Complete guidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to this journal are provided below.
Scope and Audience
Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education publishes articles for a readership professionally engaged or interested in the education of students with special needs or the education of those who will work with these students.
The journal features an applied section, Special Education Perspectives, to inform practising teachers in regular and special education settings and others interested in the education of students with special needs.
The journal is published as two issues per volume per year. The journal is published online only.
Publishing Ethics
Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:
- the manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work
- the manuscript has been submitted only to the journal - it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere
- all listed authors know of and agree to the manuscript being submitted to the journal
- the manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, fraudulent, illegal, libellous, or obscene.
During manuscript submission, authors are required to disclose the nature of any competing and/or relevant financial interest. The statement should describe all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships that may constitute conflicts of interest.
The submitting author must provide contact information for all co-authors. The author who submits the manuscript for publication accepts the responsibility of notifying all co-authors that the manuscript is being submitted. If any of the named co-authors change affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Deletion of an author during the peer-review process requires a confirming letter to the Editor-in-Chief from the author whose name is being deleted. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after the manuscript is accepted.
By submitting your paper to the Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education you are agreeing to any necessary originality checks your paper may have to undergo during the peer-review and production processes.
The Editors will collaborate with Cambridge University Press using the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics in cases of allegations of research errors, authorship complaints, multiple or concurrent (simultaneous) submission, plagiarism complaints, research results misappropriation, reviewer bias, and undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Editorial Team
The full Editorial group is listed here.
Further guidance for authors can be provided on request. It is often an advantage for prospective contributors to discuss the length, content, and emphasis of a proposed article with the Editors prior to submission. Queries should be addressed to: michael.arthur-kelly@newcastle.edu.au.
Detailed Instructions for Contributors
The fitness of a manuscript for publication is based on:
- significance/relevance to scope of the journal
- conceptual framework (connections to relevant constructs in literature)
- methods (if the manuscript is an empirical study)
- appropriateness to questions
- adequate description of methods (including data collection and analysis)
- rigorous and appropriate methods
- findings/conclusions that are literature or data-based
- overall contribution to the field
- writing style/composition/clarity.
Special Education Perspectives is a special section to welcome applied practice contributions. Manuscripts may refer to any aspect of special education practice, policy, or research, and span:
- evaluations of practice and empirical studies, even if these are not methodologically at the standard required for contributions to the main journal (e.g., no control group)
- conceptual reviews of the literature, with implications for practice
- widely applicable reports from presentations
- brief reports of action research
- interesting work in progress, including a new generation of ideas and approaches where preliminary data is reported, allowing the author to submit full findings later.
Corresponding Author
This journal uses a contributor agreement that allows for just one author (the Corresponding Author) to sign on behalf of all authors. Please identify the Corresponding Author for your work when submitting your manuscript for review.
The Corresponding Author will be responsible for the following:
- ensuring that all authors are identified on the contributor agreement, and notifying the editorial office of any changes to the authorship
- securing written permission (via letter or email) from each co-author to sign the contributor agreement on the co-author's behalf
- completing the copyright or licence to publish forms on behalf of all co-authors.
Although very rare, should a co-author have included content in his or her portion of the article that infringes the copyright of another or is otherwise in violation of any other warranty listed in the agreement, you will be the sole author indemnifying the publisher and the editor of the journal against such violation. Please contact the editorial office if you have any questions.
Authorship
All persons who have a reasonable claim to authorship must be named in the manuscript as co-authors; the corresponding author must be authorised by all co-authors to act as an agent on their behalf in all matters pertaining to publication of the manuscript, and the order of names should be agreed by all authors. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
Authorship credit should be based on:
- substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
- drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
- final approval of the version to be published.
Manuscript Language and Length
All manuscripts must be in English.
Contributions should follow the format and style described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Spelling and punctuation should conform to The Macquarie Dictionary (8th ed.). For matters of style not covered in these two publications the Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (6th ed.) should be consulted.
The preferred length for research articles and literature reviews is no more than 7,000 words, including abstracts, references, tables, and figures. Manuscripts submitted for the Special Education Perspectives section of the journal should not exceed 5,000 words.
Prospective authors should avoid language that can be seen as discriminating against people on account of disability, race, or gender.
Uncommon abbreviations and acronyms should be explained. Full stops should not be used in abbreviations or acronyms (e.g., NSW). Use single quotation marks to introduce a word or phrase used as an ironic comment, as slang, or as an invented or coined expression. Use quotation marks the first time the word or phrase is used; do not use them again. Do not use quotation marks to introduce a technical or key term. Instead, italicise the term.
Please use single quotation marks, except where 'a quotation is "within" a quotation'. Long quotations of 40 words or more should be formatted as a block quotation and italicised.
When technical terms prove essential, the writer should provide brief explanations supported by contextual descriptions or examples.
Do not use any footnotes. Endnotes should be kept to a minimum and listed at the end of the text under the heading 'Notes'.
Authors should keep Tables and Figures to a reasonable minimum and avoid repeating tabulated data in a graphic.
For the convenience of the reviewers, please double space your manuscript and use generous margins of at least 25 mm on all sides.
Manuscript Style
Title page: Please provide a title page for the Editors that states the following:
- the name, credentials, affiliation, address, telephone number, and email address of the corresponding author
- the names, credentials, and affiliations of all authors
- any acknowledgements, financial support, or competing interest statements that may identify the authors
- that this manuscript is an original work that has not been submitted or published anywhere else.
The title page is not shared with the reviewers.
Front page of the manuscript: Under the title of the article provide a word count, the abstract, and keywords.
Abstract and keywords: All manuscripts must include an abstract and up to 6 keywords. Abstracts describing the essence of the manuscript must be 200 words or less.
Headings: Headings should be used to help organise the manuscript. Typical headings for research articles include method, results, discussion, conclusion, and references. For theoretical manuscripts, authors are encouraged to use headings that clarify the flow of the manuscript as well as assist the reader in understanding the content of the paper. Section headings should be concise.
Tables and Figures
Both tables and figures should be titled with a short and concise description, numbered separately but consecutively, and referenced in the text. Tables should be clear, concise, and able to stand alone, with table notes included to clarify entries. Figures should be provided in a high-quality format. For imported scanned material, a minimum resolution is 300 dpi. In multi-part figures, each part should be labelled (Figure 1a, Figure 1b, etc.).
A list of figure captions should follow the tables in the manuscript.
Figures, graphs, illustrations and photographs (but not tables) should be prepared to the correct size and each one supplied as an individual file as outlined above. Include placement instructions in the article document, such as 'Please insert Figure 1 about here'. Figures created in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint need to be saved as PDFs. Figures created in a drawing program should be saved as EPS (encapsulated postscript) files. Figures created in Photoshop or with other photographic software should be saved with a minimum resolution of 600 dpi and in TIFF format. Minimum resolution for scanned graphics is 300 dpi for halftone work (e.g., photographs) and 600 dpi for line art, and these should also be in TIFF format. All figures and graphs should be in black and white line art (artwork that has only text and lines, no shades of grey or blocks of colour). All photographs should be supplied as separate files in JPEG or TIFF formats with a minimum 300 dpi resolution. (As a rough guide, the file size of each photograph should be above 200 KB).
More detail on artwork is here
Acknowledgements
Acknowledge individuals or organisations who provided advice or non-financial support. If there are no acknowledgements, include the heading 'Acknowledgements' followed by the text 'None.'
Financial Support
Provide details of the sources of financial and in-kind support for all authors, including grant numbers. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the author's initials. Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: 'This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.'
References
All citations and references must be complete and accurate on submission and follow the format and style described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Papers will be declined for publication if they have references that are found to be incomplete or inaccurate. References should be selective, appropriate, and easily accessible.
Examples of citations are:
The theory was first propounded in 1970 (Larsen, 1971).
Larsen (1971) was the first to propound the theory.
Examples of references are:
Heward, W. L. (2006). Exceptional children: An introduction to special education (8th ed.). Pearson.
Thomas, T. (2009). The age and qualifications of special education staff in Australia. Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education, 33(2), 109–116.https://doi.org/10.1375/ajse.3...
Permissions
The corresponding author is responsible for providing copies of permission for lengthy quotations or reprinted or adapted tables or figures. It is the responsibility of the author to check with the publisher or copyright owner regarding specific requirements for permission to adapt or quote from copyrighted material. Appropriate acknowledgement must be given in your manuscript.
Manuscript Submission
There is no submission fee or page charges.
Double-anonymous review: Authors must submit a title page as described above with article title; authors' names, titles and highest academic qualification, and emails; authors' affiliated institutions; and any acknowledgments, financial disclosure information, author notes, and/or other text that could identify the authors to reviewers. This document is separate from the article and not shared with the reviewers.
The main document that you upload must be anonymized and include an abstract of no more than 200 words.
Prior to sending artwork, the separate files of figures, graphs, illustrations, and so on, should be printed by the author to test that the fonts have been embedded correctly and there is no distortion in the artwork (i.e., lines and fonts reproduce cleanly with no jagged lines or fuzzy edges), as any such faults cannot be corrected by the publisher.
Our editorial board evaluates each manuscript in an anonymous peer-review process, which takes approximately 3 to 4 months, not including any times of revision by the author.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.