Submissions

Author Guidelines

General

Submission containing all the required documents is processed. The Editor-in-chief considers submission, guided by its compliance with the journal scope of the journal, as well as striving to eliminate plagiarism. The Editors have the right to accept or reject the submitted manuscript. The Editors assess,

• also on the basis of the bibliography,
• whether the research topic is of interest to the field internationally,
• whether the topic is one of current interest, and
• whether the article is in scope.

Any ambiguities are consulted with the Editorial Board. In the case of approval by the Editor-in-chief, a manuscript number is assigned and relevant information is sent to the corresponding author.

The corresponding author signs the copyright transfer form. By signing this form, He/She — on behalf of all Authors — accepts all the points listed in the document and agrees to respect them, along with the resulting consequences. In particular, it is confirmed that the manuscript is not under active consideration for publication elsewhere.

Submission of a review paper can be made only after a prior arrangement with the Editors.

The Editors select reviewers on the basis of competence and expertise on the topic. The process of reviewing is single-blind. The reviewers are obliged to disclose any conflicts of interest. The time for making the report is usually 3–4 weeks.

All versions of the manuscript (including the submitted, accepted, and/or published version) can be deposited in the author's institution repository or any other scientific repository without restrictions.

We encourage the Authors to upload the paper to arXiv.org before submission to Acta Physica Polonica A (APPA). This has mutual benefits. It ensures the visibility of the research, and the priority of the results given: who as the first made the observations and which journal appreciated the Authors’ results as the first.

 

Ethics

Acta Physica Polonica A is a journal specializing in physics. In particular, please be aware that a tendency to copiously or prevailingly self-cite indicates poor science and a lack of interest in the topic among the community while citing primarily old articles suggests that the topic is no longer relevant for advancing the state-of-the-art.

Authors are obliged to present their results in a reliable, honest, and unambiguous manner. Analysis should be carried out in a clear way. False claims, falsification, or data manipulation are considered unethical and are not accepted.

Authorship is limited to people who have had a significant impact on establishing the concept, research methods, and their implementation. Cases of so-called guest authorship and ghostwriting are considered unethical and are not accepted. Violations of scientific ethics will be reported by the Editorial Board to the Authors’ affiliated institutions.

 

Manuscript content

• _Language

The manuscript needs to be written in good scientific English.

• _Title

The title should be brief (less than 10 words), informative, without abbreviations or acronyms.

• _{List of Authors}

Include author names, with affiliations in the following format:

              "Name of institution/university, mailing address, postal code and city, country".

• _Email

Provide an email of one corresponding author, preferably, from the institution where the author is employed.

• _{Abstract (on the title page)}

The abstract should summarise in a concise way all core aspects of the paper:
– The scope of research; methods used; main results; originality or significance of the results.
– References to an article from the bibliography or a footnote are not allowed in the abstract. One can, however, cite the reference giving its full form, e.g., Acta Phys. Pol. A 143, 1 (2023).
– Abbreviations ARE NOT used in the abstract (except for the names of chemical compounds).
– Instead, abbreviations are defined only in the main text and only once, i.e., when the full name appears for the first time, the abbreviation is given in round brackets.

• _{Keywords (just below the abstract)}

Maximally 4 keywords, written with small letters (except method abbreviations, and personal names), all separated with commas.

• _{The organisation of the paper}

– The paper should be divided into numbered sections, subsections, etc., ordered in ascending order with Arabic numerals. Titles of the first and last sections are set as "Introduction", "Conclusions".
– Sections in the main text should be quoted in abbreviated form, like Sect.. The same rule applies to figures, tables, and equations, quoted respectively as Fig., Table, and (5).
– Arabic numbers are used for numbering the figures and equations (e.g. Fig. 4 and (5), respectively), while Roman numerals are for the tables (e.g. Table IV).
– As an exception, if the sentence begins with the word “figure”, then the long-whole-word form is used. For example, “Figure 3 represents . . . ”.
- Displayed formulae in the paper should be clearly typed, each on a different line, numbered on the right-hand side.
– Formulas should be entered in formatted text form (e.g. through LaTeX). Images of equations are not allowed!

• _{Specification: figures and tables}

– If figures are reproduced from other articles, the source must be quoted. Permission for reproduction must be obtained by the Authors from the owner of the copyright (usually the publisher) and should be submitted along with the manuscript. Regarding this point, see the requirements below.
– The volume of figures and tables should not exceed the volume of the main text.
– The formatting of figures/tables is described a bit further.

• _References

– References in the text should be in square brackets with Arabic numerals [1] (not with superscripts, or the 'author-year' bibliography style).
– In the bibliography, entries should be ordered according to their order of appearance in the main text.
– Please do not group multiple works into one reference, but give them separate numbers.
– For works with more than 10 authors, list the first 3 authors, followed by “et al.” in their bibliography entry.
– DOIs of cited articles, wherever applicable, are required in the bibliography.
– Bibliography styles are detailed a bit further.

• _{Acknowledgements}

Acknowledgments should be brief and contain grant and contribution numbers. A person can be
thanked for assistance, comments, etc., without inessential adjectives.

 

Requirements — some details

Make sure that all quantities are defined/described in the text.

Units in the figures, tables, or captions, should be written accordingly

(i) in square brackets when not referring to a particular value, e.g.  “x [mm], E [eV]”, or

(ii) in explicitly given values, the format is instead like “x = 10 mm, E = 10 eV”.

 

Figures

1. Figures, as well as tables, should be numbered in order of appearance in the text, and placed in
   the vicinity of their first mention (NOT at the end of the manuscript).
2. Their maximal width should normally be 8 cm. In the case of important small details, one should
   prepare figures/tables at most 15 cm wide.
3. The preferable font size should be in the range (i) 6–9 pt for axes, (ii) 9–11 pt for the figure axes labels. The font sizes look good when they are not larger than in the main paper font size.
4. The preferred figure format is one that shows all elements in high quality. One should
   rely on vector graphics (e.g. eps) rather than raster images (e.g. png).
5. When there are several smaller panels within one figure, each of them should labeled with small letters of the alphabet, i.e., (a), (b), . . .
6. In the axes, please use abbreviations rather than whole words.
7. Placing any tables in the figure area is forbidden.
8. The symbol of multiplication, if necessary, should be written using \times.
9. The decimal point should be used rather than a decimal comma, i.e., 0.2 not 0, 2.
10. Numbers in labels should use the explicit exponential form as 10^4  but not E-4.
11. Inscriptions on figures should be kept to a minimum. Explanations of the different types of curves or data points should be given in captions rather than on the plots.
12. Moreover, the figures should be neat and sufficiently visually appealing!
13. When the paper includes a figure published elsewhere, a note is formally required in the caption of the figure as ”Reproduced with the permission from Ref. [1]”.
14. See example figure.

 

Tables

1. Headings for columns in tables should be brminimizingising the number of words. For simplicity, it is helpful to use symbols defined in the text or caption.
2. Footnotes to each table should be indicated by superscript letters and placed in the table caption or below the table.
3. Text elements in tables should follow the same requirements as text in figures.
4. See the example table.

 

Bibliography style

1. We encourage the use of BibTeX to generate entries from the BibTeX meta-data provided by publishers (using e.g., the natural, sciences, physics bibliography styles).
2. Among bibliography elements relevant for the APPA style are a list of Authors' names, The Journal, volume, page (year), DOI.
3. See the example bib style.

 

Proofs

Proofs of accepted papers will be prepared as soon as possible and sent to the corresponding author.

The Authors are required to read them carefully, and report any needed corrections/changes to the Editors, answering also any questions attached to the proofs.

The paper will not be published if the responses to the proof and/or the Author’s approval of the proof are not sent by the time specified in the correspondence from the Editors.

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of an accepted paper is assigned at the moment of online publication.

 

Miscellaneous fees

Submission of a research paper to Acta Physica Polonica A is free of charge. English language corrections are provided as a part of editorial work. In the case of the need for extensive English editing, a fee that reflects the cost of language adjustments is applied.

A printed version of APPA issues are available for subscription. Terms of subscription can be found here.

 

Conference proceedings

Acta Physica Polonica A publishes conference proceedings, as well as special issues that are within the scope of the journal. If a conference topic goes beyond the scope of APPA, the Editor-in-chief, after consulting with the conference organizers, selects in-scope conference papers for publication.

Publication of conference proceedings requires the signing of a contract between the conference organizers and the Publisher (the Director of the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences). There is a page charge for conference proceedings.

The organizers should contact the Editor-in-chief for details.