Manuscript Preparation Guideline

1. About this guideline

This guideline tells you exactly how to prepare a manuscript for Lagos Journal of Library Science so it passes editorial screening on the first attempt. Manuscripts that ignore it are routinely returned without external review — most often for structure, referencing or declaration problems that take an author an hour to fix and an editor a week to chase.

2. Article types and length limits

Word counts exclude references, tables and figure captions. If your manuscript exceeds the range, justify it in the cover note or split the work.

3. Title page

• Title: concise and specific, ideally under 20 words. Name the population, context or method where relevant. Avoid abbreviations, jokes and declarative claims the data cannot carry.
• Authors: full names in the order agreed by all contributors, with institutional affiliations, city and country, and the corresponding author's email clearly marked.
• ORCID iDs: supply one for every author who has it; it guarantees correct attribution across indexes.

4. Authorship

List as an author only someone who (a) contributed substantially to conception, design, data acquisition, analysis or interpretation, (b) drafted or critically revised the work, (c) approved the final version, and (d) accepts accountability for it. Everyone else — data collectors, language editors, funders — belongs in the acknowledgements. Confirm authorship order in writing before submission; disputes after submission suspend handling.

5. Abstract

• Structured abstracts (research articles) use headed paragraphs: Background, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusion.
• Unstructured abstracts (reviews, practice papers) are a single paragraph in the same logical order.
• Keep it self-contained: no citations, no undefined abbreviations, no claims absent from the results. Indexing services display the abstract alone — it is your article's advertisement.

6. Keywords

Provide 3–6 keywords separated by semicolons. Prefer terms readers actually search (established subject vocabulary over invented phrases) and avoid repeating words already in the title.

7. Main text, section by section

• Introduction: what is known, what is unknown, what this study adds, and its objective. A focused literature review, not a textbook chapter.
• Methodology: design, population and sampling, instruments, procedures and analysis — in enough detail for an independent researcher to replicate the work. Name software and versions. Report ethical approval and consent here.
• Results: findings in logical order, led by the text with tables and figures as evidence. Do not duplicate the same data in text, tables and figures, and do not interpret here.
• Discussion: what the findings mean, how they compare with prior work, limitations stated honestly, and implications for practice, policy or further research.
• Conclusion: short, supported strictly by the results. No new data, no sweeping claims.

8. Language and style

• Write in clear English (British or American consistently, never mixed). Short sentences beat long ones.
• Use SI units, spell out acronyms on first use, and italicise statistical symbols and non-English phrases.
• Number all pages and lines continuously to let reviewers pinpoint comments.
• Have a colleague outside your specialty read the draft: if they cannot follow it, reviewers will not either.

9. Tables

• Number consecutively (Table 1, Table 2) with a short descriptive title above each table.
• Keep tables self-explanatory: define every abbreviation in a footnote, give units in headers, and align numbers on decimals.
• One message per table. Move oversized raw datasets to supplementary files.

10. Figures and artwork

• Number consecutively (Figure 1, Figure 2) with captions below, each caption intelligible without the main text.
• Photographs and scans: minimum 300 dpi at final size; line art: 600–1200 dpi. Acceptable formats are PNG, JPG, TIFF and PDF. Ensure text inside figures remains legible after resizing.
• Colour must still read in greyscale print. Do not manipulate images (no selective enhancement, removal or rearrangement); adjustments applied to the whole image must be disclosed.
• Confirm you hold reproduction rights for any third-party figure and credit the source in the caption.

11. References

• Cite consistently in one recognised style throughout; every in-text citation must appear in the list and vice versa.
• Prefer primary, recent and verifiable sources. Include DOIs wherever available — they are what link your article into citation indexes.
• Check each reference against the original: wrong volumes, pages and author names are among the most common screening failures.
• Excessive self-citation and citation stacking will be queried.

12. Required declarations

• Funding: name all sponsors and grant numbers, or state that no specific funding was received.
• Competing interests: declare financial and non-financial interests, or state that there are none.
• Ethics approval: committee name, reference number and date for human or animal research; describe informed consent procedures.
• Data availability: state where underlying data can be accessed (repository with identifier, supplementary file, or on reasonable request with conditions).
• Author contributions: a one-line statement of who did what.

13. Acknowledgements

Thank contributors who do not meet authorship, language editors, and providers of technical help or access. Obtain permission from anyone named.

14. Supplementary materials

Deposit questionnaires, instruments, extended tables, datasets and multimedia as supplementary files with clear filenames (e.g. supplementary-table-S1.docx). Reference each supplement at the relevant point in the text.

15. Files and naming

• Main text as an editable document (DOC, DOCX or ODT) plus a PDF version for reference.
• Figures as separate high-resolution files, not only embedded in the document.
• Name files informatively: surname-shorttitle-manuscript.docx, surname-figure-1.png.
• Maximum 50 MB per file. Remove tracked changes, comments and hidden metadata before the final upload.

16. Common reasons manuscripts are returned

1. Outside the journal's scope.
2. Missing abstract, keywords, declarations or reference list.
3. Inconsistent or incomplete referencing, including citations with no matching entry.
4. Figures illegible, unnumbered, or lacking permissions.
5. Textual overlap with published work flagged by similarity screening.
6. Conclusions unsupported by the presented results.

Ready? Work through the submission checklist, then register and submit your manuscript.