Instructions for authors

The Journal of Language and Aging Research (JLAR) invites the submission of original research reports. The submission must be unpublished original work and may not simultaneously be under consideration for publication in another journal or in a book. Manuscripts that have appeared in an earlier version in a working papers volume may be submitted to the journal. In cases where all or part of a submission is an English translation of an article or chapter that was previously published in another language, please contact the editors prior to submission.

Manuscripts should be submitted online using the portal available on the journal’s website. There are two parts to the submission, one of them the manuscript itself and the other an informational document. They should conform to the following guidelines:

Language

  • Manuscripts should be written in English.
  • When including examples (or other items) in languages other than English, please also include an English translation (see below for more on this).
  • The journal uses American English spelling and punctuation conventions; an initial submission need not conform to these, but the final version will need to.
  • As appropriate, you may wish to have your paper checked by a reader who is familiar with the norms of academic English to ensure that the manuscript adheres to them.

Manuscript content and format

  • Except as directed below, please follow the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, with all citations and bibliographies using the “author-date” style. Please include persistent identifiers—e.g., DOI references—in bibliographies wherever possible. (For style-related questions, if you do not have access to the full style manual the editors recommend referring to the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s guide to the style.)
  • Manuscripts should not normally exceed 10,000 words, including all notes, references, appendices, and the like. This is a flexible limit; however, if you wish to submit a manuscript that is significantly longer, be aware that the length must be justified by the content.
  • Articles are reviewed anonymously, and so you should not include any information in the article itself that clearly identifies any of the authors (e.g., “In our 2019 study, we found…”). Please, however, do not go so far as to eliminate your own name(s) in references, since that often has the opposite effect of making it clear who wrote the paper.
  • Manuscripts should begin with a title at the top of the first page followed by a single-paragraph abstract of up to 250 words, a list of 5 key terms, and then the body of the article.
  • The editors recommend including section headers in the body text; please number them beginning with 1, with subheadings of, e.g., 1.1 and under that 1.1.1. (Please do not use a fourth level of subheading, and do not provide a heading for the abstract or key terms.)
  • Include all tables and figures in line with the body text, with works cited and appendices (if any) following it. Tables and figures should be captioned and also referenced in the body text.
  • Use footnotes rather than endnotes; they should be numbered sequentially beginning with1, marked with a superscripted numeral both in the body text and at the beginning of the note. Though we strongly suggest that footnotes be used sparingly, there are many cases in which they are appropriate, and so should not be avoided on principle. (Please do not include an “author’s note” in your submission; you will have the opportunity to add one if your submission is accepted.)
  • You may choose to abbreviate references to languages, especially if you need to refer to them frequently. If you do, please follow ISO 639-2
  • When referring to words or phrases as examples, please italicize them and if they are not in English, identify the language and give a translation following it in single quotes, for example: fra exemple ‘example.’ Your translation may be a literal or a free translation or both, as appropriate.
  • Please remember that your paper is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International This has important implications for any content you use, which must be licensed for open access publication, as well.

Informational document

  • You will also be asked to upload a separate document containing the following information, in this order:
    • The title of the submission
    • A short title of up to 55 characters that can be used as a running header (of course, if the title is short enough this may be identical to the full title)
    • The name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s)
    • ORCID IDs, if available, for all authors
    • Contact information (email, postal address, and phone and/or fax number) for the corresponding author(s)
    • A list of potential conflicts of interest for each author (if an author has none, please explicitly state so)
    • If a grant funded the research in the article, please also include funding information including the funder name and grant number
    • Please include an ethics statement, following the guidelines in the section on research ethics below.
  • There is a Word template for your use when creating this document, if you wish.

Technical details

  • Please use an easily legible Unicode font set to 12 points. The manuscript should be double-spaced, but the informational document need not be.
  • Manuscripts should be submitted in Microsoft Word (DOCX) or rich text format (RTF) format. If there is special formatting that cannot reliably be transmitted in one of these formats, please contact the editors for assistance.
  • JLAR follows the principle of double-blind review, and so authors are asked to avoid identifying themselves in submitted articles, including in the metadata of submissions (e.g., the “author” field in a Microsoft Word document’s properties).
  • For the manuscript, name the document with the first four characters of the first author’s last name (use X as padding if the name is less than four characters), followed by the two-digit year and two-digit month, followed by the proper three- or four-character file extension. (So, for example, a manuscript submitted in Word format by Smith, Ahmadi, and Sato in September 2022 would be smit2209.docx.)
  • For the informational document, do the same thing but add an A to the end of the file name. (So the informational document accompanying the above example would be smit2209a.docx.)

Ethics

  • General considerations
    • Submissions should adhere to the principles outlined in the journal's statement on publication ethics.
    • Information on how you dealt with ethical implications should be included in your paper, in the data section. Please provide, if necessary, related documents to the editors. You are also asked to provide a separate ethics statement in the submitting process.
  • Data collection and management
    • In the spirit of Open Science, please include a data availability statement in the article. We support the FAIR principles
    • Concerning ethical issues raised by the inclusion of human subjects, we encourage you to apply current initiatives of establishing and unifying ethical standards. At the same time, we account for the fact that JLAR addresses different sub-disciplines in linguistics with different research methods. As an example of a discussion of ethics in relation to linguistic research specifically (though set squarely in a British context), we refer authors to the British Association for Applied Linguistics Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics (BAAL 2021).
  • Ethics statement
    • A brief ethics statement will be included with the published version of your paper. You are asked to explain how you addressed the issues raised by ethical standards, as follows:
      1. Did you obtain the official approval of an ethics committee of your university or sponsoring institution (e.g., institutional review board, research ethics board, comité de protection des personnes)? If so, please include the institution and contact information for the board, as well as the title and/or reference number for the approval.
        OR (if not 1)
      2. Did you follow existing standards for participant protection and research ethics, and how did you do so?
        OR (if not 1 or 2)
      3. Please briefly answer the relevant “key questions” presented in BAAL 2021 pp.12–‍13.

Downloadable version for offline use: JLAR instructions for authors (version 1.0, 2023-06-30)