Guide for authors

Submission and publication workflow

Interested in submitting to the Traffic Safety Research (TSR) journal?

  1. Start by reviewing the focus and scope of the journal to ensure that the TSR is the right venue to publish your work.
  2. Examine the publication types accepted by the journal and decide on your format.
  3. Check the ethical guidelines—do you comply?
  4. Study the manuscript preparation instructions.
  5. Make sure that you have ‘yes’ for all items in the submission checklist.
  6. Submit!
  7. Learn about what happens after the submission.
  8. Learn how to promote your published article.
  9. Learn what you can do if any post-publication updates are necessary.

Ethical guidelines for authors

The inspiration for these guidelines comes to a high degree from the materials provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

In case the editor, reviewers or peer researches suspect that the authors behaved unethically in one way or another, the journal has a formal procedure for investigating such allegations as described here. On the other hand, the authors may raise complaints about the conduct of the handling editor or reviewers or appeal for reconsideration of the decision taken by the editor as described here.

Communication language, style, and channels

All communication between the parties of the editorial process must be done in a professional manner, using appropriate language, and with due respect. To promote transparency, communication should be restricted to the official channels, such as the submission-specific discussion tool within the journal software system and/or professional emails. Contacts through personal messaging platforms like WhatsUp, LinkedIn, etc., are strongly discouraged.

Studies involving human subjects

Research involving people must take special considerations to how their rights, dignity, and welfare might be affected. This is best done by seeking an approval (or granted exemption) of the research plan by an appropriate institutional or national research ethics committee.

Research activities that require an external ethical evaluation include (but not limited to):

  • collection or use of data (traceable to individuals) on ethnic origins, political views, religious convictions, health, biometric data, sex life, or legal offences
  • physical interventions on living human beings
  • application of methods that aim to affect the human subjects physically or mentally
  • application of methods that entail obvious risks of harming the human subjects
  • use of biological materials (traceable to individuals) from living or deceased persons
  • involvement of specially vulnerable groups, such as children or people lacking capacity.

Details of the ethical approval (body that performed the evaluation, decision identifier, etc.) must be provided in the Ethics statement of the manuscript. If a study is exempted from requiring an ethical approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript.

Individual participants in studies have the right to decide what happens to the (identifiable) personal data gathered, to what they have said during a study or an interview, as well as to any photograph that was taken. In many instances authors will need to secure written consent before including images.

Identifying details (names, dates of birth, identity numbers, etc.) of the participants that were studied should not be published in written descriptions, images, or other media formats unless the information is essential for scholarly purposes and the participant (or parent/guardian if the participant is a minor or incapable or legal representative) gave written informed consent for publication. Under certain circumstances consent is not required as long as information is anonymized and the submission does not include images that may identify the person.

Informed consent for publication should be obtained if there is any doubt.

Competing interests

A ‘competing interest’ (the situation may be also referred to as a ‘conflict of interests’) occurs when there is a risk that your research was influenced by other people or organizations affected by the publication contents. Competing interests can be of financial (e.g. employment, collaboration, receiving of grants, patents held or pending) or non-financial (e.g. political, legal, or other involvements) nature.

Competing interest does not mean that objectivity of your work is affected, but rather than it can be perceived as affected. As a rule of thumb, the authors should disclose any relations that, if discovered at a later stage, may cause them embarrassment.

Existence of competing interest does not mean that the paper cannot be published. On the other hand, an undisclosed competing interest identified later may lead to delays in the reviewing process and a potential rejection. If the article is already published, the authors will be required to issue a Correction notice or the article may even be retracted from the journal.

A special concern are the submissions in which the author(s) is in some way involved with the TSR journal, for example being a member of the Editorial team or a colleague/student to an editor. As such, the TSR does not forbid such submissions and their eventual publication. However, exceptional transparency and independence of the reviewing and decision taking process are required. An external guest editor must be called for, and in choosing the candidate, special efforts are made to minimize his/her conflict of interests. For example, the guest editor should not have jointly published, been a former colleague or a student/supervisor, worked together in joint projects, etc. with any of the authors. The circumstances of the involvement with the TSR and the way they were addressed by the journal are to be clearly described under the ‘Declaration of competing interests’.

Authorship

Two minimum requirements define the authorship:

  • Making a substantial contribution to the work, verified by the ‘CRediT contribution statement’. Persons whose contributions are not deemed significant might better fit mentioned in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section.

  • Being accountable for the work and its published form. This is verified through ORCID iD confirmation that assumes that the author is aware about and approves the submission and later its publication.

Any authorship-related disputes are handled by the editorial team following the guidelines developed by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The recommended practice is to delay the review and production processes until a satisfactory resolution of all issues has been reached.

Originality and plagiarism

All manuscripts are checked by the editorial team using iThenticate plagiarism detection software.

The authors must ensure that all parts of their work are original. If the work and/or words of others have been used, they must be appropriately cited or quoted.

Overlap of text with an author's own previously published work, so called ‘text recycling’, is considered by the editor on the case-to-case basis. Generally, the significance of the overlap is taken into account, as well as in which parts of the manuscript it takes place (e.g. it might be hard to avoid in the method description, but is completely unacceptable in the results section). The TSR follows the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) regarding text recycling.

Text recycling is not to be confused with redundant publications, which is generally a more serious problem.

Redundant or concurrent publications

In general, the authors should not publish more than one manuscript describing essentially the same research.

It is still acceptable that the research has been made public earlier in a form of an abstract, a poster, a conference presentation, a project report, or an academic thesis. Preprints are allowed (read more about the preprint policy of the TSR journal here).

In such cases, a proper note must be made in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of the manuscript.

Scientific transparency

The authors must be very clear in description of how their results have been obtained. The data origins, definitions, calculation procedures, analysis methods, etc. must be described to such a degree that it would be hypothetically possible for a peer researcher to repeat all steps of your data collection and analysis.

Data and reproducibility

Traffic Safety Research encourages the authors to share their research data and methodology (e.g. computer codes used in the analysis) when it is permitted by the data protection regulations. You can either share the data upon a request or (a much better option) share it directly by uploading to a publicly accessible data repository. A useful overview of repository services can be found here.

State clearly in the ‘Data availability’ section of your manuscript how the readers may get access to your data/protocols/analysis code.

Fundamental error in published work

If the authors discover a significant error in their published work, they must notify the journal editor and promptly retract or correct the paper. Read more about post-publication corrections here.

Funding sources

The authors must state all sponsors for the work described in the submitted manuscript (or explicitly state their absence) in the ‘Funding’ section of your manuscript.

In case a funder was involved in (i) study design, (ii) data collection, analysis and interpretation, (iii) writing process, or (iv) decision to submit the paper for publication, their role should be clearly described.

The journal submission system is integrated with the Open Funder Registry (OFR). During the submission, the author should provide the funder names and grant numbers in the article metadata (this might not be possible for some grant-giving organizations that are not registered with the OFR).

Generative AI technologies

Writing process. The TSR permits usage of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in writing to improve readability and language of the work. However, since AI is known to occasionally produce biased, incomplete, or incorrect output, the authors must carefully review and edit the AI-generated results. The authors are ultimately responsible for the contents of the work they submit. The authors should disclose the use of AI in the ‘Declaration of generative AI use in writing’. They should not list AI as a co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans. The standard requirement for the work's originality applies.

Figures, images, artwork. It is not allowed to use generative AI to create or alter images in submitted manuscripts. This may include enhancing, obscuring, moving, removing, or introducing specific features within an image or figure. The only exception is when AI is used as a part of the research design, see below. Adjustment of brightness, contrast, or colour balance is acceptable as long as it does not obscure or eliminate any information present in the original. A good practice is to present both the original and enhanced images.

AI as research method. When AI or AI-assisted tools are used as a research method, such use must be described in a reproducible manner in the methods section. This should include explanations on how the AI tool was used, as well as its name, version, and manufacturer. The general requirement of scientific transparency applies.

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Manuscript preparation instructions

Language standard

The Traffic Safety Research journal publishes materials written in English language. British, American, and other varieties are equally acceptable. It is expected that the authors have proofread their manuscript prior to the submission, consulting specialized language services if necessary. Manuscripts written sloppily, or found difficult to understand due to language issues, will be desk rejected by the editor.

Given the fact that the majority of the TSR's authors, reviewers, and editors are not native English speakers, a certain share of ‘language imperfections’ is unavoidable. However, they should not hinder the reading flow or create ambiguity about the contents.

‘Crash’ vs. ‘accident’

The TSR editorial team finds the ‘crash or accident’ debate overheated and on some occasions counter-productive. The journal acknowledges that the debate has brought up issues deserving consideration, notably from both sides (e.g. here and here). It does not, however, find ‘language policing’ to be the right way to address them. Therefore, it is left to the authors to decide on which term they find more appropriate to use. The reviewers are recommended to avoid commenting on this matter, and the editors are instructed to disregard such comments in their decision making.

Manuscript length

The TSR does not impose any specific restrictions on the length of the submitted manuscripts. The length should be adequate in relation to the contents, allowing for description of the work done in sufficient detail yet not giving the impression of lengthiness.

During the review stage, the authors may receive recommendations regarding shortening or expanding the manuscript or its specific parts.

Manuscript template

The TSR strongly recommends the authors to get familiar with the article submission template. The template contains style and formatting instructions, and lists the compulsory declarations and statements to be included at the end of the manuscript. While the initially submitted manuscript may be formatted differently, upon its acceptance the authors will be requested to make adjustments to ensure consistency with the journal production style as described in the template.

The template can be downloaded here (Word) and here (LaTeX).

Specific sections

The manuscript must contain the following sections:

Additionally, the manuscript may contain the sections:

‘About authors’ (compulsory)

The manuscript must include a photo and a short professional biography (5–8 lines) for each of the authors. If in doubts about what to write, check the articles already published in the TSR for examples.

‘Acknowledgements’ (if relevant)

If the current research derives from earlier works (e.g. preprints, conference presentations, reports or academic theses), the authors must clearly state so in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section.

Contributors not included in the list of the authors may be mentioned here, too.

‘CRediT contribution statement’ (compulsory)

All authors of a submitted manuscript must state their contributions in the ‘CRediT contribution statement’ section. The same applies even if the manuscript has a single author.

Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) is a high-level taxonomy that includes 14 roles typically played by the authors of a scientific paper. These include:

  • Conceptualization: ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
  • Data curation: management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use
  • Formal analysis: application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
  • Funding acquisition: acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication
  • Investigation: conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
  • Methodology: development or design of methodology; creation of models
  • Project administration: management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
  • Resources: provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
  • Software: programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
  • Supervision: oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
  • Validation: verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
  • Visualization: preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation
  • Writing—original draft: preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
  • Writing—review & editing: preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision—including pre- or post-publication stages.

The role titles are to be used ‘as is’ without any changes. For each author, the relevant roles are picked from the list, separated by commas:

‘Author One: Methodology, Visualization, Writing—review & editing. Author Two: Investigation, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.’

‘Data availability’ (if relevant)

The authors are encouraged to responsibly share relevant data and research methodology (e.g. computer code) through open access repositories. Explanations on how these can be accessed are provided in the ‘Data availability’ section.

‘Declaration of competing interests’ (compulsory)

A submitted manuscript must include a ‘Declaration of competing interests’, even if authors have no interests to declare (in this case, they should clearly state so). Read the definition of competing interests here.

‘Declaration of generative AI use in writing’ (compulsory)

The authors must state whether in preparation of the manuscript they used generative AI or AI-assisted tools, and if so, specify the tool and the reason for using it. Read more on AI usage in writing here.

‘Ethics statement’ (compulsory)

A submitted manuscript must include an ‘Ethics statement’. Usually, it will contain a reference to the ethical evaluation of the research plan performed by a relevant authority (specifying the authority and the decision identifier).

If a study was exempted from requiring an ethical approval, the reasons for and the procedure for arriving at such conclusion must be provided.

‘Funding’ (compulsory)

The authors must state which funding agencies, and through which grants, financed the research described in the manuscript. If no external funding was received, it should be clearly stated so, too.

If a funder directly affected some of the decisions related to this research, this must be clearly described. Read more here.

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Submission checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items:

  • The submission has not been previously published in peer-reviewed journals, nor is it submitted to another journal for consideration. In case the manuscript derives from earlier works (e.g. conference presentations, reports, or academic theses), it is stated so in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section.
  • The submitter has received approval from all authors for the submission of the manuscript in its current shape.
  • The manuscript is written in English and has been checked for language issues (spelling, grammar, vocabulary use).
  • The manuscript contains ‘About authors’ section.
  • The manuscript contains ‘CRediT contribution statement’.
  • The manuscript contains a ‘Declaration of competing interests’.
  • The manuscript contains ‘Declaration of generative AI use in writing’.
  • The manuscript contains ‘Ethics statement’.
  • The manuscript contains ‘Funding’ section.
  • Where available, DOI/URL links are provided for the referenced sources.

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Submission

Ready? Go to the Submission page. You will be asked to register or, if already registered, simply log in to begin the submission process.

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What happens after?

After receiving your submission, the journal will assign a handling editor to it. It is the editor's responsibility to handle the peer-review process, including the communication both with the reviewers and the authors. Read more about the open peer reviewing procedure at the TSR here.

In case the authors suspect some misconduct during the review process or disagree with the editor's decisions, they may lodge an appeal and request the situation to be investigated. Read more about the procedures for complaints and appeals here.

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Promote your published article

You publication will receive more attention (and, ultimately, citations) if you actively promote it. Here are some ideas on how to do that: 

  • Add a TSR banner to your email signature linking to the published paper. You can download the suggested banners here.
  • Use the ‘Share’ buttons that appear on your article page at the TSR website (just under the Scopus citation counter).
  • Like or share the post about your article in the journal's official LinkedIn and Bluesky channels.
  • Alternatively, put some efforts into writing an original ‘tweetable’ abstract for your paper—concise, engaging, and not too technical. Carefully choose a picture that best illustrates your work.
  • Write a post about your findings in your professional blog, add a link to the full paper.
  • Make sure that the paper is listed in your research profiles—institutional, ORCID, ResearchGate, etc. See the TSR's pre- and postprint policy for details on how to share your work responsibly.
  • Present/share your paper at workshops, seminars, conferences.
  • Ask your co-authors to do the same!
  • Timing is crucial. Start promoting your paper as soon as it has been published.

Please, use the hashtag #TSRjournal when posting about the Traffic Safety Research journal.

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Updates after publication

Read more about the TSR's policy regarding post-publication corrections, retractions and expressions of concern here.

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