Information for Authors

AIM AND SCOPE
International Journal of Information Technology and Economic Development (IJITED) is a scholarly publication of the International Information Technology and Economic Development Association (IITEDA). The IJITED is a multidisciplinary Journal that covers the main areas of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Economic Development in alignment with the UN’s sustainable development goals.

The congruence of the two fields (ICT and Economic development) has shown its theoretical and technological impact in different aspects of human and commercial sectors; ranging from IT industries and Case study projects to educational domain, Global Health and Socio-economic sustainability to the Government sectors, Professional Development and Policy Makers. In today’s emerging commerce and economic development, ICT has become a necessary factor to develop the several areas of productivity and sustainability of the underlying infrastructures and/or organizational plans across all sectors of the economy, linking the commercial industries and stakeholders with the global economy and ensuring competitiveness at large. In turn, the contemporary trends and state-of-the-art technologies contribute to the development of business, enterprise, and socio-economic opportunities for distribution of information, policy making, organizational management, education, and innovative ideas around the world.

In accordance with the academic significance and professional protocols, IJITED welcomes research articles, short communications, and work in progress in different disciplines covering the topics. Submitted articles must be the author's original work, which has not been published before nor is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. IJITED also welcomes extended versions of conference proceedings (see below regarding conference articles). Articles covering topics that deal with human subjects or health-related topics must not contain any libelous or unlawful statements, be against ethical considerations, or in any way infringe the rights of others.

Topics of interests include but are not limited to:
Information and Communication Technologies:
• Advances in ICT and emerging technologies
• Impact of digital technologies for economic development
• Intelligent systems and artificial Intelligence
• Data science and information Management
• Intelligent methods, distributed software and development
• Managing innovative changes in ICT
• Machine learning and deep learning
• Process mining and modelling
• Human-Computer systems and control
• Knowledge acquisition in intelligent systems
• Process modelling and modularization

Industry, Government, and Socio-economic Development:
• e-Government and technology-mediated jurisdiction
• Organizational barriers or policies to implementing ICT in business
• Enterprise resource models and database systems
• Service information technology and decision making
• Team performance and training systems
• e-Commerce, and new forms of organizations
• ICT and networked organizations
• ICT and Customer relationship management
• ICT and intellectual property rights

Global Health and Sustainability:
• ICT for health management, bioinformatics, and social informatics
• Geographic health information management systems
• Tele-medicine and virtual care
• ICT and global maternal mortality or child killer diseases
• ICT and epidemics of communicable diseases
• ICT and hazardous chemical pollution or substance abuse
• ICT and infrastructures or road traffic accidents
• ICT and universal access to sexual or reproductive health-care services
• ICT and health financing, recruitment, development and training
• ICT and management of early warnings and reduction of health risks
• Advances in virtual clinical learning, diagnosis, and therapy.
• General e-Health and Technology-mediated solutions

Education and Learning Technologies:
• Educational process management
• Educational data mining
• Educational process intelligence
• Learning communities and spaces
• Learning analytics and learning design
• Innovative technologies for lifelong Learning
• Virtual performance, collaboration, and assessment
• e-Learning and digital transformation
• e-Content and curriculum design
• Flipped classroom and challenge-based learning
• Serious games and gamification for e-learning
• Personalized and adaptive learning systems

AUDIENCE
Researchers, Professionals and Health Practitioners, Educators, Government agencies or Policy Makers, IT experts and Managers, and other sectors interested in the application of research studies and technologies to discover solutions for the purpose of planning, problem solving, and decision making towards economic development.

AUTHOR GUIDELINES
All authors must declare that they have read and agreed to the content of the submitted article. An author may submit an article if that article (either the same or substantially similar) has not been previously under consideration with another journal or publisher. Author(s) must have formal written evidence of the rejection or withdrawal of an article from the original place of submission if submitting an article that has previously been considered for publication in another journal with statement of the reason for withdrawal or how they have addressed the points or issues raised by the reviewers. All submissions to the IJITED Journal must be made through the Journal’s submission systems or in the event of any technical issues during the submission process, must email this written evidence to ijited.submissions@iiteda.org,
requesting that it be added to the submission and stating any relevant IJITED submission ID if applicable.

The author(s) must be the owner of the copyright and be entitled to sign the Author Copyright Agreement. In submitting an article, the author complies with these conditions. In addition, the publisher reserves the right to re-referee and/or reject an accepted article if the article does not meet the criteria outlined in the review form or if the article is in some other way deemed unsuitable. If the Author wishes to withdraw or annul the review process or remove his/her article from the system before publication, the article must be formally withdrawn in writing before it can be submitted to another journal. Non-compliance with any of the above conditions may result in academic repercussions or sanctions.

Copyright
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a “Journal Publishing Agreement”. An email will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement. Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution of any of the published contents outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations.

Role of the funding source
You are requested to provide any grant details or identify who provided any form of financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any. For example, in study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, then this should be stated.

Writing and Submitting
Language and language services
IJITED Journal publishes all of its contents in English. Please write your text in good English language (standard British English spellings should be used throughout). All acronyms and abbreviations should be spelt out when first used in the text.

Submission
Submission to the journal proceeds totally online through the International Journal of Information Technology and Economic Development (IJITED) online submission and review platform. 

Submission process
Authors are requested to submit all text, tables and artwork in electronic form through this Journal submission link and you will be guided stepwise through the creation of new user account or login for existing authors when uploading your files. This file will also be used in the peer-review process. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, will be done through the online portal and all communications received through e-mail by the correspondence author.

In any accompanying letter or supplementary materials, authors should state that the manuscript (with manuscript ID if available), or parts of it, have not been and will not be submitted elsewhere for publication. Submission items include (in preferred order): Cover letter, Abstract, Title page (with Author details- including institutional affiliation and email.), Blinded Manuscript (without Author Details), Tables and Figures (if any), and Brief biography for each author. Revised manuscripts should also be accompanied by a unique file (separate from the covering letter) with responses to reviewers' comments, which should be included in a separate file in the re-submission. Files should be labelled with appropriate and descriptive file names (e.g., SmithText.doc, Fig1.eps, and Table 3.doc). Upload text tables and graphics as separate files. Do not import figures or tables into the text document.

Article preparation
Original article would normally consist of 5000-7000 words (excluding figures, tables and references).

However, high-quality articles which exceed 7000 words will equally be considered. If English is not your first language, please ask an English-speaking colleague or editor to proofread your article. Submissions may be formatted in single or double spacing, preferably in Times New Roman size 12 fonts. All accepted articles will be correctly formatted for publication. The text of the article should include the followings:
a. Title: as short as possible, with no abbreviations or acronyms.
b. Abstract: approximately 150 words, maximum 200.The abstract should consist of a concise paragraph describing the purpose, design/methodology/approach, findings, practical implication, originality/value, keywords, and paper type.
c. Keywords: approximately 4-6 words and should contain no more than two-word phrases.
Keywords are important for online searching and indexing.
d. Address: authors’ position, department, name of institution/affiliation, full postal address and email address for each author.
e. Text: consist of 5000-7000 words.
f. References: (see details below).
g. Biographical notes: approximately 100 words per author, maximum 150.

Author details should not be included in the article and are only required when completing relevant sections of the online submission form.

Conference Articles
If your article is based on a conference paper, it is important that you observe and abide to the following points: Conference papers which are not extended with at least 50% additional content are not accepted. Thus, authors can submit an article that is based on a conference paper, so long as it has been substantially revised, expanded and rewritten (50% and above) so that it is significantly different from the conference
paper or presentation on which it is based. The article must be sufficiently different to make it a new, original work.


As a guideline, the rewritten article can have a similarity index with the original conference paper of no more than 50%. These articles will be treated like any other article submitted to IJITED and will go through our plagiarism checker and undergo a double-blind peer-review process. The original conference article should be referenced by the author in the expanded article. And please include the statement: “This article is a revised and expanded version of a conference paper entitled [title] presented at [name, location and date of conference]” in the online system when you submit your article, using the "Notes for the Editor" field option. If the original conference paper on which the extended article is based has been published elsewhere, or the copyright has been assigned to the conference organisers or another party, authors should ensure that they have cleared any necessary permission with the copyright owners.

Articles will not be accepted, post-review, for publication unless such written permissions have been provided along with the author copyright forms.

References
Referencing should be done according to the 7th edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) referencing format. This entails short reference system (surname and year of publication) for citations in the text with a detailed alphabetical bibliography/reference list at the end of the article. For example, “Ogunjimi (2020)
suggests ...” or “Usoro and Okoye (2020) found that ...” or “A study of Health Services (Ben and Stone, 2019) has shown that ...” It is imperative to ensure that all works cited in the text are included in the References section. Footnotes should be avoided, but any short, succinct notes making a specific point may be placed in number order following the alphabetical list of references. References should be made only to works that are peer-reviewed, published, accepted for publication (not merely 'submitted'), or available through libraries or institutions. Any other source should be qualified by a note regarding availability, e.g. url to documents retrieved from the website. Full reference should include all authors' names and initials, date of publication, title of article, title of publication (italics), volume and issue number (for journal articles), publisher and editions (for books, conference proceedings) and page numbers. Papers that have not been published, even if they have been submitted for publication, should be cited as “unpublished.” Papers that have been accepted for publication should be cited as “in press.” Capitalise the first letter of each word in a paper title, except for proper nouns and element symbols. See examples below:

Robert, B. E. & Edem, N. B. (2016). Impact of Information Communication and     Technology on Cataloguing and classification of Library Materials in three university libraries in Akwa-Ibom State, Nigeria. Computing and Information    System Journal, 20 (3), 1-13.

Okoye, K. (2020). Applications and Developments in Semantic Process Mining. (1st ed.). IGI Global Publishers, Hershey, USA.

GUIDELINES FOR TABLES AND FIGURES

  • Do not restate all the information from tables/figures in the text of the paper. 
  • Tables/figures should not be used to highlight what has already been said in the paper.
  • Use tables to present detailed and important data.
  • Use graphs to show trends in data.
  • The table should include a thin straight border under the title and heading cells and under the main body of data. There is usually no need for vertical borders. Often, the title is in bold. Putting the headings in bold is advised only if they are very short headings, and not if it is inconsistent with the format for other tables in the report.
  • Refer to all the tables/figures in the text by pointing out the relevant part(s) of a table/figure when referring to it.
  • Refer to tables/figures with their numbers (e.g., Table 1); do not refer to their location (like “in the table below”).
  • Use tables to present data that is detailed and that is important.
  • Each table needs a concise title of no more than one sentence, placed above the table with the table number. The legend and footnotes should be placed below the table. Footnotes may be used to explain abbreviations.
  • Consider using text instead of tables if data is:
    - Not detailed: One or two sentences can be used to describe the data
    - Not important: The entire data does not need to be presented; instead, a summary can be given in text
    Tables must:
  •  Be cell-based (e.g., created in Word with Tables tool (preferred) or in Excel).
  •  Be editable (i.e., not a graphic object).
  •  Have heading/subheading levels in separate columns.
  •  Be no larger than one printed page (7 in x 9 in). Larger tables can be published as online supporting information. Note: some wide tables may be printed sideways in the PDF.
  •  Table number and title appear above the table.
    Tables must not:
    • Use returns or tabs within a cell.
    • Have color or shading.
    • Use lines, rules, or borders.
    • Contain spaces within cells to align text.
    • Have inserted text boxes or pictures.
    • Have tables within tables.
    • Include empty columns, rows, or cells to create spacing.
    • Include hyperlinked text.
    Figures
    All illustrations, whether diagrams or photographs, are referred to as Figures. If any figure appears in colour, please note that it will only appear in colour in the online version; in the printed version it will be in black and white. If the quality of the coloured figure supplied is not suitable to be produced in colour, it will also be shown in black and white in the online version.
    Figures should ideally be black and white, not colour, and numbered sequentially. However, if colour is essential to the figure, please send a good quality colour image. Please place them at the end of the article, rather than interspersed in text. Please prepare all figures, especially line diagrams, to the highest possible standards. Bear in mind that lettering may be reduced in size by a factor of 2 or 3, and that fine lines may
    disappear.
    • Clarity: Make sure that all the parts of the figure are clear and legible with the figure size you have used.
    • Abbreviation of the word "Figure": – When referring to a Figure in the text, the word "Figure" is abbreviated as "Fig.", while "Table" is not abbreviated. Both words are spelled out completely in descriptive legends.
    • Big or little? For course-related papers, a good rule of thumb is to size your figures to fill about one-half of a page. Readers should not have to reach for a magnifying glass to make out the details. Compound figures may require a full page.
    • Color or no color? Most often black and white is preferred. The rationale is that if you need to photocopy or fax your paper, any information conveyed by colors will be lost to the reader. However, for a poster presentation or a talk with projected images, color can be helpful in distinguishing different data sets. Every aspect of your Figure should convey information; never use color simply because it is pretty.
    • Figure number and title appear below the figure.
    • Label the important parts of schematic diagrams and insert scale in images and maps 

    Units of measurement
    IJITED Journal follow the Système International (SI) for units of measurement.
    Imperial units will be converted, except where conversion would affect the meaning of a statement or imply a greater or lesser degree of accuracy.

    International context
    It should not be assumed that the reader is familiar with specific national institutions or corporations. Authors are encouraged to approach their chosen topic with an international perspective. Countries and groupings of countries should be referred to by their full title (for example, 'Europe' and 'America' are ambiguous).
    Special attention should be paid to identifying units of currency by nationality.
    Acronyms should be translated in full in English. (See also 'Translated works' below.)

    Translated works
    Difficulty often arises in translating acronyms, so it is best to spell out an acronym in English (for example, IIRP – French personal income tax). If you follow the spelling out with its acronym in brackets, you can subsequently use the acronym rather than the full expression. Similarly, labels and suffixes need careful attention where the letters refer to words which have been translated.

    The names of mathematical functions may change in translation - check this against an English or American mathematical reference text.