1. GENERAL INFORMATION

The Pan-American Journal of Communication had its origin in the academic environment of the Schools of Communication within the Universidad Panamericana of Mexico in 2019. It is an open, free, international, biannual journal, conceived as a vehicle at the service of the Mexican and Latin American research community. In tune with its name, it has a clear orientation towards Pan-American universality, thus representing a means of mobilization, analysis and dissemination of research enterprises in the field of communication, circumscribed to North America, Ibero-America and Europe.

The Pan-American Journal of Communication transcends geographical limits to serve as a link between the American and European continents, supported by the strength of two fundamental pillars: Mexico and Spain.

The editorial team of the Pan-American Journal of Communication is actively engaged in safeguarding the ethical aspects and scientific integrity of the publication, not only as an object of study, but also as an example of good practices in the academic field. Through its monographic editions, the journal demonstrates a commitment to expand the frontiers of scientific communication, since the selected topics not only address new scientific issues, but also contribute to forge new profiles in the field of research. The commitment of the editorial team is to maintain high quality processes, proofreading and editing in fast processes.

 

2. SCOPE AND POLICY

2.1. Topics

The journal deals with any of the topics of the Communication area, including Documentation, an auxiliary discipline of the area whose object of study is also information. The belonging of the area of Documentation to Communication was constantly referred to by the first editor of the journal, D. José López Yepes. Therefore, this is a journal of Communication that aims to address the richness of the area; Journalism, Communication in General, Advertising, Audiovisual Communication, Public Relations and Documentation. Communication phenomena in any context, Communication and Science, Communication and Health are also of its interest, with the exception of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

 

2.2. Documentary typologies

The papers must be original, fruit of the authors' research. Therefore, they cannot have been previously made public or be in the process of evaluation by other journals. In the case of results from doctoral theses or results partially presented at conferences, it is advisable to consult the editorial team of the journal.

The articles will be structured within the thematic monographs or in miscellaneous sections.

The following types of papers are accepted:

• Research and reviews Length between 4,000 and 10,000 words All sections are included in this extension, including identifying elements such as titles, abstracts and keywords, as well as the bibliography.
• Book reviews Length between 1,000 and 5,000 words All sections are included in this extension, including identifying elements such as titles, abstracts and keywords, as well as the bibliography.

 

3. EDITORIAL PROCESS

The Pan-American Journal of Communication aims to serve researchers in the field with the utmost respect, professionalism and speed. To this end, the journal's technical team is highly professionalized in scientific editing processes, and prioritizes the technical aspects of editing over other responsibilities in the Publications Service of the Universidad Panamericana of Mexico. Likewise, the aim is to select scientific peers of proven authority external to the journal to carry out the review process. The objective is to evaluate the articles in the shortest possible time and, if accepted, to make the editing processes as efficient as possible. For this purpose, and taking advantage of the fact that the magazine is 100% online, the articles will be published once the latest version has been accepted and formatted.

The manuscript management platform used in the Pan-American Journal of Communication is OJS, whose IT management is contracted with Scimago company, which guarantees that the latest versions of the software are always used, as well as the security, external copies and stability of the manuscript management platform. The Scimago company performs weekly backups of the magazine on two different servers. Likewise, all articles published in the Pan-American Journal of Communication keep a copy in the Scripta repository (Dspace).

The first evaluation of a manuscript will be that of the editor, who will check compliance with the journal's regulations, as well as the thematic adequacy of the article, the sense of the article and, superficially, the quality of its execution. Within a maximum period of 15 days (normally within 5 days), it will be communicated whether the work is sent to external reviewers or rejected and the reasons in such case.

A manuscript will be evaluated, anonymously, by a minimum of three experts external to the journal, and based on their reports to the editorial team, manuscripts will be accepted or rejected. However, it is strongly emphasized that the review processes should be constructive, since the review is not a mere discarding of poorly prepared papers, but should constitute a point of growth for the improvement of the papers and the training of the authors. The protocol and review template of the journal is public. At Pan-American Journal of Communication, we are committed to prompt and constructive reviews.

With the review reports available, the editor of the journal agrees on a document in which the authors are informed of the characteristics of the manuscript and in case it is decided to accept the work with minor or major changes, an extra period of time is allowed for its implementation or discussion of these suggestions, usually 30 days. The original reports are not provided so as not to fall into contradictions, often a reviewer asks the author to make a specific change while the other reviewer asks to do the opposite, this type of contradictions will be debugged by the editor and therefore a logical document of changes will be agreed upon.

The authors will receive, before the publication of the final manuscript, a galley proof of the document in PDF, for its orthographic and typographical correction in a maximum of 3 days. After this time, it will be understood that this final version is valid. The Pan-American Journal of Communication relies on scholars who act as style reviewers who, in these last stages of the document, try to correct and improve the content of the text.

 

4. PRESENTATION AND STRUCTURE OF ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripts must be submitted exclusively through the OJS platform by the corresponding author. The submission is through this link: (https://revistas.up.edu.mx/rpc/about/submissions). It is mandatory that all authors be registered in the OJS system.

The presentation of the papers should conform to the following guidelines: use Arial 10 font, single line spacing and full justification, avoiding the use of tabs or carriage returns between paragraphs. A carriage return should only be applied to longer sections, such as author, title, abstracts, descriptors, credits and headings. The page format must include two-centimeter margins on all sides. Papers should be submitted in Word format for PC. The file must be anonymized in the File Properties, so that the identity of the authors is not revealed (it must be anonymized before sending).

This journal is governed by the APA norms in its seventh edition, both for the citation and referencing of papers and for the structure and development of individual elements (abbreviations, tables, figures, etc.).

This journal follows APA guidelines regarding the use of ChatGPT. In consequence, authors using ChatGPT or another AI should attach an appendix with the prompts used and the original AI response, mentioning this appendix within the manuscript. It is also allowed to quote verbatim sentences generated by ChatGPT using quotation marks and the parenthetical system, e.g. (OpenAI, 2023). Note that OpenAI (not ChatGPT) is used as the equivalent of the corporate author. Finally, in the references, it is recommended to follow the conventional format: author, (year), title and source. Note that the author is OpenAI and the title ChatGPT plus the request. Finally, it is advisable to indicate the AI version next to the title, with a clarification in square brackets indicating that it is a large language model (LLM).

 

4.1. Structure of the initial submission

Se deben enviar los siguientes documentos a través de la plataforma OJS.

a. Original manuscript. It must be sent without disclosing any mention of authorship, eliminating the data of the persons who created and modified it in the docx file. This document must be agreed upon by all the authors of the work. If an author, after the submission and even publication of the paper, declares ignorance and disagrees with it, the paper will be rejected.

Structure of the manuscript. The IMR&C structure (Introduction, Methodology, Results and Conclusions) is prioritized. However, in qualitative or humanistic works, the internal order is also allowed to be freely adjusted to the content of the work.  In the case of book reviews, the structure is free.

• Scientific Articles and Reviews. Title of no more than 80 characters. Summary between 150 and 250 words. Abstract between 150 and 200 words. Six keywords in Spanish and six keywords in English. It should be noted that a large number of references, both classic and updated, are expected in the review articles.
• Book reviews Title of no more than 80 characters. Summary between 100 and 150 words. Abstract between 100 and 150 words. Six keywords in Spanish and six keywords in English. Book reviews should be critical analyses of the work, with bibliography, not documents for propaganda purposes, carried out by experts in the field, not by people related to the author or the author of the work.

Acknowledgments In order to maintain the anonymity of the work, it is recommended to include this section once the manuscript has been accepted in the changes of galley proofs. The section is included before the Bibliography.

Financing This section will not be included in the evaluation versions, in order to maintain anonymity, as it is recorded in the cover letter, it will be included once the work is accepted in the final layout.

Notes This section should be included at the end of the text, before the acknowledgements, if any.

Annexes are not included in the article, therefore, in order to use extraordinary materials in the article such as images or datasets, they must be uploaded to a data repository such as Zenodo or Figshare and be properly cited and referencede.

 

a. Letter of introduction. A cover letter must be included according to the magazine's model. This document identifies the title of the article, the authors of the work with their main identifying elements, and the study's funder. In addition, it includes a commitment to accept the Pan-American Journal of Communication Regulations. All authors must sign the document and give their consent for the paper to be evaluated.

The cover letter also indicates the role of each author in the work following the CrediT taxonomy, which is developed below. It is not necessary to use all of them.

• Project management. Management responsibility and coordination of the planning and execution of the research activity.
• Formal analysis. Application of statistical, mathematical, computational or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize the study data.
• Conceptualization. Idea generation; formulation or evolution of overall research objectives and goals.
• Data curation. Management activities to annotate (create metadata), clean data, and maintain research data (including software code, when necessary to interpret the data itself) for initial use and subsequent reuse.
• Writing - original draft. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically the writing of the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing - proofreading and editing Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision, including pre- or post-publication stages.
• Research. Conducting a process of investigation and exploration, specifically conducting experiments or collecting data/evidence.
• Methodology. Methodology development or design; creation of models.
• Obtaining financing. Acquisition of financial support for the project leading to the development of the publication.
• Resources. Provision of study materials, laboratory samples, patients, users, instrumentation, computer resources or other analytical tools.
• Software. Programming, software development; design of computer programs; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision. Oversight and leadership responsibility for the planning and execution of research activity, including mentoring external to the core team.
• Validation. Verification, either as part of the activity or separately, of the overall replicability/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research results.
• Visualization Preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work, specifically data visualization/presentation.

Figures and images Images of the manuscript must be attached with sufficient quality for professional printing. For example, in SVG vector format (ideal for figures), or in JPG or PNG with a quality of 300 dpi.

Personal photographs Pan-American Journal of Communication articles are published with the authors' photos. For this purpose, each author is required to send a passport photograph, white background, high quality (JPG 300 DPI) where the features of each scholar, for example, the eyes, can be appreciated in detail. Photographs are requested to be current.

 

4.2. Other notes

Within the IMR&C article structure, authors are free to create sub-headings if they deem it necessary, needless to say the same applies to the free structure. Headings and sub-headings shall be in Arabic numerals. However, the numbering shall register a maximum of three levels 1.1.1. A line break should be maintained at the end of each heading.