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E:CO is interested in receiving work from a wide range of perspectives:

Theoretical and practitioner based;
Both conventional and unconventional methodologies;
Case study work;
Approaches to teaching management or leadership;
Work covering a variety of organizational types, size and ownership;
Cross cultural studies and work from Australasia, Africa, Central and South America and the Far East as well as the USA and Europe.

We ask that authors set their paper clearly within the context of the notion of complexity and complex systems, however they chose to define such, and that the practical implications and transferable lessons from their work be clearly described.

Note that quantitative studies (including those which focus on survey results and related statistics) are not suitable for E:CO. Authors are limited to one mathematical formula per paper (additional formulae may appear in the technical appendix). If you wish to submit work of a quantitative nature, please represent it qualitatively. Figures and tables should be illustrative. Quantitative and statistically based submissions will be returned without review. Each article in E:CO will be accompanied by space on the E:CO web site for additional materials and discussion forums.

General Guidelines

Submission of a manuscript to E:CO implies that all listed authors contributed substantially to the work, and that the work is an original contribution.
If a manuscript constitutes primary publication of results from a study involving human subjects, authors must affirm that it was done in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.
In general, for studies involving human or animal research, authors should follow the policies established for the PLOS Journals (see for example the relevant policies in PLOS Medicine).
Authors may use any common citation style (e.g., AMA style, APA style, the Chicago Manual of Style, etc.) in the Reference section, as long as it is used consistently and authorship of cited works is adequately attributed, with all information necessary to locate cited material included. We also request that ISSN and ISBN are included for all periodical and book publications, respectively.

Instructions for creating an author account

All authors and co-authors will need an E:CO account in order compose and submit a manuscript to E:CO. A new account can be created by clicking the ‘Register’ link on the E:CO log-in page, which can be found via the ‘log in’ link in the upper right-hand corner of the E:CO homepage.

Submitting a username and email address will generate an email message asking you to confirm your account. Completing the confirmation process will generate a second message, which will provide you with the temporary password you will need to log in. This password can be updated as needed on your Profile page.

Once logged in, please update your profile with your full name, and affiliation information. This information will be used in the E:CO articles published under your name, so please ensure that your name and affiliation information appears exactly as it should in the author list of a published article, and in PubMed. You can access your profile via the Profile section on your ‘Dashboard’ page.

Instructions for writing and submitting articles to E:CO

Once you have created an E:CO account and logged in, you will be able to create a new article via the WordPress Dashboard, which is accessible from the top of any E:CO page. Before creating a new submission, please make sure of the following:

A) Please ensure that you are logged in to the correct E:CO section – the name of the section will appear in the Dashboard bar at the top of the page. Unfortunately, we are not able to transfer articles between E:CO sections at the moment.

B) Please ensure that you are creating a new Article, rather than a new ‘Post.’ Posts cannot be published in E:CO, and will need to be re-submitted as articles.

From the Annotum Dashboard page, select the ‘Articles’ button on the left-hand sidebar, followed by the ‘Add New’ button.

Enter the paper’s Title, Abstract, Funding Statement, and Acknowledgments into the appropriate text fields on the submission page, using the editing toolbar to format the text, add images, tables, equations, and lists as needed.

Note: If you are copying a fully formatted document into Annotum, the previous document’s formatting may not display correctly in Annotum. In this case the you can use the ‘Paste as Plain Text’ tool to copy the article into Annotum.

Creating Article Text

A) Note the <Sec>, <Title>, and tags found in the ‘Body’ text field – these tags will allow you to correctly format your article for publication.

If only one row of toolbar buttons appears above the ‘Body’ field, click the ‘Show/Hide Kitchen Sink’ button to access the second row, which includes the buttons for creating references, tables, and equations.

B) Section headings (Introduction, Methods, Results, etc) should be provided in the <Title> field, while article text should be provided in the text fields ( = paragraph). Sub-headings should be denoted by using bold text formatting.

C) New sections can be created by pressing Ctrl + Enter on your keyboard:

Pressing Ctrl+ Enter while your cursor is in a will create a new section which contains a new <Title> field.
Pressing Ctrl+ Enter while your cursor is in the <Title> field will create a new .
Pressing Enter while your cursor is in a field will create a new .

Adding co-authors

Co-authors can be added to an Annotum article at any point in the article-creation process.

In the article editor, find the “Author” and “Co-Authors” meta boxes on the right-hand side of the screen – you may have to scroll down to find them.

A) If your co-authors do not already have E:CO profiles, you can invite them to do so via the ‘invite a new user’ link, found in the ‘Co-Authors’ box on the right-hand sidebar.

B) If your co-authors already have Annotum profiles, enter their names into the search field in the ‘Co-Authors’ box on the right-hand sidebar, select the correct name, and click the ‘Add’ button.

Note – the author order will be denoted by the order in which you invite authors. That is, as the primary author you will appear as the first author (this can be changed), the first co-author added to the article will appear as the second author, the second co-author invited will appear as the third, etc…

To change the primary author for an article, follow these steps:

1) Open the article in the article editor

2) Be sure that the desired primary author is already added as a coauthor. See “Adding and Inviting Coauthors”, earlier in this article, for more details.

3) Find the “Author” meta-box on the right-hand side of the screen. You may have to scroll down the page to find it.

4) Use the dropdown menu to select a new primary author

Providing Author Affiliation Information

In the published article, the author list will appear at the top of the page, and each author’s affiliation information will appear upon mouse-over of their name. Each author will need to submit his/her own affiliation information in Annotum, which can be done via the ‘Annotum Profile’ page.

Submitting your article

Once the article is complete, you can submit it for review. The submission process can be initiated via the ‘Submit For Review’ button found in the top right corner of your submission page:

Once submitted, the status box for your submission will read as follows:

Following submission a manuscript number (eg [DIS-12-0001]) will be added to the title of your submission for tracking purposes. This will be removed prior to publication should your article be accepted.

As your submission moves through the editorial process, the status box will display the following stages:

Waiting for Review – the editors are considering whether to solicit review comments from the experts on our reviewer board.

In Review – the editors have sent invitations to external reviewers, who will be given approximately one week to provide their review comments.

Approved/Declined/Revised – the editors have reached a decision, and you should have received a formal decision letter

If and when your article is approved for publication by the editors, E:CO staff will give the submission a final quality check to ensure that all required information has been provided, and that the article is formatted correctly. If revisions are requested, the article returns to a draft status for further editing by the author(s).

For Authors