Editorial Policies

Focus and scope

Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL, ISSN 2243-4712) is the official journal of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics (AELINCO).

RiCL is a scholarly peer-reviewed international scientific journal aiming at the publication of contributions which contain empirical analyses of data from different languages and from different theoretical perspectives and frameworks, with the goal of improving our knowledge about the linguistic theoretical background of a language, a language family or any type of cross-linguistic phenomena/constructions/assumptions.

RiCL invites original, previously unpublished research articles and book reviews in the field of Corpus Linguistics. The journal also considers the publication of special issues on specific topics, whose edition can be offered to leading scholars in the field.

Main areas of interests:

Corpus design, compilation and typology
Discourse, literary analysis and corpora
Corpus-based grammatical studies
Corpus-based lexicology and lexicography
Corpora, contrastive studies and translation
Corpus and linguistic variation
Corpus-based computational linguistics
Corpora, language acquisition and teaching

Section policies

RiCL only publishes contributions in English in four main forms:

Papers reporting on research based on or derived from corpora.
Research papers reporting on corpus construction, annotation, the development and application of corpus tools, software, etc.
Book reviews in the field of Corpus Linguistics.
Review articles in the field of Corpus Linguistics.

1. Research papers reporting on research based on or derived from corpora

Papers reporting on research based on or derived from corpora should between 6,000 and 10,000 words, including title, abstract, references, notes, appendices, tables and figures. It is highly desirable for articles to have a sharp, clearly-stated focus, with aims made explicit from the outset and every section contributing to show the validity of the research and of its conclusions.

2. Research papers reporting on corpus construction, annotation, the development and application of corpus tools, software, etc.

Research papers reporting on corpus construction, annotation, the development and application of corpus tools, software, etc. should have between 3,000 and 5,000 words, including title, abstract, references, notes, appendices, tables and figures. It is highly desirable for articles to have a sharp, clearly-stated focus, with aims made explicit from the outset. These papers should include explicit information about the availability of the tool/software/corpus being described and a discussion of potential applications.

3. Book reviews in the field of Corpus Linguistics

RiCL will only consider for publication reviews about books dealing with aspects related to the field of Corpus Linguistics and published within three years of the date of submission. Book reviews are substantial reviews covering one single book or comparative reviews between two to four books on the same topic. Book reviews should offer an objective critical assessment of the book(s) in terms of their contribution to the field of specialization targeted at. At the same time, they are expected to incorporate the author’s assessment of the volume(s) in terms of their relative value and scope, as well as to indicate directions for future research. Formal aspects such as style, layout, critical apparatus, reference system, etc. should also be attended to, complying with the journal’s guidelines. Book reviews do not require an abstract and should have between 1,500 and 3,000 words, if only one book is reviewed, and between 3,000 and 6,000, if several books are reviewed.

4. Review articles

Review articles are authoritative and balanced surveys of recent developments in a particular research field. Review articles do not report on original research but rather are based on other published articles, offering scholarly and thematic context and significant depth of analysis of the existing literature on a topic, in an attempt to explain the current state of understanding on the topic. Review articles require an abstract and should have between 3,000 and 6,000 words. RiCL will only consider review articles reporting on a topic related to the field of Corpus Linguistics. They should incorporate a review of previously published literature from the past 5-10 years as well as the author’s opinion and reflections about the issue being discussed.

Peer review process

Submissions are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has been neither submitted to, nor published in, another publication. Concurrent submission to other publications will result in immediate rejection of the submission. Before peer review all articles are run through a plagiarism detection software.

In RiCL we take care that all submissions are revised objectively and with no conflict of interest on the part of the referees, authors or editors. All manuscripts will be subject to a blind, well-established, fair, unbiased peer review process, and are considered on the basis of their significance, novelty and usefulness to the journal's readership. Manuscripts are evaluated without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy. The reviewing structure will always ensure the anonymity of the referees and the authors.

All articles undergo a strict two-step blind peer-review process undertaken by experts in the corresponding areas of each contribution.

Internal Review. Each manuscript received in RiCL is first carefully reviewed by the editors to ensure that it meets the basic requirements specified in the general and stylesheet guidelines, and that it is of sufficient quality to merit external review. Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements are not considered for external review. The internal review generally takes approximately two weeks.
External Review. Submissions which meet the basic requirements are then sent out for blind peer review by two experts in the field. The external review takes approximately two to four months. Reviewers are asked to follow RiCL's review form for the revision of manuscripts. Following the external review, the authors are sent copies of the external reviewers’ comments and are notified as to the decision.

The review output will be one of the following decisions:

Accept with minor changes
Accept with major changes
Reject

Should authors be requested by the editors to revise the text, the revised version should be submitted within two months for a major revision or one month for a minor revision. Authors who need more time are kindly requested to contact the editors. The editors reserve the right to reject a paper if it does not meet the aims and scope of the journal, it is not technically sound, it is not revised satisfactorily, or if it is inadequate in presentation.

Revised versions should follow the same requirements as for the final versions to format the paper, plus a short summary about the modifications authors have made and the author's response to the reviewer's comments.

Authors will receive the notification of acceptance by email from the editors, with the guidelines of how to finalize the other publication procedures.

Publication Frequency

Between 2013 and 2019 this journal was published once a year.

From 2020 onwards the journal is published twice a year (January-June and July-December).

Open Access Policy

This journal provides open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Research in Corpus Linguistics is a fully open access journal. All content is freely and immediately accessible to readers under a liberal CC-BY license. The journal is supported by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics. Authors do not pay publication charges nor submission charges. Authors retain full copyright and all rights of reuse. Research in Corpus Linguistics allows text mining and other ways of accessing and using the content.

Copyright Notice

Submission of your paper to this journal implies that the paper is not under submission for publication elsewhere. Material which has been previously copyrighted, published, or accepted for publication will not be considered for publication in this journal. Submission of a manuscript is interpreted as a statement of certification that no part of the manuscript is copyrighted by any other publisher nor is under review by any other formal publication. By submitting your manuscript to us, you agree on these copyright guidelines. It is your responsibility to ensure that your manuscript does not cause any copyright infringements, defamation, and other problems.

Submitted papers are assumed to contain no proprietary material unprotected by patent or patent application; responsibility for technical content and for protection of proprietary material rests solely with the author(s) and their organizations and is not the responsibility of the journal or its editorial staff. The main author is responsible for ensuring that the article has been seen and approved by all the other authors. It is the responsibility of the author to obtain all necessary copyright release permissions for the use of any copyrighted materials in the manuscript prior to the submission.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the BY Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal

Article submission implies author agreement with this policy.

Publication Ethics Statement

This section outlines the best practice principles that are applied in Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL), the official journal of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics, in order to maintain the integrity of its academic content and publishing. The principles described here have been outlined on the basis of Elsevier recommendations and the Best Practice Guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In submitting an article to RiCL, authors acknowledge these principles have been applied to the research reported in the article by ticking the corresponding box in the Submission Preparation Checklist.

1. Reporting standards

Submissions to RiCL must present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately and with an appropriate academic style in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work.

Authors are responsible for submitting their articles following the general and style guidelines of RiCL. Otherwise the articles will be immediately returned to their authors and will not be sent to the two blind reviewers until compliance with the style sheet guidelines is satisfactory. A template to help you format your article can be downloaded here.

Authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with the General and Style guidelines by ticking the corresponding box in the Submission Preparation Checklist.

2. Article selection policy

Submission to RiCL are evaluated on the basis of the paper’s importance originality and clarity, and the study’s validity and its relevance to the journal's scope. Manuscripts are evaluated without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy. See Peer Review Process.

3. Originality, Plagiarism and Acknowledgement of Sources

Submission of an article to RiCL requires the assurance that it is an original work which has not been published previously (fully or a substantial part of it) and that it is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. Submitting the same paper to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

All manuscripts received in RiCL are run through a plagiarism software to ensure they are no (partial) duplicates of already published papers. By ticking the corresponding box in the Submission Preparation Checklist, authors certify that the article was written by them and in their own words, except for quotations from published and unpublished sources, which are clearly indicated and acknowledged as such. They also certify that they are conscious that the incorporation of material from other works or a paraphrase of such material without acknowledgement will be treated as plagiarism. The source of any figure, picture, map or other illustration is also indicated, as is the source, published or unpublished, of any material not resulting from their own experimentation, observation or data-collecting.

4. Authorship

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author ensures that all contributing co-authors and no uninvolved persons are included in the author list by ticking the corresponding box in the Submission Preparation Checklist. The corresponding author will also verify that all co-authors have approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

5. Research with Human or Animal Subjects

If the work involves the use of animal or human subjects, the author should ensure that the manuscript contains a statement that all procedures were performed in compliance with relevant laws and institutional guidelines and that they have been approved by the appropriate institutional committee(s). Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

6. Libel, Defamation and Freedom of Expression

Freedom of expression is of crucial importance in RiCL. However, RiCL will not publish false statements, fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements which may harm the reputation of others. It is understood that any opinions expressed in published articles do not necessarily coincide with those of the journal's Editors, who will not accept liability for the contents included in the articles. When necessary, authors should explicitly accept liability for the ethical aspects related to the contents of their study.

7. Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editors, the members of the editorial board and the reviewers for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

Editors and members of the advisory board and the board of referees will recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or (possibly) institutions connected to the papers.

8. Confidentiality

The editors or any member of the editorial staff, the advisory board or the board of peer reviewers must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

9. Fundamental errors in published works

Post-publication changes involving content will be made only if there is a problem with comprehensibility or a fundamental error. Such changes will be accompanied by a note of revision. When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and to cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper in form of an erratum.