Simulation & Gaming

Instructions. Please read the guidelines below thoroughly before uploading your article in the journal’s submission site found at the end of this guide. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines will be un-submitted by the editors. The Associate Editors and Editors of the Journal preserve the right to deviate from Submission Guidelines if needed and / or deemed appropriate, as to submit further comments and / or suggestions to Authors.

1. SCOPE

Simulation & Gaming: An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research (S&G) serves as a leading international forum for the exploration and development of simulation/gaming methodologies used in education, training, consultation, and research. S&G appraises academic and applied issues in the expanding fields of simulation: computer and internet mediated simulation, virtual reality, educational games, video games, industrial simulators, active and experiential learning, case studies, and related methodologies. We encourage and welcome innovative snapshot articles, future perspectives and viewpoints as well as articles following or describing more traditional research paths and topics.

2. PEER REVIEW POLICY

S&G employs a double-blind peer review process for at least the first round of reviews. Additional reviews may be required at the discretion of the managing editor. Our goal is to provide authors with feedback on their article within 60 days. The Editors-in-Chief reserve the right to desk-reject or un-submit any article that they feel is not properly prepared, not a good fit for the journal, lacks quality, fails to contributes to the literature, lacks originality, or is not written in a clear, scholarly manner.

3. TYPES OF ARTICLES AND CRITERIA FOR EACH

Research articles. These are research or research-based articles. S&G encourages originalresearch. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are encouraged over literature reviews. We will consider case reports on a case-by-case basis, where the editors feel that the article will contribute to innovative ways of thinking about the use of simulation and gaming. Word count: 7000 words (excluding references).

Short research reports. These are research articles that summarize pilot studies, usually involving a smaller sample. Limited to two tables and two figures. Word count: 3000 words (excluding references).

Theoretical articles. A theoretical article may report on new or preexisting principles related to a specific field of knowledge or discipline. These peer-reviewed articles do not normally contain research experimental data, are supported by research, best practices, and the body of existing literature. Word count: 5000 words (excluding references).

Simulations Ready to Use. Professors, teachers and others may wish to use these types of articles in their classrooms. They need to know how the games or simulations are used along with the simulation/game’s effectiveness for leading their learners to the objectives. These articles should be research-based and not simply descriptive or a sales pitch for a commercial or future profit- making game or simulation. A guide or set of instructions for the game or simulation should be placed in the appendix to provide support to educators who wish to use the game in their settings. Word count: 5000 words (excluding references).

A NOTE ABOUT WORD COUNTS: Our aim is to improve readership. The expectation is that authors are able and willing to write in a succinct manner and sometimes saying less is more. We encourage use of graphics, tables and diagrams to support the article; but may limit the number of supplementary in relation to the length and/or message of the article. Researchers often peruse abstracts looking for information they need. Following that step, and especially when reviewing an article online, they often skim the remainder of the article for what they are looking for. There is much evidence in this digital age that suggests that longer articles are set aside and not read. Be very cognizant of word counts. Summarize ideas into succinct paragraphs rather than multiple pages. “Unconstrained wordiness lapses into embellishment and flowery writing, which are clearly inappropriate in scientific style” (APA, 2020, p. 114). Word count limits may only be exceeded by explicit permission from the journal’s editors.

4. FORMAT AND WRITING INSTRUCTIONS

• Follow the body structure or format instructions in Section V carefully!
• Submit your articles using Microsoft Word®. Other formats are not recognized or processed by ScholarOne™, the current author management system used to manage and process articles.
• Use APA format, Times New Roman or Ariel font, double-spaced, 11 or 12-font.
• Under page layout in Microsoft Word®, select continuous line numbers. This will allow reviewers to provide feedback and inquiry to specific passages in your article even if the page numbers change in the management system.
• Use a structured abstract between 200-300 words. The structured abstract should be a reflection of the body format described in section V.
• List 5-6 keywords directly under the abstract. Use bold text to highlight key terms and words within abstract.
• Use the appropriate levels of headings and subheadings (APA, 2020, p. 47) to assist with flow and understanding.
• Plagiarism is a serious concern and the Internet is full of cases of public humiliation where an author intentionally or unintentionally plagiarized content from the work of others. Content directly quoted from another author requires, author(s) year, and page/paragraph numbers. As very often the overuse of quotations can affect readability, we encourage authors to paraphrase while also giving credit to the author(s). As indicated in the APA manual, doing so adds credence to the passage and assists the reader with locating the passage being referenced (APA, 2020, p. 253-254).
• DO NOT use quotation marks to emphasize words and phrases as they can become confused with quotes, which require citations and page numbers. Instead, italicize the word or phrases to emphasize a point(s).
• Capitalize the names of games throughout the article.
• Although we discourage articles that read like personal statements, we encourage authors to write in the first person when appropriate, especially when reporting research. As an example, rather than stating, "The authors recorded the difference between…” authors might state, "We recorded the difference between…” (APA, 2020, p. 120). Use I, rather than we if you are a sole author (APA, 2020, p. 120).

5. ARTICLE BODY STRUCTURE OR FORMAT

Although not strictly enforced, please submit your research article using the following sections. Qualitative research will vary slightly but should contain the same general format. Doing so enhances readership and can expedite the review process since reviewers can find what they need quickly.

Background (Brief, succinct literature review of what is known, research completed on the topic, and what is missing, leading to a problem statement).

Intervention (Describe your intervention as appropriate)

Methods

• Begin with the research objective statement that describes the type of research and the setting
• (Ex1: This quasi-experiential research followed a pretest/posttest design to measure differences in scores for those completing a college preparatory course in an urban high school).
• (Ex2: This correlational research explored the association between overnight workers and distress in an adult care facility in rural Nevada).
• Research questions and hypothesis.
• Sample. Describe your sample. Important: If your research involved human subjects, we require an institutional review board (IRB) approval statement. In most cases, this statement will normally be:
• This research was approved by our institution’s Institutional Review Board or research ethics committee.

Alternatively, as may be the case in some limited situations for some international researchers:

• This research has been conducted following the ethical requirements established by (Country) national board of ethics (Although this burden and liability is strictly on the researcher, we reserve the right to ask for proof of ethical consideration, including consent or assent with parental permission). Note: Even if you are not assigned to a college or university, you are still required to seek IRB or proper ethical approval for your research.
• We require an informed consent (specify written or verbal) statement.
• Instruments (please describe the instruments and the validation process if used)
• Research protocol. Briefly describe the procedures or steps that you used to complete your research.
• Statistical analysis (Briefly describe the statistical methods used to analyze the data (i.e. SPSS; t-tests, Wilcoxon test, etc.). Include power calculations as necessary.

Results. Briefly describe the results, but with enough detail and appropriate tables to help the reader understand the results of your analysis. Please clean your data. Eliminate improper spacing and limit your data to two decimal places as appropriate.

Discussion. Discuss your findings in the same order that you presented them in the results section.

Limitations and suggestions for further future research. Identify limitations that enable other researchers to know limitations in what has been done, what needs to be done, and other considerations that might influence their research or practice.

Conclusion. Be wary of implying causation where it did not occur. Good research is not limited to statistically significant positive results. The simulation and gaming community needs to know what did not work or which interventions may not have been as effective as intended.

References. We require complete citations according to APA 7th edition, including the use of doi numbers.

Acknowledgements (optional). Normally limited to 1-2 sentences. Acknowledge the contributions of those who did not meet authorship requirements. To keep the article blinded, do not add this section until your article is accepted. Authors should also disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Funding statements. All authors must acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit Funding Acknowledgements on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding or state in your acknowledgments that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflict of interest. It is the policy of S&G to require a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors enabling a statement to be carried within the paginated pages of all published articles. If no declaration is made, the following will be printed under this heading in your article: ‘None declared’. Alternatively, you may wish to state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’. When making a declaration the disclosure information must be specific and include any financial relationship that all authors of the article have with any sponsoring organization and the for-profit interests the organization represents, and with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the article. Any commercial or financial involvements that might represent an appearance of a conflict of interest need to be additionally disclosed in the covering letter accompanying your article to assist the Editor in evaluating whether sufficient disclosure has been made within the Declaration of Conflicting Interests provided in the article. Again, for more information, please visit the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

Author Bios. Keep your submitted articles blinded. DO NOT include bios until the article is accepted! Limited to 1-2 sentences per author. Make sure no sensitive personal details such as date of birth and telephone number are included.

6. AUTHORSHIP

Articles should only be submitted for consideration once consent is given by all contributing authors. Those submitting articles should carefully check that all those whose work contributed to the article are acknowledged as contributing authors. *Editing an article does not entitle a person to authorship.

The list of authors should include all those who can legitimately claim authorship. This is all those who:

• Made a substantial contribution to the concept and design, acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data.
• Drafted the article or revised it critically for important intellectual content.
• Approved the version to be published.

7. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS APPLICABLE TO ALL SAGE JOURNALS

Authors submitting articles to S&G must be familiar with the core publishing practices established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org).

8. COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, PLAGIARISM, AND INAPPROPRIATE PUBLICATION PRACTICES

We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of articles published in the journal. All articles submitted to ScholarOne™ will automatically be screened using plagiarism or duplication-checking software. The position of Sage and this journal: Where an article is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, orwhere authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article (removing it from the journal); taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author’s institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; banning the author from publication in the journal or all SAGE journals, or appropriate legal action.

9. INAPPROPRIATE OR UNETHICAL PUBLISHING PRACTICES (NOT A COMPLETE LIST)

Salami or piecemeal publication. Salami publication refers to submitting two or more articles derived from a single study. Typically, violators will split a single study into additional ones, each with their own results and conclusion sections (see Broad’s 1981 article, The publication game: getting more for less. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.7008199).

Submitting duplicate submissions. Duplicate publication “is the publication of the same data or ideas in two separate sources” (APA, 2020, p. 17).

Self-plagiarism. Defining the amount of information that is re-used can fall into a gray area. S&G will normally refrain from publishing conference proceedings or work that has been published elsewhere that resembles the original unless the original was a poster, abstract, university report, or unpublished (abbreviated) dissertation.

Fabricating data.

10. PROTECTING HUMAN SUBJECTS AND PATIENTS

Participants in educational research must be afforded similar privacy considerations and the researcher should obtain informed consent to comply with good research practices. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note. Research on human subjects requires consent/assent with parental permission. Without exception, approval to deviate can only be obtained through explicit IRB approval. When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the submitted article.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. All randomized controlled trials submitted for publication in Public Health should include a completed Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart. Please refer to the CONSORT statement website at http://www.consort-statement.org for more information.

11. CONTRIBUTOR’S PUBLISHING AGREEMENT

Upon acceptance of an article, the corresponding author will receive a SAGE Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement form. SAGE requires the author as the rights holder to sign the form which occurs electronically toward the end of the publication process. SAGE’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive license agreement, which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants SAGE the sole and exclusive right and license to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than SAGE. In this case, copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

12. PERMISSIONS

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. [Title of graphic]. Source: Reproduced with permission from publisher, author, and year.

Example:

Figure 1. In situ checklist. Source: Reproduced with permission from Elsevier, Clapper (2013).

APA (2020) is explicit about crediting the author for original work that may have been modified (pp. 198-199, 218). Creating a figure based on the work of other authors/researchers still requires that credit be given to the authors for their original ideas. That is, you MUST provide the source of the original ideas for each figure unless the original ideas are based on your own findings. In many cases crediting the author(s) responsible for the ideas used in your graphics may include a statement directly under each graphic with the following information:

[Title of graphic]. Source: Adapted from [authors, date, page no.; just as you would with a citation]

Example:

Figure 1. Vygotsky’s learner transformation process. Source: Adapted from Vygotsky (1978).

*Examples provided above are for most common types of permission and crediting following adaptation of original ideas and materials. Authors can find additional information in the SAGE Style Guide.

*Authors should include written permissions as required with their final version of the article.

For further information, including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

13. ARTWORK, FIGURES AND OTHER GRAPHICS

For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit SAGE’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

S&G is no longer available in print form. Figures supplied in color will normally appear in color online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in color in the printed version.

14. SUBMITTING ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, AV files) alongside the full-text of the article. These will be subjected to peer review alongside the article. For more information, please refer to SAGE’s Guidelines for Authors on Supplemental Files.

15. ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITING SERVICES

Authors who would like to refine the use of English in their manuscripts might consider using the services of a professional English-language editing company. Visit English Language Editing Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.

S&G is an international journal and receives submissions from authors worldwide. As English is the language used in S&G and not always the first language of many countries, we encourage authors to prepare their articles so that (a) reviewers are able to read the article, including understanding the proper flow, and (b) nothing is lost in the translation to English. The managing editors reserve the right to return articles to the author for formatting and language issues to ease the burden on the reviewers. As necessary, the managing editors may also insist on professional or equivalent editing following the peer review process before the article is accepted or moved to publication.

16. SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT

S&G is hosted on SAGE track, a web-based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Authors can log in and submit their articles through this system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sg).

Corresponding author contact details

Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email, mailing address and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations are required for all co-authors. These details should be presented separately to the main text of the article to facilitate anonymous peer review.

On acceptance and publication. Your SAGE Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. The corresponding author will receive a PDF version of the article proof. The author should address any notes or discrepancies and return the proof promptly. SAGE provides authors with online access to their final article where it normally proceeds to Online First before being assigned to an issue. Online First allows final revision articles to be published online reducing the lead-time between submission and publication.

17. OPEN ACCESS

S&G does not charge publication fees to its authors; however, it is not an open access journal. If you or your funder wish your article to be freely available online to nonsubscribers immediately upon publication (Gold Open Access), you can opt for it to be included in SAGE Choice, subject to the payment of a publication fee. The manuscript submission and peer review procedure is unchanged. On acceptance of your article, you will be asked to let SAGE know directly if you are choosing SAGE Choice. To check journal eligibility and the publication fee, please visit SAGE Choice. For more information on open access options and compliance at SAGE, including self/author archiving deposits (Green Open Access) visit SAGE Publishing Policies on our Journal Author Gateway.

18. FURTHER INFORMATION

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the S&G editorial office as follows: editors@simulation-gaming.org.

References: American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (7ᵗʰ ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association