Submissions

Author Guidelines

Please follow the instructions below when submitting your manuscript.

Feel free to contact us at ccreditorialteam@gmail.com for any questions about scope, format, or procedures around submissions.

Note that our journal uses LaTeX for typesetting. After acceptance, we expect authors to use our LaTeX template:

• Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/computational-communication-research-template/rdypnbpwjqrd
• Quarto: https://github.com/ccr-journal/ccr-quarto/
• Direct link to the ccr.sty file: https://github.com/ccr-journal/ccr-quarto/blob/main/_extensions/ccr/ccr.cls

For initial submissions, using APA7 style (e.g., produced with Word or LibreOffice) instead of the LaTeX template is acceptable.

• Use American or British English.
• Include an abstract that should generally not exceed 200 words.
• Submissions should not contain information that identifies the author (except in the case of tool or data announcements; see below). Self-citations are permitted, but where obvious replace by (Author, 2017).  External links to identifiable resources such as authors’ github repositories should be removed from the initial submission. Please make sure the filename and file properties do not contain your name.
• Research articles should be at most 9,000 words in length (including bibliography and tables)
• Research notes should be at most 4,000 words and should focus on describing empirical results. They should contain a short theoretical introduction to link the research with the relevant communication science theory, but references and theoretical discussion should be kept to a minimum.
• Announcements of novel tools or data sets should be at most 2,000 words and describe a publicly accessible and novel (or major revision of a) tool or data set relevant to the communication science community.  The manuscript should contain a link to the tool or data in question and describe the relevance and intended working and purpose of the tool or data. For tools, code examples or screenshots describing common use cases are encouraged. Announcements are not subject to blinded peer-review, only (unblinded) editorial review, as they are intended for expedient dissemination to the research community. 
• For publishing tools, please refer to the Nature editorial “Does your code stand up to scrutiny?” (Nature 555, 142, 2018) and checklist.
• For publishing data, please archive the data in a repository that guarantees persistence.
• For both tools and data, the repository or archive may be kept private until acceptance but should be publicly accessible on publication. If the tool or data cannot be made accessible due to business, legal, or ethical constraints, please contact the editor before submitting the manuscript.
  
  

  Registered Reports 

  Authors can also choose to submit their paper as registered reports. RRs are becoming increasingly common in experimental research, with a special relevance to computational communication research, where the testing of external validity and the publication of null findings are crucial contributions.

  Authors should first submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) that addresses: (1) a brief description of the study, including background, research questions/hypotheses, and proposed methods/sample; (2) a statement that data collection has not begun, plus disclosure of any pilot data; (3) an envisaged schedule for the study, including data collection and manuscript submission timelines; and (4) a statement disclosing intent to share study materials in a publicly accessible repository, including code and data. The LOI is subject to editorial review to determine fit with the journal, allowing authors to receive a timely initial decision before committing to the longer peer review process.

  If the LOI receives a positive evaluation, authors are invited to submit a full Stage 1 registered report. This submission should keep to a maximum of 6,000 words and include research questions, dataset description, and a detailed analysis plan. Importantly, this submission is made before data collection is conducted. The submission then undergoes peer review, with reviewers assessing the relevance of the research questions and the appropriateness of the data and analyses for addressing them. Reviewers may approve or reject the plan or ask for revisions. In particular, this enables reviewers to comment on, and encourage authors to adjust, critical early decisions that are hard to undo once a computational project has begun in earnest. 

  Once the plan is accepted at Stage 1, the authors are given a conditional guarantee of publication. At Stage 2, if the authors show that they have done the analyses they said they would do on the data they said they would obtain, the paper is published, regardless of whether the findings end up being "significant" or particularly novel.

  For the Stage 1 and Stage 2 process, we adhere in principle to the guidelines at https://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/registered-reports.