Guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals

This paper aims to compare guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals regarding six scientific fields (according to Croatian classification) and to show the representation of technical and ethical issues that are explained in guidelines for authors.

The aim of the research is to identify elements that are included in guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals from all scientific fields. Fourteen parameters for 200 journals were analyzed (all the journals that had published at least one 2016 issue by the end of February 2017).

The parameter that is explained in the most journals is the length of the manuscript (91.5 per cent). The lowest number of journals explains Open Researcher and Contributor ID (1.5 per cent). The highest percentage of journals that explain plagiarism is in the field of natural sciences (44 per cent). As compared to the results of previous researches, there is an increase in the number of ethical questions mentioned in the guidelines for authors of Croatian scholarly journals.

This paper provides recommendations and suggestions that could help journal editors make guidelines for authors more informative. That could help in advancing editorial process (e.g. peer review process) and in avoiding misconducts (e.g. plagiarism or false attribution of authorship).

This paper is the first detailed content analysis of guidelines for authors in all Croatian scholarly journals.