Author guidelines

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

	The submission must follow the guidance appropriate to the section to which it is submitted and include all required elements, as detailed in the Journal’s focus and scope, including word limits, document sections, inclusion of ‘notes’ and other information.
	The submission has not been previously published, nor is it under review elsewhere.
	The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Journal Layout Template (Word, LaTeX), is written in English, and provides URLs and DOIs for the references where available. The authors submitting in LaTeX format should upload both a PDF and the source files.
	Author lists should contain all those, and only those, who meet the JLA criteria for authorship by: making substantial contributions to study conception, design, or analysis and interpretation. being involved in the writing of the manuscript, and approval of and responsibility for the final version. All authors must adhere to Journal's policies, including the authorship statement.

Submitting a manuscript

Once you are ready, you can submit a new manuscript using the Journal's online submission portal.

General guidelines for all submission types

Blinding manuscripts for the review.
JLA conducts a double-blind review process such that the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers and the reviewers do not know the identity of the authors. The following steps will help ensure that you submit a properly blinded manuscript for review

Remove identifying information from the first page of the manuscript.
The title page should only include the manuscript title, abstract and keywords as initial information.

Identifying information, including names, affiliations, and contact information for ALL author(s) must be entered into the appropriate OJS submission fields only. Following COPE standards, changes to authors once a manuscript has been submitted will not be allowed except in the case that a clear reason for the change in authorship is given and all authors have given their written consent to the change.

Remove identifying information from the body of the manuscript.
Details that could identify the authors, such as titles of projects and websites, should be blinded by replacing the actual details with a placeholder. E.g. [Project Title] or [URL]

Do not include acknowledgements.
Acknowledgements can be added in the final revisions once a manuscript has been accepted.

References in the manuscript should be in the third person form.
Use of references in the manuscript should not disclose the identity of the authors. The best way to do this is by including citations to the authors’ own work in the third person. E.g. In a paper by Author Chang, the reference could read “Drawing on the previous method developed by Chang et al. (2015)….” with the full citation by Chang included in the reference list.

In situations where either (a) the current work is so intimately related to the prior work that such a third person reference would still disclose identity or (b) the number of references to prior work by the same author would de facto reveal their identity, place holders should be used instead. E.g. “Elaborating the same analysis method (Authors, 2014; 2015) that was used on the same data previously (Authors, 2016)…” In this case the full citation should not be included in the reference list.

For revised submissions, do not include identifying information in the reviewer response letter.
When making a revised submission you should include a separate document that clearly explains how you have addressed the comments that were raised in the reviews and decision letter. This reviewer response letter will be shared with the reviewers and thus must not contain author names or any other identifying information. The reviewer response letter should be uploaded as a supplemental file in the OJS submission system.

Document properties and personal information should be inspected and removed.
In Microsoft Word, you must go to File > ‘Inspect Document’ > click ‘inspect’ and then ‘remove all’ under the properties and personal information. This removes author names from the document metadata. Detailed instructions may be found at in Microsoft Office help, or equivalent for your software.

Unblind the final submission of an accepted manuscript.
When a manuscript has been accepted for publication, you will be asked to resubmit the approved version with all identifying information restored. The first page of the final, accepted manuscript should include the title of the manuscript, authors' names, affiliations, and e-mails. All placeholders should be replaced and acknowledgments should be added at this time. Any in-text citations that had placeholders should also now be replaced and the full citation incorporated alphabetically into the reference list.

Specific guidelines for research paper submissions

Focus & scope: Research papers must describe original work of relevance to learning analytics or review the state of the art in a particular area of learning analytics. All research papers must make explicit their significance for the wider field of learning analytics.

Papers describing original research should include (a) thorough coverage of the related literature, (b) an explanation of the research objectives and question, (c) a detailed description of the research methods used, (b) a clear presentation of the results found, and (e) discussion of how the obtained results advance the body of learning analytics knowledge.
Review papers must offer a rigorous examination of relevant literature(s) to put forward a novel theory, framework, or empirical result (e.g. via meta-analysis).

Manuscript length: Research papers should generally be no longer than 8,000 words (not including the abstract, keywords, and reference list). Text embedded in tables or figures will be included in this count. The Editors-in-chief will make a decision on a case-to case basis, regarding longer manuscripts that are submitted with a justification for their extended length.

Notes for practice: All research paper submissions should include ‘Notes for Practice’ highlighting the significance of the work for practice. These notes should be comprised of bullet points outlining:

A brief, accessible overview of the established knowledge on the topic
A summary of the contribution of the paper
Key implications of the paper’s findings for practice, policy, and implementation of research

Specific guidelines for extended conference paper submissions

Submissions that extend previously published conference papers are welcome provided that the journal submission has sufficiently been extended (at least 25-30% of new contribution). Submissions that are extensions of previously published conference papers must be accompanied by a cover letter outlining the new contributions. The Journal uses single-blind review process for extended conference paper submissions.

Specific guidelines for practical report submissions

Focus & scope: Practical reports provide value by serving as case studies of authentic learning analytics applications with relevance to the wider community. Practical reports should describe new or innovative learning analytics practices, programs, techniques or application in a specific context of practice. These may include efforts to apply learning analytics in pilot projects or in “at scale” implementations, efforts to evaluation learning analytics use in practice, efforts to develop institutional data repositories or pipelines, efforts to develop institutional policies or practices surrounding learning analytics use, and critical examinations of organizational challenges, tactics and strategies.

Practical reports should include (a) thorough description of the pedagogical and/or institutional context for the work and the drivers / need for analytics, (b) detailed presentation of the innovation introduced (this can be a combination of tools and/or processes), (c) description of the results found and how they were obtained, (d) discussion of issues that arose / lessons learned / implications for future efforts and any known factors impacting the transferability of the findings to another context.

Manuscript length: Practical Reports should be no longer than 6000 words in length (not including the abstract, key words, or reference list). Text embedded in tables or figures will be included in this count

Notes for research: Along with the abstract, all practical report submissions should include ‘Notes for Research’ that highlight the significance of the work for research. These notes should be presented as bullet points outlining:

What prior research findings does the report draws on
What new contributions the report makes
What significance the report has for researchers (contextualise existing findings, suggest new areas needing research etc.)

Specific guidelines for data and tools report submissions

Focus & scope: Data and tools reports describe datasets and/or tools and their significance for the learning analytics community. Data and tools reports are intended to foster collaboration and development of new approaches based on existing community work. The reports must include links to the data or tools described, preferably in openly available public repositories; if this is not the case, the report should describe procedures for requesting access. The Journal does not offer hosting services for tools or data.

Dataset reports will typically introduce data that arises from actual learning processes and will frame it with theoretical foundations that will allow understanding its context and its potential analyses. Such data can be drawn from a learning experience in any domain, in any learning setting, and with any population, but must be explicitly presented in the paper. Dataset reports can also be based on online or face-to-face settings. If relevant, complementary data (such as demographics, data from surveys, etc.) should also be provided, in order to allow a rich understanding of the learning experience.

Tools reports typically introduce novel tools and methods to analyze data, in a way that may enable replication studies and extensions of existing analyses to other learning settings. These reports should detail about the tool’s purpose and how to properly use it. We also expect such papers to educate readers about the ways the presented tools might enrich exploration of data, for example by presenting a few case studies.

Manuscript length: Both data and tools reports should be no longer than 6000 words in length (not including the abstract, key words, and reference list). Text embedded in tables or figures will be included in this count

Specific guidelines for book review submissions

Focus & scope: Book reviews inform readers about recent publications relevant to learning analytics and the use of big data in education. Reviews may be of single books or can be review essays that discuss and compare two or more books addressing related topics. Reviewers must have sufficient up-to-date expertise in the topic(s) of the book they propose to review and familiarity with the literature of the learning analytics field overall.

Manuscript length: Journal of Learning Analytics book reviews should be no longer than 2,000 words in length and provide a concise introduction to the book's primary topics, themes and messages followed by a critical analysis of its strengths, weaknesses, and relevance to the field.

Submission process: To propose a book review, first email the Journal editors at jla.editorial@learning-analytlcs.info with the following information:

The citation and a brief description of the book proposed for review
The proposed reviewer's CV
A short rationale for why the book is worthy of review / will be of interest to the JLA audience.

Unsolicited reviews that were not first approved by the editorial team will not be accepted.

Conflict of interest: All prospective reviewers must adhere to our ethics and conflict of interest policy: they are expected to not have close personal or collegial relations to the authors of materials they propose to review, nor any vested interest in the promotion or sale of the book. Commissioned reviews will be given careful editorial attention and a dialogue with the reviewer may occur before a final version is accepted.