides on the subject matter of the issues based on the proposals received, both from the journal itself and from others. Proposals are accepted on the basis of their innovative nature and the relevance and interest of the topic proposed. The coordination of the monographic issue is carried out by one or more people, who are responsible for requesting unpublished articles from specialists in the field and for making a first filter of the quality of the texts submitted. If deemed appropriate, the Editorial Board may also issue an open call for proposals for original works to form part of a monographic issue, once the subject matter has been approved.

The miscellaneous issues will be made up of a minimum of 6 articles that have passed the evaluation process established by the Editorial Board.

 

Submission of proposals

 

The articles to be published will be submitted through the journal's platform. To do so, the person must have previously registered and follow the steps indicated in the option "New submission". The texts that are sent must be original, respect the code of ethics of this publication and adapt to the editing rules that can be found at https://revistas.um.es/areas/about/submissions. If these standards are not met, they will be returned so that they can be adapted to the journal's criteria.

 

The authors of the original texts to be published may propose possible reviewers, as long as they can be justified as specialists in the subject of the article.

Proposals for monographic issues should be sent to the editor of the journal specifying the following questions:

- Title of the monographic issue.

- Coordinators (stating their affiliation and academic contact details).

- Relevance or interest of the subject of the proposed issue.

- List of authors, their professional affiliation, the title of their contribution and a brief summary.

- Approximate proposed timetable for implementation.

 

Evaluation process

 

All articles submitted - whether to form part of a monographic or a miscellaneous issue - are subject to the same evaluation process established by the journal. Firstly, they must pass the filter of a plagiarism and self-plagiarism detection programme. Secondly, the articles received are reviewed by the Editorial Board, which will be responsible for deciding whether the proposal sent adapts to the editorial line of this publication and whether it meets the minimum quality requirements (based on its originality, interest, methodological rigour and formal adaptation to the rules for the submission of originals).

The Editorial Board undertakes to reply on the acceptance or rejection of all originals submitted - whether to form part of a monographic issue or a miscellaneous issue - within three months of receipt. Likewise, it will report on the decision of the evaluations issued within a maximum of eight months from the date of sending the article.

Accepted articles will undergo an external and anonymous evaluation as detailed below.

 

External anonymous peer review process

 

The evaluation process for original articles follows the steps specified below, both in the case of articles for monographic issues and for those intended for miscellaneous issues.

Once the articles have been accepted by the Editorial Board, an external evaluation process begins, carried out by two evaluators (proposed by the coordinators of each issue or by the Editorial Board). These are researchers who are specialists in the field corresponding to the subject of the work in question, who do not belong to the journal's editorial team and who analyse anonymised articles. For the evaluation, a template is provided for them to draw their conclusions and make their recommendation for possible publication. In case of discrepancy between the evaluations, the collaboration of another evaluator will be requested, whose report will be decisive. Articles that are accepted for publication with modifications will be reviewed again after the implementation of these changes by at least one external reviewer. This expert may be the same as the first reviewer or another expert in the field.

When authors submit the revised version of their article, they must include:

The text with the changes made marked with track changes.

A detailed response document to the reviewers.

The text with all accepted changes unmarked and with the change control tool deactivated.

For miscellaneous issues, once the articles received by the Editorial Board have been reviewed, the selected articles go through the same peer review process as above.

Instructions for submitting article proposals can be found in the submissions section (link to https://revistas.um.es/areas/about/submissions) of this website.

 

Code of Ethics

 

The journal Áreas has a Code of Ethics approved by its Editorial Board on 16 December 2021. This Code governs its operation in terms of management and evaluation procedures for all texts submitted for publication, as well as its relationship with authors and evaluators involved in the article review process.

 

The Editorial Board of Áreas assumes the following principles:

Commitment to confidentiality throughout the process of publication of an article, both in terms of authorship and the identity of the reviewers. The texts of articles that are not accepted for publication will be removed from the journal's internal repository in order to preserve their confidentiality.

Biennial publication of the list of people who have carried out evaluations for the journal, in accordance with a policy of transparency.

The participation of members of the Editorial Board of Áreas in the submission of articles will be limited. However, in the case of a relevant contribution to the journal (such as in the case of a specific monograph), original articles by members of the Editorial Board may be accepted. In the event of such a circumstance, it will be ensured that the person affected by this situation is kept out of the entire evaluation process, especially the selection of reviewers.

In the case of monographs, the coordinators of the issue may not act as reviewers of the articles submitted.

The members of the Editorial Board will ensure that all articles submitted are evaluated by specialists in their subject matter, avoiding the existence of conflicts of interest.

Maintaining an editorial policy committed to the elimination of gender inequality, seeking an approach to gender parity both in the composition of the Editorial Board and in the evaluation and authorship of the articles. To this end, there will be public monitoring of participation in these elements of the journal.

Active monitoring to ensure that the content of the texts published and the language used is inclusive and neutral.

 

Open access policy

 

This journal provides its contents in immediate open access and full text, under the principle that allowing free access to the results of research results in a greater exchange of knowledge at a global level.

See Copyright for more information.

 

Review history

 

Areas. Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales (International Social Science Journal) has been published continuously since 1981, making it more than thirty years old.

 

In terms of gender distribution, the editorial team is currently distributed as follows:

The percentage of women in the authorship of articles published in the journal has been very volatile (partly related to the number of articles published annually) and has tended to gradually equalise, as can be seen in the following graph:

 

                          Percentage of female authorship of articles

With regard to the peer review process, the distribution needs to be improved, as it is currently below 40% (2021 it was 34.0%), as can be seen in the following graph:

         Percentage of women in peer review of articles.

 

Quality indicators

 

It has the FECYT seal of quality.

It is currently included in the following portals and databases:

- Índice de citas de fuentes emergentes:  http://mjl.clarivate.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi

- REDIB. Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico: https://redib.org/recursos/

- DICE. Difusión y Calidad Editorial de las Revistas Españolas de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas: http://dice.cindoc.csic.es/

- ISOC Revistas de CC. Sociales y Humanidades:  http://bddoc.csic.es:8080/detalles.html

- resh. Revistas españolas en ciencias sociales y humanidades: http://epuc.cchs.csic.es/resh/

- e-revist@s. Plataforma Open Access de Revistas Científicas Electrónicas Españolas y Latinoamericanas, recientemente transformado en REDIB. Red Iberoamerinaca de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico: https://www.redib.org/recursos/Record/

- CIRC EC3metric:  http://clasificacioncirc.es/ficha_revista?id=42872

- CARHUS Plus+, sistema de clasificación de revistas científicas de los ámbitos de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades. Valoración D: https://boga.agaur.gencat.cat/agaur_boga/

 - Sistema Regional de Información en línea para revistas científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal. http://www.latindex.org/buscador/

 - Matriz de Información para el Análisis de Revistas. ICDS 3.977  http://miar.ub.edu/search/issn/0211-6707

 - Dulcinea. Derechos de explotación y permisos para el auto-archivo de revistas científicas españolas:  http://www.accesoabierto.net/dulcinea/default.php

 - Plataforma de recursos y servicios documentales:  https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/revista?codigo=159

 - Depósito digital institucional de la Universidad de Murcia: https://digitum.um.es/xmlui/handle/10201/2434

 

Interoperability protocol

 

Áreas currently uses the Dublin Core schema for its metadata tags and can export in METS XML, PubMed XML, mEDRA, CrossRef XML format.

 

The journal provides an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface that allows its contents to be harvested by other distribution systems, such as digital repositories and harvesters.

Specifications:

• OAI-PMH Protocol Version 2.0
• Dublin Core Metadata

Harvester path: https://revistas.um.es/areas/oai

 

Digital preservation policies

 

All journals published by the University of Murcia are hosted in the institutional repository DIGITUM (digitum.um.es). Authors are allowed and encouraged to deposit their works published in Areas in other repositories, as this favours their circulation, dissemination and preservation.