Submissions

Author Guidelines

Manuscript writing

All papers submitted to PTS must be original and must not have been submitted to any other journal for publication.

Manuscripts will be sent for initial review by the editorial team, who will check that the manuscript complies with the guidelines for authors described here. Authors are encouraged to use the Checklist (submission preparation checklist) for final verification of these requirements prior to submission. If the editorial team detects inaccuracies with respect to these submission and formatting guidelines, the manuscript will be returned to the authors as many times as necessary until it is adapted to these guidelines.

Once the adjustment of the manuscripts to the standards of the journal is checked, their contents will be checked in a general way. In the event that the basic contents fit the subject matter of the journal, the manuscript will be submitted to the anonymous, double-blind peer review process.

The editor-in-chief of the journal and the entire editorial board will consider that all authors signing the article have given their consent for submission to the journal. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to obtain this acceptance. The number of authors and their order cannot be changed once the manuscript has been registered.

 

Structure of the manuscript

The manuscript will follow the guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA) in its seventh edition in terms of structure, format of tables and figures. Its structure will be as follows:

 

First page

It will include the title, the authors in their corresponding order and their affiliation (the affiliation will be indicated with a superscript number for each corresponding author). Data of the corresponding author with his/her name and surname(s), institutional mailing address, e-mail address and telephone number (these data will be published as contact data of the authors). If the authors have an ORCID digital identifier (recommended), it will be included on the first page and for each of them.

The first page will include in turn and in this order the following three mandatory sections: A statement of ethical aspects called "Ethical aspects" in which the ethical issues described in the section on Duties derived from authorship will be described and a statement of conflict of interest called "Conflict of interest". If there is no conflict of interest, the absence of such conflict should be declared with the phrase "The undersigned authors declare the absence of any type of conflict of interest".  Finally, a declaration of the funding obtained for the development of the research called "Funding". In the case of not having obtained any type of funding, the authors should include the word "None". The authors have the possibility of including a fourth section on the home page called "Acknowledgements" in which they can include those persons or institutions that were not included in the authorship section, for the reasons already mentioned, in the corresponding section, but that did participate in other aspects of the development of the research.

 

Second page

It will again include the title of the article (without authors), the abstract in Spanish or Catalan (depending on the language in which it was written) and finally the keywords. Title, abstract and keywords should include an English translation. In the case of manuscripts written entirely in English, no translation into Spanish or Catalan is required.

The abstract should be between 200 and 300 words, structured according to the IOMRDC system, i.e.: Introduction, Objective, Method (Design, Population, Sample, Procedure, Instruments and Statistical Analysis), Results, Discussion and Conclusions. In the case of qualitative designs this structure may vary if necessary.

Keywords should be separated by a semicolon, and it is recommended that they be considered according to terms included in specialized thesauri (MeSH or similar). A minimum of four and a maximum of six keywords are allowed.

 

Third page

The body of the manuscript should begin on the third page.

Any information provided about the location, participating institutions or procedure that could give information or clues about the authors or their affiliation should be anonymized within the manuscript.

The PTS journal will prioritize empirical articles, so the structure of the manuscript will be as follows: Introduction (which will include the objective at the end of it), Method (Design, Population, Sample, Procedure, Instruments and Statistical Analysis), Results, Discussion (which will include a Limitations section and a Conclusions section at the end, without the need to create a specific subsection for it) and References. Articles with a qualitative design could slightly vary this structure provided that their procedure requires it and it is justified.

 

Footnotes should be avoided

Tables and Figures should be called out in the text of the article and added correlatively, one on each page, after the references section.

The preparation of the manuscript should follow the APA 7th (American Psychological Association, seventh American edition) publication guidelines. This especially affects the presentation of in-text citations, references, tables and figures. Authors should consider some particularities of a publication that accepts manuscripts in three languages. Therefore, when numerical data are presented, a period, not a comma, should be written before the tenths. Zero should not be used before the decimal fraction, when the number cannot be greater than 1 (correlations, significance levels, etc.).

The entire manuscript should be written in Times New Roman font, size 12 and 1.5 line spacing.

 

Manuscript submission and review process

The corresponding author should register in the journal platform and add co-authors, if any. In all cases, at least their name and surname, affiliation and ORCID number (if they have one) should be stated.

When the article is received, an automated acknowledgement of receipt will be sent by the PTS journal platform through the confirmatory e-mail. If the corresponding author does not receive this e-mail, it is possible that it has been caught by the spam filter of the author's e-mail manager and sent to his/her junk mailbox.

 

Once the article has been checked for formatting compliance, it will be sent for peer review. Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Authors should participate in the review process by providing modifications to their manuscripts if required by the reviewers. The final decision on the publication of an article rests with the journal's management. The acceptance or rejection of the article will be communicated to the corresponding author as soon as possible. After publication, authors will receive their article in PDF format and will always have access to it through the journal's platform.

 

Copyright notice

Authors always retain their rights and grant the journal the right of first publication of the work, registered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (by-nc-sa).

Authors are encouraged to maximize the dissemination of their article (e.g., by publishing it online) by suggesting that they do so (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) during the submission process, as this practice can produce good results in terms of dissemination and knowledge transfer, while contributing to the published work receiving more citations.