Submissions

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 materials, including word limits, document sections, inclusion of ‘notes’, etc.
The submission has not been previously published, nor is it under review elsewhere.
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 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.
Author lists contain all those, and only those, who meet the JLA criteria for authorship by (1) making substantial contributions to study conception, design, or analysis and interpretation; (2) being involved in the writing of the manuscript; and (3) approval of and responsibility for the final version. All authors must adhere to Journal Policies, including the Authorship Statement.

Author Guidelines

Authors should refer to the Journal's Focus and Scope document and the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal layout template in Microsoft Word or LaTeX formats. Authors submitting in LaTeX format should upload both a PDF and the source files.

Blinding Manuscripts for 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 author's identity. The following steps will help ensure you submit a properly blinded manuscript for review.

Do Not Include Author Information on 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 if a clear reason for the change in authorship is given and all authors have given their written consent to the change.

Do Not Include Identifying Details in 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 to the final revisions once a manuscript has been accepted.

References in the Manuscript Should be Presented in the Third Person
The use of references in the manuscript should not disclose the authors' identity. The best way to do this is by including citations to the author’s 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 the 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 Author Names in the Reviewer Response Letter
When making a revised submission, you should include a separate document explaining how you have addressed the comments 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 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, 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 in Microsoft Office help or equivalent for your software.

Unblinding 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 should be incorporated alphabetically into the reference list.

Research Papers

The Journal of Learning Analytics welcomes papers that describe original empirical or theory-building research. 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) explanation of the research objectives and question, (c) detailed description of the research methods used, (b) 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) in order to put forward a novel theory, framework, or empirical result (e.g. via meta-analysis).

Research papers should generally be no longer than 8,000 words in length including the abstract, key words, tables/figures, acknowledgements, and reference list. The editors will consider longer manuscripts that are submitted alongside a justification for their extended length. Manuscripts should not be formally published nor under review elsewhere. The Journal of Learning Analytics welcomes only papers which are neither formally published, nor under review elsewhere. Submissions that extend previously published conference papers are welcome provided that the journal submission is sufficiently novel (at least 25-30% of new contribution) and permission to republish any prior sections is obtained. Submissions that are extensions of previously published conference papers must be accompanied by a cover letter explaining how the criteria for novelty has been met. Along with the abstract, all research paper submissions should include ‘Notes for Practice’ that highlight 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

Extended Conference Papers

This special section will receive papers from LAK. A single blind review model will be used.

Practical Reports

The Journal of Learning Analytics welcomes papers that report on the application of learning analytics across a diversity of contexts. Practical reports provide value by serving as case studies of authentic learning analytics applications with relevance to the wider community. Reports 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.

Practical Reports should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length (not including the abstract), key words, tables/figures, acknowledgements, and reference list and should not be formally published nor under review elsewhere. Submissions that extend previously published conference papers are welcome provided that the journal submission is sufficiently novel (at least 25-30% of new contribution) and permission to republish any prior sections is obtained. Submissions that are extensions of previously published conference papers must be accompanied by a cover letter explaining how the criteria for novelty have been met. 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.)

Data and Tools Reports

To build the community and its impact, the Journal of Learning Analytics is now accepting papers that describe datasets and/or tools and their significance for the learning analytics community. The learning analytics field brings data and learning together; these new submission types recognise this in the journal by making data and the tools to analyse that data available, contextualised in learning environments of relevance to the learning analytics community. These papers are intended to foster collaboration and development of new approaches based on existing community work. 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 - all, of course, should be explicitly presented in the paper. Such data can 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 will 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. Both data and tools reports should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words in length not including the abstract, key words, tables/figures, acknowledgements, and reference list. They 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. JLA does not offer hosting services for tools or data.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish in the Journal of Learning Analytics agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors can enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., posting it to an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as this can lead to productive exchanges and earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

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Data Privacy Policy

The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals. It includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to inform readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables collecting aggregated data on readership behaviors, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication.

This journal’s editorial team uses this data to guide its work in publishing and improving this journal. Data that will assist in developing this publishing platform may be shared with its developer Public Knowledge Project in an anonymized and aggregated form, with appropriate exceptions such as article metrics. The data will not be sold by this journal or PKP nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here. The authors published in this journal are responsible for the human subject data that figures in the research reported here.

Those involved in editing this journal seek to be compliant with industry standards for data privacy, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision for “data subject rights” that include (a) breach notification; (b) right of access; (c) the right to be forgotten; (d) data portability; and (e) privacy by design. The GDPR also allows for the recognition of “the public interest in the availability of the data,” which has a particular saliency for those involved in maintaining, with the greatest integrity possible, the public record of scholarly publishing.

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