Research topics

 

  • Air quality, atmospheric processes, and effects on natural and man-made environments,
  • Climate and environmental changes of the past, present and future,
  • Contamination of water and soil resources, and methods of remediation/restoration,
  • Current vs. sustainable management of natural protected areas,
  • Dynamic of forest ecosystems and sustainable forest management,
  • Environmental impacts of climate change, agriculture, forestry and land uses,
  • Environmental impacts of waste or wastewater treatment,
  • Geomorphological processes, dynamics, and relation to climate changes,
  • GIS, remote sensing and data applications in natural science/environmental research,
  • Global change-induced extreme events and environmental impacts,
  • Hydrological processes and related risks and hazards: mitigation and/or restoration,
  • Monitoring of nanomaterials, microplastics, and other emerging contaminants in natural and man-made environments,
  • Natural end anthropogenic hazards: risk assessment, effects and mitigation,
  • Spatial planning in the context of climate change and sustainable resource management,
  • Tourism, services and other economic activities: environmental impacts and sustainability in the context of climate changes,
  • Water quality and security,
  • Other topics of significant scientific and societal interest pertaining to environmental research.

 

 

Types of articles accepted for submission

 

  • Research papers reporting original and previously unpublished work.
  • Short Communications regarding urgent matters or the reporting of significant preliminary findings.
  • Letters to the Editor containing a written discussion of papers published in the journal (based on new scientific insights on the particular topic, critical additional information, relevance to the published paper and timeliness) and Replies from authors to points raised in the letters. Letters and Replies are published based on scientific merit, relevance and interest to the general audience.
  • Review Articles: a critical evaluation of existing data, defined topics or emerging fields of investigation, critical issues of public concern.
  • Special Issues containing proceedings of symposia, workshops and/or conferences focusing on subjects relevant for this journal.

For agreements regarding the publication of special issues the Editors of Geoconcept Journal should be contacted early in the conference planning process to get approval.

 

 

Submission checklist

 

You are advised to use this list to carry out a final check of your article before you submit it to the journal for review.

For more details regarding the content and editing of the manuscript please check the relevant sections of this Guideline.

Ensure that the following items are present:

Only one author is designated as the corresponding author with contact details provided:

  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address

All necessary files have been uploaded:

  • Manuscript:
  • Includes keywords
  • All figures (including relevant captions)
  • All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
  • Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided
  • Indicate clearly if color should be used for any figures in print
  • Reference list
  • Abstract conveying the main message of described study
  • Supplemental files (if available; must have the same title page as the main paper)
  • Declaration of competing interest
  • Authorship statement

Further considerations:

  • Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and ‘grammar checked’.
  • All references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa.
  • Please limit the total number of figures and tables to no more than 10, and place secondary figures and tables, pictorial figures, and over-sized tables in Supplementary Material.
  • Permission has been obtained for the use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet).
  • Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed.
  • A statement of competing interest is provided, even if the authors have no competing interests to declare.

 

 

Declaration of competing interest

 

Corresponding authors, on behalf of all the authors of a submission, must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people and/or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work.

Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations and grants or other funding.

All authors, including those without competing interests to declare, should provide the relevant information to the corresponding author (which, where relevant, may specify they have nothing to declare). Corresponding authors should create a shared statement and send it to the Editor-in-chief by email (see Contact).The file type of the statement should be .docx. Author signatures are not required.

 

 

 

Submission declaration and verification

 

Submission of a manuscript implies that:

  • the work described has not been published previously, except in the form of an abstract, a published lecture or academic thesis,
  • it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
  • its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out,
  • if accepted for publication, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically.

To verify compliance, your article may be checked by using originality or duplicate checking software.

 

 

Use of inclusive language

 

The use of inclusive language is essential for acknowledging diversity, conveying respect to all people, and promoting equal opportunities.
The content of your work should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader; contain nothing which might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition; and use inclusive language throughout.
Authors should ensure that writing is free from bias, stereotypes, slang, reference to dominant culture and/or cultural assumptions. We advise to seek gender neutrality by using plural nouns as default/wherever possible to avoid using "he, she," or "he/she."
We recommend avoiding the use of descriptors that refer to personal attributes such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition unless they are relevant and valid.
These guidelines are meant as a point of reference to help identify appropriate language but are by no means exhaustive or definitive.

 

 

Author contributions and changes to authorship

 

For transparency, we encourage authors to submit an author statement file outlining their individual contributions to the paper using the relevant CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) roles, including: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing.
The authorship statement should contain the names of authors first ensued by their corresponding CRediT role(s).

Any changes (addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list) requested after the manuscript has been submitted can be made only before the manuscript is accepted for publication and only if approved by the journal Editors.

In exceptional cases the requested changes can be approved after the article has been accepted.
To approve such a change, the Editor must receive from the corresponding author the following items: (a) the reason for the change in author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.

 

 

Copyright and licensing

 

Geoconcept is an open access journal, therefore the authors of the published works retain the copyright in their articles.

Articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY) to allow the general audience to freely access, copy and use research, provided that the author is correctly attributed.

 

 

Role of the funding source

The authors of the manuscript are requested to identify who provided financial support for conducting the research and/or preparing the article, and to briefly describe the role of the funding source(s), if any, 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, it is recommended to state this.

 

 

Language

The submitted manuscript should be written in English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these).

The authors are advised to conform to correct scientific English and ensure that the manuscript has been 'spell checked' and ‘grammar checked’ before submission.

 

 

Submission

 

Authors may submit their manuscripts electronically to this journal. The contributions may be either submitted using the online platform (link) or sent by e-mail to the Editor.
Please do NOT submit via both routes as this will generate confusion and may lead to your article being reviewed twice.

All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail.

 

 

References

 

Reference entries must contain, where applicable, author(s) name(s), journal title/book title, chapter title/article title, year of publication, volume number/book chapter and the article number or pagination. Use of DOI is highly encouraged.

Examples for the reference styles used by Geoconcept Journal are provided in the section Reference formatting of this Guideline.

 

 

Line and page numbering

The font used for your manuscript should be 12-point Times New Roman. Before submission, please ensure that the text is double-spaced and has consecutive (continuous) line numbering, and add page numbers to the source file, as these are essential peer review requirements.

 

 

Figures and tables

Figures and tables may be embedded in the Word manuscript or submitted separately as files in an approved format (TIFF or EPS with the correct resolution for figures and MS Office files for tables).

 

 

Peer review

Geoconcept Journal relies on single anonymized review for assessing the scientific quality of submitted manuscripts.

All contributions will be initially evaluated by the Editor to determine the suitability for the journal. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to determine their quality and validity. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles, based on the assessment received from independent reviewers.
Editors are not involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Any such submission is subject to all of the journal's usual procedures, with peer review handled independently of the respective Editor. In such cases the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles will be taken by another Editor.

 

 

 

Manuscript editing

Use of word processing software

The manuscript will be submitted as an editable Word document (.docx). The layout of the text must be kept as simple as possible, as most of the formatting codes will be removed and replaced on processing the article.

Please see the sections Line and page numbering and Manuscript formatting for details.

To avoid unnecessary errors, you are strongly advised to use the 'spell check' and 'grammar check' functions of your word processor.

 

Manuscript formatting

Authors are advised to use the following standard formatting for manuscripts:

  • Font: Times Roman, 12 point (text, figure and table captions, references etc.)
  • Line spacing: double-spaced
  • Page size: A4
  • Margins: 1 inch on all sides
  • Paragraph indentation: 0.5 inches (or press Tab once)
  • Justified alignment of text; one space between sentences
  • First page contains article title, authors list and affiliation, contact information of the corresponding author, abstract and keywords (see section Essential title page information).

 

 

Article structure

Manuscript page limit
While there is no restriction on the number of pages of the manuscript, we encourage brevity of papers. The length of a paper should be in agreement with the scientific information being reported. In particular, we advise that the introductory material should be limited to a few paragraphs and results presented in figures should not be repeated in tables.

 

Subdivision - numbered sections

Divide your article into clearly defined and numbered sections. Subsections should be numbered 1.1 (then 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ...), 1.2 etc. The abstract is not included in section numbering.

Authors are advised to use this numbering also for internal cross-referencing, instead of just referring to 'the text'. Any subsection may be given a brief heading. Each heading should appear on its own separate line in the manuscript.

 

Introduction

State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background for the research, avoiding a detailed literature survey or a summary of the results.

 

Materials and methods

In order to write a substantial section dedicated to Materials and methods, provide sufficient details to allow the work to be reproduced by an independent researcher.

Methods that are already published should be summarized and indicated by a reference. When quoting directly from a previously published method, use quotation marks and cite the source. Any modifications to existing methods should also be described in this section.

 

Results

Results should be presented in a clear and concise manner.

 

Discussion

This part of the manuscript should explore the significance of the results of the research presented in the previous section, while avoiding repetition as much as possible. Some authors opt to present and discuss their findings in a combined Results and Discussion section.

 

Conclusions

The main conclusions of the study may be presented in a short Conclusions section, which may stand alone or form a subsection of a Discussion or Results and Discussion section.

 

Acknowledgements

Collate acknowledgements in a separate section at the end of the article before the references. If applicable, list here the individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., providing language help, writing assistance or proofreading the article etc.).

This section will also include a list of the funding sources to facilitate compliance to funder’s requirements, e.g.: This work was supported by the National Authority for Research and Development (grant number xxxx); the Internal Research Grants Programme of the University of Iasi, Romania (grant number yyyy); and the Terra Foundation, Bucharest, Romania (grant number zzzz).

If no funding has been provided for the research, it is recommended to include the following sentence: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

 

References
Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is present in the reference list inserted at the end of the manuscript.

 

Appendices

If there is more than one appendix included in the manuscript, they should be identified as A, B etc. Formulae and equations in appendices should be given separate numbering: Eq. (A.1), Eq. (A.2) etc.; in a subsequent appendix, Eq. (B.1) and so on. Similarly for tables and figures: Table A.1; Fig. A.1 etc.

 

Footnotes

We advise that footnotes are used sparingly in manuscripts. However, if they are necessary, number them consecutively throughout the article. Many word processors build footnotes into the text, and this feature may be used.

 

 

Essential title page information

 

Title

Authors are advised to be concise and informative when establishing the title of an article. Acronyms and brand names should not appear in paper titles.

 

Author names and affiliations

Please clearly indicate the given name(s) and family name(s) of each author and check that all names are accurately spelled. Provide the authors' affiliation addresses below the names. Indicate all affiliations using a superscript number immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and, if available, the e-mail address of each author.

 

Corresponding author

Clearly indicate the person who will handle correspondence at all stages of the review and publication process, as well as post-publication.

The inclusion of multiple corresponding authors is strongly discouraged by our journal. Please ensure that the e-mail address of the corresponding author is provided and that contact details are kept up to date.

 

Abstract

The abstract should state in a concise manner the purpose of the research, the main results and major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. Therefore, references should be avoided in the abstract. However, if essential, then cite the author(s) and year(s). Non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should also be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract itself. Please limit your abstract to 300 words.

 

Keywords

Provide a maximum of 6 keywords, avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts (e.g., ‘and’, ‘of’ etc.). Avoid abbreviations, except for the ones firmly established in the field, which should also be used sparingly, if possible.

The keywords of the paper should not contain any words already in the title, but can include abbreviated terms or location information not suitable for the title.

Keywords are used for indexing purposes.

 

 

Artwork

Electronic artwork

  • Make sure you use uniform lettering and sizing when creating your artwork
  • Preferred fonts: Times New Roman, Cambria, Arial
  • Figures will be numbered using Arabic numerals (e.g., Figure 1) according to their succession in the text
  • For figure files exceeding 10 MB, please provide the illustration as a separate source file
  • The formats accepted for figures are TIFF / JPG (color or grayscale: resolution of minimum 300 dpi; bitmapped line drawings: min. 1000 dpi; combinations bitmapped line / color or grayscale: min. 500 dpi) and EPS / PDF (for vector drawings)
  • Please do not supply files optimized for screen use (GIF, BMP, PICT, WPG etc.) as their resolution is too low
  • In general, avoid including artwork with low resolution
  • Your color artwork will be published as such both online and in the printed version

Figure captions

Ensure that each figure has a caption comprising a brief title and a description of the illustration.

The text inserted in the illustration itself should be kept to a minimum. However, all the symbols and abbreviations used in the figures must be explained in the caption.

 

 

Tables

Number tables consecutively using Arabic numerals in accordance with their appearance in the text (e.g., Table 1). The table will have a short descriptive title inserted directly above the table. Other necessary information regarding the content of the table will be placed just below the table and should be used sparingly.

The content of the table should be double-spaced. Please avoid using vertical rules in your tables.

 

 

References

Citation in text

Please ensure that every refence cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). If necessary, any refences cited in the abstract must be given in full.

We recommend that unpublished results and personal communications are not included in the reference list, but may instead be mentioned in the text. However, if the authors opt to include them in the reference list, they should comply with the standard reference style of the journal and should substitute the publication date with either ‘Unpublished results’ or ‘Personal communication’.

Citation of a reference as ‘in press’ implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

 

Web references

The full URL of the cited source should be provided, as well as the date when the reference was last accessed. If known, other additional information should be given, including DOI, author names, reference to a source publication etc.

Web references can be listed separately, after the reference list, or can be included in the reference list.

 

Reference formatting and styles

Where applicable, reference entries should contain author(s) name(s), journal title/book title, chapter title/article title, year of publication, volume number/book chapter and the article number or pagination. Use of DOI is highly encouraged, as the DOI is guaranteed never to change and can be used as a permanent link to any electronic article.

The formatting of the references (both as citations in the text and in the reference list) will be made by the authors of the manuscript according to the reference style used by the Geoconcept Journal. The references should be arranged following the examples provided below.

In the text: all citations should refer to:

  • Single author: the author’s name (without initials, unless there is any ambiguity) and the year of publication: e.g., ‘according to established methods (Evans, 1998; Marks, 2013, 2016a, 2016b)’ or ‘as initially shown by Allen (2005)’.
  • Two authors: both authors’ names and the year of publication: e.g., ‘according to recent studies (Jones and White, 2021)’ or ‘as demonstrated by Hall and Smith (1977)’.
  • Three or more authors: the name of the first author followed by ‘et al.’ and the year of publication: e.g., ‘Ferrars et al. (2015) have shown that…’ or ‘as illustrated by Spencer et al. (2020) in their recent work’.

As shown in the examples provided above, citations may be made directly or parenthetically. Groups of refences can be listed either first alphabetically, then chronologically, or vice versa.

In the reference list: references should be listed alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one refence from the same author(s) published in the same year will be identified using letters ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ etc. placed after the year of publication.

Examples:

  • Reference to a journal publication:

Van der Geel A., Hutchinson M., Lustig R.A. 2015. Sustainable development and circular economy. Journal of Environmental Science 55, 32-44. https://doi.org/10.1014/j.env.sc.2015.00372.

  • Reference to a journal publication with an article number:

Lustig R.A., Van der Geel A., Hutchinson M. 2021. Environmental awareness as a tool for supporting sustainability in urban planning. Journal of Urban Studies 121, e00278https://doi.org/10.1018/j.urb.st.2021.00372.

  • Reference to a book:

White R.A., Maine S., Benitez F.M. 2010. Paleolimnological analysis guidebook. Terra Nostra Publishing, Budapest.

  • Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

Jordan G.R., Adams L.A. 2015. How to prepare an electronic version of your article, in: Jones M.A., Morales A. (eds) Introduction to the Electronic Age. Longman Publishing, New York, pp. 281-304.

  • Reference to a website:

Statistical data for forest dynamic in Romania, 2010-2020. National Institute for Statistical Analysis.

http://www.ins.ro/dateanuale/paduri/UAT/ (accessed 13 September 2022).

 

 

Limitations

 

Considering the challenges facing contemporary research, we believe that a ‘Limitations’ section could be useful (if not mandatory) in all scientific papers and should be included in the closing section of the manuscript (after the Acknowledgements section, before the Reference list).

Adding a ‘Limitations’ section to manuscripts would increase openness and transparency in scientific research, to the considerable benefit of both the scientific community and society in general, as suggested by this publication: A ‘Limitations’ section should be mandatory in all scientific papersby Sumpter et al. (2023).