All manuscript submissions should follow the requirements below:
The manuscript is the authors' original work and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including the authors' own previously published work.
The manuscript has been submitted solely to the PACH and is not under consideration, under peer review, accepted for publication, in press, or published elsewhere.
Authors should submit papers electronically via the journal's online submission system.
Articles should not include the authors' personal details; these should be listed (name and contact details) on a separate document. Files should be submitted in MS Word format.
The manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libelous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal.
Manuscripts should present issues and analyses of relevance and interest to the PACH readership in accordance with the Journal's Aims & Scope.
Qualitative and quantitative manuscripts are welcome.
The length of the submitted manuscript as an original research article should fall between 3,000 and 6,000 words and appear in 12pt Times New Roman, single-spaced text, left-justified.
Manuscripts should be grammatically and stylistically sound. It is required that manuscripts be submitted as a copy-edited and proofread document, including proper use of the English language, correct grammatical structure, and accurate spelling and punctuation. Where not specified, follow the Concise Oxford Dictionary, New Hart's Rules, and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. When in doubt, refer to Judith Butcher, Copy-editing.
Before submitting your manuscript to the PACH, please ensure you have read the Aims & Scope. The PACH publishes Research Articles in various areas of interest in Physical Activity in Children.
Required files to upload: Authors must submit the following five essential files through the manuscript submission system: 1. Main Manuscript File (without the author details and prepared based on the provided template. 2. Title Page, 3. Authorship Form (must include the article title, full names of all authors, and be signed by all authors), 4. Conflict of Interest Form (must be signed by the Corresponding Author and uploaded with the Main Manuscript File), and 5. Cover Letter (Please include any necessary information in the online cover letter).
Manuscript Preparation for Research Articles
Follow these steps to prepare a manuscript of your research article:
Article Structure
This section details how to organize your manuscript for review. Please keep in mind that the structure should conform to the APA style guide, 7th edition.
1.1. Title page information
1.1.1. Title
Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
1.1.2. 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. You may add your name between parentheses in your own script behind the English transliteration. Present the authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was conducted) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter 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.
1.1.3. Corresponding author
Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, as well as post-publication. This responsibility includes answering any future queries about methodology and materials and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements—such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements—are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors. Ensure that the e-mail address is provided and that contact details are kept up to date by the corresponding author.
The corresponding author is the person who signs the publishing agreement on behalf of all the authors and whose contact details are included on the article. They should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.
1.1.4. Abstract
A concise and factual abstract of 200–300 words is required. The abstract should briefly state the purpose of the research, the principal results, and the major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. For this reason, references should be avoided; however, if essential, cite the author(s) and year(s). In addition, non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential, they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract itself.
1.1.5. Keywords
Immediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 5 keywords, avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.
1.2. Introduction
State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background, avoiding a detailed literature survey or a summary of the results.
1.3. Methods
Provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be reproduced. Methods already published should be indicated by a reference; only relevant modifications should be described. Include a data analysis subsection in which you describe what analyses you will use to test specific hypotheses and what results will be considered supportive.
1.4. Results
Results should be clear and concise. Organize this section by hypothesis. Do not interpret the results here; interpretation is reserved for the Discussion section.
1.5. Discussion
This should explore the significance of the results of the work, not repeat them. A combined Results and Discussion section is sometimes, though rarely, appropriate. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature.
1.6. Conclusions
The main conclusions of the study may be presented in a short Conclusions section, which may stand alone or form a subsection of the Discussion or Results and Discussion section.
Abbreviations
Define abbreviations that are not standard in this field in a footnote to be placed on the first page of the article. Such abbreviations that are unavoidable in the abstract must be defined at their first mention there, as well as in the footnotes. Ensure consistency of abbreviations throughout the article.
Acknowledgements
Collate acknowledgements in a separate section at the end of the article, before the references, and do not include them on the title page, as a footnote to the title, or otherwise. List here those individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., providing language help, writing assistance, or proofreading the article).
Conflict of Interest
Authors must indicate whether or not there is a financial relationship between them and the organization that sponsored the research. This note should be added in a separate section preceding the reference list. If no conflict exists, authors should state: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. A separate statement is required for every individual author of a manuscript and should be submitted together with the manuscript.
Formatting of Funding Sources
List funding sources in this standard way to facilitate compliance with funders' requirements:
Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy] and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number zzzz].
It is not necessary to include detailed descriptions of the program or types of grants and awards. When funding is from a block grant or other resources available to a university, college, or other research institution, submit the name of the institute or organization that provided the funding.
If no funding has been provided for the research, please include the following sentence:
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Footnotes & Endnotes
The PACH does not accept footnotes, and endnotes should be used sparingly. Number them consecutively throughout the article. Many word processors build footnotes/endnotes into the text, and this feature may be used. Should this not be the case, indicate the position of endnotes in the text and present the endnotes themselves separately at the end of the article.
Formatting
The Journal's accepted format for manuscripts is MS Word.
Artwork, Figures, and Other Graphics
8.1. Artwork guidelines
Illustrations, pictures, and graphs should be supplied at the highest quality. Please follow the guidelines below:
Format: PNG, JPG, TIFF, JPEG: Common formats for pictures (containing no text or graphs).
Placement: Figures/charts and tables created in MS Word should be included in the main text.
Resolution: Rasterized files (i.e., with .tiff or .jpeg extension) require a resolution of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). Line art should be supplied with a minimum resolution of 800 dpi.
Dimensions: Check that the artwork supplied matches or exceeds the journal's dimensions. Images cannot be scaled up after creation.
Fonts: The lettering used in the artwork should not vary too much in size and type (usually sans-serif font as a default).
8.2. Figure captions
Ensure that each illustration has a caption. A caption should comprise a brief title (not on the figure itself) and a description of the illustration. Keep text in the illustrations themselves to a minimum but explain all symbols and abbreviations used.
8.3. Tables
Please submit tables as editable text and not as images. Tables can be placed either next to the relevant text in the article or on separate page(s) at the end. Number tables consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text and place any table notes below the table body. Be sparing in the use of tables and ensure that the data presented in them do not duplicate results described elsewhere in the article. Please avoid using vertical rules and shading in table cells.
Reference Style
The PACH adheres to the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association for in-text citations and references. You are referred to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition.
9.1. Citation in text
Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Any references cited in the abstract must be given in full. Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list but may be mentioned in the text. If these references are included in the reference list, they should follow the standard reference style of the journal and should include a substitution of 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.
9.2. Web references
As a minimum, the full URL should be given and the date when the reference was last accessed. Any further information, if known (DOI, author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be provided. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or they can be included in the reference list.
9.3. Data references
This journal encourages you to cite underlying or relevant datasets in your manuscript by citing them in your text and including a data reference in your Reference List. Data references should include the following elements: author name(s), dataset title, data repository, version (where available), year, and global persistent identifier. Add [dataset] immediately before the reference so we can properly identify it as a data reference. The [dataset] identifier will not appear in your published article.
9.4. Foreign Words and Transliteration
The journal recommends the Concise Oxford Dictionary, New Hart's Rules, and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors for correct spelling. All technical terms from languages written in non-Roman alphabets must be italicized and fully transliterated with diacritical marks (macrons and dots). A technical term is defined as a word not found in Oxford Dictionaries, Merriam– Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, or a multiword phrase, excluding titles and proper nouns.
Diacritical marks, as well as the letters ‘ayn and hamza, should be inserted using a Unicode font. Words that are found in the Oxford Dictionary or Merriam–Webster's should be spelled as they appear there and not treated as technical terms. They should have no diacritics, nor should they be italicized—for example, mufti, jihad, shaykh. Diacritics should not be added to personal names, place names, names of political parties and organizations, or titles of books and articles.
Personal and place names with accepted English spellings should be spelled in accordance with English norms. This rule applies to cities of publication in citations. Names of living individuals may be spelled according to their preferred English spelling. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their transliterations.
For further information on the transliteration system for terms in Persian and Arabic, you may refer to the Encyclopædia Iranica and the Encyclopedia of Islam, Third Edition. As noted, the PACH adheres to the APA referencing style, and you may refer to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, for further information. You may also refer to the examples provided by the library of Mount Saint Vincent University for citing non-English works.
Physical Activity in Children