Guide for Authors

Before Submission

Interested in submitting to the Traffic Safety Research journal?

  1. Start by reviewing Focus and Scope section to ensure that TSR is the right place to publish your work.
  2. Examine the Publication Types accepted by the journal and choose your format.
  3. Check Publishing Ethics Guidelines—do you comply?
  4. Check Manuscript Preparation Instructions.
  5. Before starting the submission, make sure that you have 'yes' for all items in the Submission Preparation Checklist.
  6. Read and follow Cover Letter instructions.

Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, simply log in to begin the submission process.

Publishing Ethics Guidelines

Competing Interests

A competing interest (also known as a conflict of interest) occurs when there is a risk that your research was influenced by other people or organisations affected by the publication contents. Competing interests can be of financial (e.g. employment, collaboration, receiving of grants, patents hold 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 by the editor, reviewers or readers 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 an Erratum or the article may even be retracted from the journal.

Originality and Plagiarism

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

All manuscripts are checked by the editing team using Ourigonal plagiarism detection software.

Authorship

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the manuscript. This is verified by providing a CRediT Contribution Statement (see Manuscript Preparation Instructions).

Redundant or Concurrent Publication

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 here).

In such cases, the editor must be informed during the submission and a proper note is made in the ‘Acknowledgement’ section of the manuscript.

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.

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Manuscript Preparation Instructions

How to Format Your Manuscript

The initial submission can use any format and reference system as long as it is readable and understandable for the editor and reviewers.

Once accepted, however, the manuscript must be formatted according to the journal article template for publication (see Downloads section in see the right sidebar). A good time saver thus is to start writing in the template from the very beginning.

Referencing

The journal uses referencing system based on the Harward style (author+year). Reference formatting examples are provided in the journal article template (see Downloads section in the right sidebar). If you use EndNote, you can also download and use TSR journal's reference style file (*.ens).

Where available, URLs for the references should be provided.

Figures and Tables

Figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points (rather than at the end of the manuscript). They must be readable and amount of information limited to what is necessary.

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 describe to such a degree that it would be possible for a peer researcher to repeat the study.

The authors are encouraged to share their raw data when it is permitted by the data protection laws.

CRediT Contribution Statement

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

  • Conceptualization
  • Data curation
  • Formal Analysis
  • Funding acquisition
  • Investigation
  • Methodology
  • Project administration
  • Resources
  • Software
  • Supervision
  • Validation
  • Visualization
  • Writing – original draft
  • Writing – review & editing

All authors of a submitted manuscript must state their contribution in the ‘CRediT Contribution Statement’ (see the journal article template).

Declaration of Competing Interests

A submitted manuscript must contain a 'Declaration of competing interests' (even if authors have no interests to declare—see the journal article template).

Acknowledgements

In the 'Acknowledgements', the author may provide information about the funding bodies, refer to earlier works, presentations and publications (pre-prints) from which the current research derives, mention other contributors not included in the list of the authors.

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Submission Preparation 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, nor is it submitted to another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The manuscript is written in English and has been checked for language issues (spelling, grammer, vocabulary use).
  • The manuscript contains 'CRediT contribution statement'.
  • The manuscript contains a 'Declaration of competing interests' (even if authors have no interests to declare).
  • Where available, DOI links for the references have been provided.
  • The submission includes a 'Cover Letter' written according to the instructions provided in the 'Guide for Authors'.

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Cover Letter instructions

The initial submission must include a 'Cover Letter'. The 'Cover Letter' should provide core information about your manuscript to help the editor and reviewers to quickly understand what to expect from reading it, as well as how well it fits into the publication profile maintained by TSR journal. The 'Cover Letter' is uploaded as a separate document and it must contain (preferably in a bullet list form) answers to the following questions:

  • What road safety problem does your work address?
  • What methods have you used?
  • What is your most important finding?
  • What is the practical value of your results?
  • How does your work align with Safe System/Vision Zero?

Put your answers in simple, clear and concise words.

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Submission

Ready? Go to the Submission page.

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