Submissions

Agreement by Authors

By submitting work for onsideration to be published in JESA, the author prospectively grants the publisher a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and perpetual licence to reproduce, publish and distribute the work in any format or medium. The author agrees that the contribution is an original work, was not published elsewhere; is not being considered for publication elsewhere; and will not be submitted for publication elsewhere unless rejected by the journal or withdrawn by the author.

Disclaimer

Neither the editorial staff, the board nor the publisher accepts responsibility for opinions or viewpoints expressed; or for the correctness of facts and figures.

Submissions

Submissions are made through the open-access journal system at https://journals.assaf.org.za/index.php/jesa/about/submissions. Follow the instructions carefully for a successful submission, especially to allow a double blind author-reviewer interactive process. In other words, during first submission, names of authors and their affiliations are excluded from the document.

The open-access journal system allows authors to add supplementary information to the research article – research instrument/equipment, research material, research results, transcripts, data analysis and source text. Authors are encouraged to use this facility to avoid articles having annexures/appendices, but to share additional information that might be of use to readers.

If you experience difficulties in making an online submission, please contact the editor.

Anonymisation of Manuscript

To ensure the integrity of anonymous peer-review, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
The authors of the document have removed personal information from the file properties by taking the following steps:

Presentation of the Manuscript

The paper should be submitted in MS Word, with a single column and no section breaks. All body text should bear the ‘Normal’ style. Spacing should be 1.5 lines. Tables and figures are included in the text. The manuscript should further be anonymised. No reference to the author/s of the manuscript should be visible to ensure a double blind peer review. 

Length: Between 5000 and 7000 words all inclusive (text, info-graphics and bibliography).

Linguistic and other conventions: UK English spelling (including ‘-ise’ rather than ‘-ize’ suffixes).

Use single quotation marks ('....').

Currency units: Use the ISO 4217 currency code.

Measurements: Use the International System of Units, with the unit separated from the value by a non-breaking space (in MS Word: control-alt-spacebar), except for %, min, sec.

Numbers or values: Use a point for the decimal marker. Allow a non-breaking space between thousands in long numbers as well as between value and units. No commas to separate thousands.

Abstract: The abstract should be a single paragraph of up to 250 words. Briefly introduce the research field and the particular problem investigated; follow this with a statement of the objective/importance of the problem under investigation; then an indication of the study design and setting, key findings/contributions/results; conclude with a catchy or appealing indication of implications for future or existing developments.

Highlights: Not more than four bulleted points, each of a maximum of ten words.

Keywords: Not more than five words or phrases (not sentences). All in lower case and separated by semi-colons; the keywords should not repeat words in the title.

Numbering: Section headings numbered 1, 2, 3…, subheadings numbered 1.1, 1.1.1 etc. Minor subheadings can be left unnumbered.

Tables, figures and equations: These should be included within the body of the text and each series numbered consecutively from 1. All tables, figures and equations must be referred to in the body of the preceding text and as near as possible to the respective illustrations, using capital T, F or E (e.g. ‘…as shown in Figure 1.’ or ‘Table 1 shows…’ or ‘…expressed in terms of Equation 1’). Captions are placed above tables, but below figures, respectively, with a full-stop at the end. If not your original work or if adopted/derived from elsewhere, give citations, e.g.,

Figure 3: Cross-sectional view of a commercial photovoltaics module [1] or (Bekker, 2007).

Figures, which may be in colour, must be of reasonable standard at the time of manuscript submission – i.e. with crisp and clear drawings and labels. Labels within figures should take the font consistent with the manuscript. Excel figures should be included in editable form. When the manuscript is finally accepted by JESA, authors may be requested to submit better quality illustrations. Note that downloads from the internet sometimes do not meet a publishable quality for an academic journal.

Bibliographic management: This is one of the most significant values of your submission. The general guideline here is that citaions from credible, scholarly and peer-reviewed journals have a direct impact on the quality of your work going into the future. While authors may find it inevitable to cite material from non-scholarly and nonpeer-reviewed publications or sources such as the WWW, newspapers, reports, governments, theses and dissetations, JESA discourges such practice. Authors should not, however, view this as an impediment to their publishing aspirations and stop submitting to JESA, but can proceed with their submissions with full knowledge of opportunities to enhance their research profiles. 

Citing as you write: Use author-year in parentheses, e.g. (authour1, year; author2, year; author3, year), i.e. the Harvard system. Apply consistently throughout and, preferably, place such citations at the end of a clause or sentence. Authors are encouraged to include citations mainly from accredited international journals. Sources outside scholarly published material and theses are acceptable but should be at an absolute minimum.

Recommended tool: EndNote, Mendeley and RefWorks are software tools for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references on the Windows; and are downloadable MS Word plugins. EndNote, in particular is recommended by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics, as well as endorsed by most journals and universities. 

Reference list: Choose the Harvard system of reference, which is essentially automated but can be edited for consistency in respect with (1) author’s last name and initials, (2) year of publication/source, (3) title of publication/source (taking into account the general conventions of capital and lower case letters), (3) name of journal/source, (5) relevant pages. Only initial capitals are used for titles of articles, books, etc; caps are used for journal titles. Examples:

Bekker, B. 2007. Irradiation and PV array energy output, cost, and optimal positioning estimation for South Africa. Journal of Energy in Southern Africa 18 (2): 16–25.

Madessa, H.B., Lovesth, J. and Nydal, O.J. 2009. Experimental investigation on rock bed for high temperature solar thermal storage. Renewable energy shaping our future. Proceedings of the ISES Solar World Congress 2009, Johannesburg, South Africa, 11–14 October, 2009: 123–132.

Manwell, J. F., McGowan, J. and Rogers, A. 2002. Wind power explained: Theory, design and application, second edition. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Okello, D. 2012. Rock bed thermal energy storage for solar cooking application – potential for solar cooking in Uganda. PhD dissertation, Makerere University, Uganda.

Plagiarism Policy

Plagiarism is defined as the use of another's work, words or ideas without attribution or permission, and representation of them as one’s own original work. Plagiarism may take many forms, ranging from major plagiarism (the copy-and-paste of large amounts of text), to minor plagiarism without dishonest intent (e.g. when an author uses parts of an introduction from an earlier paper) and even self-plagiarism (the reuse of significant, identical or near-identical portions of one's own work without citing the original version).

Manuscripts containing plagiarism will not be considered for publication in the journal. If plagiarism is brought to light after a manuscript has been published, the journal will proceed to conduct a preliminary investigation. Suspected misconduct will be reported to the institutes and funding agencies of the authors concerned. The journal reserves the right to formally retract such manuscripts and publish statements to reference material as plagiarism.

Copyright & License Terms

Copyright remains with the author/s of the article/s.

All articles published in JESA can be re-used under the following CC license: CC BY-SA Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.