Editorial Policies

Section Policies

Note from the Editor

Note from the editor contains an overview of the issue. Any Editor, Co-Editor, Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Board may write a note.

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Research Articles

We invite articles reporting empirical research results. Research Articles can range from 2,500 to 8,000 words and cover topics such as:

  • identification of author, speaker, writer and language,
  • text classification of relevant genres and registers including threats, suicide notes, deception, linguistic profiling,
  • translation and interpretation,
  • cryptography,
  • trademark and patent infringement,
  • text recycling and textual similarity measures,
  • social-media-based reputation protection for executive and corporate security,
  • interviewing and interrogation techniques,
  • and other topics relevant to forensic linguistics.

Articles must use standard, generally accepted linguistic approaches grounded in current linguistic theory, with results supported by validation testing. Standard methods include phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and textual data mining.

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Policy Papers

We invite policy papers which describe well-reasoned arguments for specific policy and standards in forensic sciences related to linguistics, security and intelligence. Policy papers can range from 2,500 to 6,000 words and cover topics such as:

  • training, certification and educational degree programs
  • standards in forensic linguistics
  • ethics in forensic linguistics
  • data management and database development
  • human subjects protection
  • validation testing standards
  • translation and interpretation standards
  • criminal, security and intelligence investigation

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Resources

We invite articles that describe resources for conducting research in forensic linguistics. Resource articles range in from 1,000 to 2,500 words and cover such topics as:

  • datasets
  • text analysis tools
  • phonetic analysis tools
  • annotated bibliographies
  • case law reports
  • websites

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Research Requests

We  invite Research Requests, authored by attorneys, security analysts, intelligence analysts, digital forensic examiners, investigators, law enforcement and other consumers of forensic linguistic research, to outline the specific needs and situations where linguistic research and solutions are required. Research Requests can range from 500 to 2,000 words.

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Book and Software Reviews

We invite even-handed and intelligent reviews of books, including academic theses and dissertations, and software relevant to forensic linguistic evidence. Although these reviews are not put through blind peer review, they are reviewed by the editorial staff for clarity, tone, fairness and argumentation.

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Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

 

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

 

Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in this journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

 

Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their Web sites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.


There are no article processing charges, submissions fees, or any other costs required of authors to submit articles to this journal.

 

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...