You will find detailed information on the AP journal’s website.
The most frequent mistakes of authors:
- The authors do not follow the instructions for authors (they often do not read the instructions at all!).
- The contribution does not have characteristics of academic publication but more likely of technical report or lab report. What is the difference? Academic publication contains an introduction with an overview of the current state of the described issue based on the current publications in the field which were used by the authors when preparing the experiment. In the part dedicated to discussion, the authors then reason, compare, explain and defend their results in comparison with current and published findings in the field.
- The reference list should correspond to the thorough literature search. If the reference list contains three items, especially general websites and textbooks, it shows that the author is not interested in new findings in the field and is not aware of what is happening in the field and therefore the contribution is not interesting for a broader international community.
- The authors are often in breach with the academic and publication ethics. They frequently literally copy their own previous publications. The editorial team is using a tool SimilarityCheck to check originality of contributions and non-original contributions are being turned down immediately.
- Young authors usually do not know how to highlight the benefit of their work in comparison with current publications in the field in the discussion. They do not know how to discuss pros and cons and assess the benefit of their extensive and good experimental work.
- The authors will save valuable time to themselves and to the editorial team if they will ensure the contribution went through proofreading before they submit it.
- The contribution has to be submitted in .pdf format for the reviewers. If it is submitted in .doc format the file might be read differently by various versions of Word and OS and the reviewer might in the better case scenario point out the differences as errors which the author did not make or in the worse case scenario for example the used math symbols might be replaced by completely different ones and it does not make sense anymore.
- If the contribution is going through the peer-review process it is necessary (as part of good manners and polite communication) to enter to the system together with an edited version (with the edits highlighted in color) also a “letter for reviewers” containing answers/comments to the individual remarks of the reviewer and also thank you note for the reviewer (an individual letter to each reviewer).
- The most frequent reasons why contributions are rejected by reviewers can be found on elsevier.com.