Guidelines & Evaluation Process

1. Submission of Papers

From Volume 8 IJBESAR utilizes a fully digitized process for paper submission and review, via its online Editorial Manager Platform. Authors who wish to submit their papers for review, need to register with Editorial Manager and go through the paper submission process. Detailed guidelines are provided onsite.

2. Format of Papers
IJBESAR accepts submissions in English only. The submission should include a full text paper, a cover letter and some author and paper metadata submitted in a relevant form. The title but not the author's name should appear on the first page of the manuscript, as IJBESAR uses a blind peer-review process. Therefore, all information revealing the author's identity will be removed before the paper is assigned to reviewers.

Detailed guidelines
Papers should be written in Microsoft Word format (docx). Each paper should be single-spaced with margins: 2.8 cm above, 2.5 cm bottom, 2 cm right - left. The size of the page should be A4, with pages in numbered sequence. The font used for the title and abstract should be 10 pt Book Antiqua, keywords and JEL should be 8 pt Book Antiqua and for main text of the paper it should be 10 pt Book Antiqua or the closest font available. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively and placed within the text. Please leave one line empty before every section.
References should appear in brackets with the author's name, followed by the year (Smith, 2001), or (Smith and White, 2001) or in the case of multiple authors (Smith et al., 2001); if the author is not known, give the title of the work and the year (Climate Change, 2009). If the same author has published more than two papers at the same year, then the papers are alphabetically separated, i.e. (Hall, 1990a; 1990b). In the case of quotation, add the page number, i.e. (Smith, 2001, p. 10). If the reference is within the body of the clause, give the author's name and only the year of the paper in brackets, i.e. In Smith (2001) it is proposed...
Figures and Tables should be placed as close to their reference point in text as possible and they should be numbered consecutively as they appear in the text. All figures and tables must have titles and must be referenced from within the text. We remark that, all figures and tables should be included in one file, and integrated into the text at the appropriate points (not in an appendix), unless they are large and interrupt the flow of the text. In this case they should be appended and numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals with a descriptive caption. Appendix should be placed at the end of your paper, after the references.
Table captions should always be positioned above the tables. The final sentence of a table caption should end without a period.
Figure captions should always be placed below the figures.
Equations should be centered and numbered as the following example. It is preferable to use "Equation Editor" or "MathType" for the necessary equations, as it follows:

References and Citations should follow the Harvard (or author-date) system convention, in alphabetical order at the end of the paper. If a referenced paper has multiple authors, they all should be quoted. Please, check the examples below:
Book: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, Title (in italics), Publisher, Place of publication.
Example: Papadopoulos, S., 2000, Economic development in the South-Eastern Europe, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, USA.
Book chapter: Chapter Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, "Chapter's Title", Book Author's family name, Initial(s)., Book's Title (in italics), Publisher, Place of publication, inclusive pages.
Example: Sigala, M. and Christou, E., 2010, "The Greek case after the crisis", Wober, K. W., Frew, A. J. and Hitz, M., Monentary Policy and Euro-system, Springer-Verlag, Wien, pp. 142 - 153.
Journal: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, "Paper title", Journal name (in italics), Volume and Issue numbers, inclusive pages.
Example: Bodorik, P., 2008, "Prospects for the future of E.U. enlargement", International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research, 2, 1, pp. 153 - 165.
Conference paper or contributed volume: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, paper title, Proceedings title (in italics), City, Country, inclusive pages.
Example: Beck, K. and Ralph, J., 1994, "Corporate social responsibility in multinational companies", Proceedings of the 2^nd International conference The Economies of Balkan and Eastern Europe Countries in the changed world, EBEEC 2010, Kavala, Greece, pp. 139 - 149.
Newspaper article: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, "Title", Newspaper name (in italics), Article's publish date, inclusive pages.
Example: Miller, G., 2002, "Tourism in crisis", The Guardian, 22 June, p. 9.
PhD Thesis: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, Dissertation's title (in italics), PhD Thesis, University.
Example: Holyoak, B., 2006, Matrix Analysis in Predicting Economic Time Series, PhD Thesis, Bournemouth University.
Webpages: Author's family name, Initial(s)., year, "Registry Title", exact URL (accessed date).
Example: The European Central Bank, 2010, "Indicators of financial integration in the euro area", http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/finint.html (April 2016).
In Appendix section place, if needed, tables and/or figures that you refer to the main body of your paper, but they are large and interrupt the flow of the text.The numbering of the tables and/or figures must be A1, A2, A3,...

A template is a set of styles and page layout settings that determine the appearance of a document. The use of the IJBESAR template is mandatory.

3. Peer Review
The aim of peer review process is to ensure that high quality and original scientific studies are published. All published manuscripts in International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research (IJBESAR) are peer reviewed, following the procedure outlined below.

Initial manuscript evaluation
All manuscripts are submitted for publication to IJBESAR via its online Editorial Manager Platform. Authors who wish to submit their papers for review, need to register with Editorial Manager and go through the manuscript submission process. Manuscripts are firstly evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief and may be rejected without peer review if it is felt that they are not of high enough priority or not relevant to the Journal. This fast rejection process means that authors are given a quick decision and do not need to wait for the review process.

Policy of peer review
International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research employs double blind reviewing, where both, reviewers and author, remain anonymous throughout the process. The reviewers are not members of the Journal's Editorial Board.

Peer Review Process
Manuscripts that are not instantly rejected are sent out for peer review, usually to two independent reviewers who are determined by the Editor-in-Chief. Manuscripts may be sent out for statistical review as well. The peer review process takes place entirely on IJBESAR Editorial Management Platform, where all reviewers are registered as well. Reviewers are chosen from the Journal's reviewers list or, when necessary, after online search, according to their expertise.

Reviewers are asked to evaluate the manuscript's originality, methodology, contribution to the literature, presentation of results and support for the conclusions, and appropriate referencing of previous relevant studies. They might accept the manuscript, reject the manuscript or might require a minor or major revision for style and/or content. For the publication of papers, two positive reviews are required. In case one reviewer's report is negative while the other is positive, the paper is forwarded to a third reviewer for additional evaluation.

When a revision is recommended by the reviewer or reviewers, the author(s) are obliged to proceed making those proposed adjustments to their paper, taking into consideration their specific feedback and suggestions, and then resubmit the revised version of manuscript within a week. Revised manuscripts resubmitted after this deadline of one week will be considered as a new submission and peer review process will start from the beginning. Reviewers may request more than one revision of a manuscript. Manuscripts which are not accepted for publication are not resent back to their authors.

Final Evaluation
After the favorable opinions of reviewers, the paper is accepted for publication by the Editor-in-Chief and it is placed in an Issue sequence.

Time of Peer Review Process
The peer review process that takes a long time is an important problem. Naturally, the author(s) wish to take an answer about their submissions soon enough. International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research aims to complete this process within 4 weeks after submission (1 day for initial evaluation, 25 days for review and 2 days for final evaluation).

The author(s) that submit a paper to the International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research are considered as accepting all above mentioned peer review conditions and procedures.

Originality
By submitting your manuscript to the Journal it is understood that this it is an original manuscript and is unpublished work and is not under consideration elsewhere. Plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the author's own work, in whole or in part without proper citation is not tolerated. Manuscripts submitted to the Journal are checked for originality using anti-plagiarism software.

International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research uses Ephorus (Turnitin) anti-plagiarism software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Ephorus (Turnitin) is an online service for screening published and submitted content for originality and highlighting potential plagiarism.

4. Licensing, Copyright and publishing rights
Your contribution must be original work that has not been published previously, has not been accepted for publication elsewhere and is not under consideration for publication by any publisher in any print or electronic media.

All papers published in International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research are open-access papers, published and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0), which permits reproduction, distribution, derives and commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited and authors and publisher are properly identified. Every reprint must contain a reference to the original publication in "International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research", including reference to the corresponding Issue. The authors retain the copyright of their work without restrictions, for all papers published in this Journal.

It is the author's responsibility to obtain signed permission from the copyright holder to use and reproduce text, illustrations, tables, etc., published previously in other Journals, electronic or print media. The signed permission letter must be submitted together with the signed cover letter. Authors are required to disclose any sponsorship or funding received from any Ιnstitution relating to their research.

5. Publication fee/How to pay
From the first issue of Volume 8 (2015), IJBESAR will have a publication fee of €100 for each paper, payable only if the paper is finally accepted for publication. Click here for more details.

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Publication Ethics Policy & Malpractice Statement

IJBESAR is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics and to supporting ethical research practices and adheres to the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. The journal editors follow the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors and to refer reviewers to the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers as appropriate. Allegations of misconduct are investigated in accordance with the COPE Best Practice Guidelines as far as is practicable.

This journal has adopted a comprehensive publication ethics and publication malpractice statement, composed using the publishing ethics resource kit and in compliance with Elsevier recommendations and COPE guidelines that are described below:

Duties of the IJBESAR Editors

Fair play

Submitted manuscripts are evaluated for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.

Confidentiality

The Editor-in-Chief and any editorial staff do not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript are not used in Editor's or Reviewers' own research without the explicit written consent of the author(s).

Publication decisions

The Editors-in-Chief of IJBESAR are responsible for deciding which of the submitted articles should be published. The Editors-in-Chief may be guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editors-in-Chief may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.

Duties of peer reviewers

Contribution to editorial decisions

Peer review assists the Editors-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and, through the editorial communication with the author, may also assist the author in improving the manuscript.

Promptness

Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript submitted to IJBESAR or knows that its timely review will be impossible should immediately notify the Editor-in-Chief so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received by IJBESAR for review are treated as confidential documents. They are not shown or discussed with others except if authorised by the Editors-in-Chief.

Standards of objectivity

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is unacceptable. Referees should express their views clearly with appropriate supporting arguments.

Acknowledgement of sources

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the IJBESAR Editors’ attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published data of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and conflict of interest

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider evaluating manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the submission.

Duties of authors

Reporting standards

Authors reporting results of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the manuscript. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable.

Originality and Plagiarism

The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others they are responsible to ensure that this has been appropriately cited or quoted. IJBESAR systematically run submitted papers through plagiarism-detection software (using iThenticate by Turnitin plagiarism checker) to identify possible cases; IJBESAR accepts and publishes manuscripts that score as "Green" in Similarity Report by Turnitin.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable.

Acknowledgement of sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should also cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.

Authorship of a manuscript

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as coauthors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be named in an Acknowledgement section. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors (according to the above definition) and no inappropriate co-authors are included in the author list of the manuscript, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. All submissions should include author's and all co-authors' – if any – ORCID (compulsory for all submissions since Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022).

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author's obligation to promptly notify the Journal's Editor-in-Chief and cooperate with them to either retract the paper or to publish an appropriate erratum.

Publisher's confirmation

In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication or plagiarism the Publisher (School of Business & Economics, Democritus University of Thrace), in close collaboration with the IJBESAR Editors-in-Chief, will take all appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question. This includes the prompt publication of an erratum or, in the most severe cases, the complete retraction of the affected work.

The Publisher and the Journal do not discriminate on the basis of age, colour, religion, creed, disability, marital status, veteran status, national origin, race, gender, genetic predisposition or carrier status, or sexual orientation in its publishing programs, services and activities.

Scientific Misconduct and Breaches of Publication Ethics

• Scientific misconduct includes fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism by the authors.
• Breaches of publication ethics include failure to reveal financial conflicts of interest; omitting a deserving author or adding a non-contributing author; misrepresenting publication status in the reference list (erroneously claiming that a paper is "in-press"); self-plagiarism without attribution; and duplicate or redundant publication.
• Editorial action should be expected in breaches of publication ethics and cases of scientific misconduct. IJEBSAR has adopted the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Any and all authors submitting a manuscript to IJBESAR agree to adhere to the ethical guidelines contained in the Notes for Authors, and acknowledges that they are aware of the consequences that may result following breaches of publication ethics. Consequences include notification of the breach in the journal, retraction of published articles, notification of institutional authorities, subsequent institutional investigation, and loss of privileges of publishing in the journal.
• Redundant or duplicate publication is publication of data, tables, figures, or any other content that substantially overlaps with other material published previously or to be published in the future. This includes work published by others or any author of the manuscript submitted to IJBESAR. When submitting a paper, the corresponding author must make a full statement to the Editors-in-Chief in the cover letter about all submissions and previous reports (in any language) that could be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work. The corresponding author is also responsible for alerting the Editors-in-Chief if the work includes subjects about which a previous report has been published or about a manuscript that is under review by, submitted to, in press at, or to be submitted to or published in another journal in the future. Any such work must be referred to and referenced in the new paper and a copy of the material should be included with the submission as a supplemental file. Abstracts presented at scientific meetings (with no press releases and not discussed in detail at a symposium) are not considered pre-published material.
• Plagiarism is the use of others' ideas or words without properly crediting the source. If authors include one or more sentences verbatim from another source, the original source must be cited and the sentence(s) put in quotation marks to avoid plagiarism. Authors must not use materials of others (text, figures, images, tables) without permission and attribution, including their own published work.
• Overlap detection technology has been implemented by IJBESAR and a number of other journals in the form of iThenticate, a software tool created by CrossRef to check for overlap in submitted manuscripts. iThenticate detects possible plagiarism in text using an extensive database of published materials. Manuscripts with excessive duplication will be rejected.
• Editorial action should be expected in cases of scientific misconduct and breaches of publication ethics. Editorial actions that may be taken include notification of the breach in the journal, retraction of published articles, notification of institutional authorities, and loss of privileges of publishing in IJBESAR.

Complaints

The authors who may have a complaint against any of the aspects of their interaction with IJBESAR should, in the first instance, write/e-mail to the Associate Editor. In case this does not resolve the issue, the complaint should be forwarded to the Editors-in-Chief. The Associate Editor and the Editors-in-Chief aim to acknowledge the complaint within 7 days after receiving it. In addition, they should explain to the author the procedure which they will be undertaking to resolve the matter.