Preparing your manuscript
The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.
Title page
The title page should:
present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design,
running head,
the full names and institutional affiliations of all authors, and the corresponding author should be identified with a complete mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address.
The major category should be identified on the title page:
Sports Management
Sports Coaching
Sports Studies
Sports Medicine
Sports Fitness and Health
Blind Title Page
Should only include the title of the article and running head.
Abstract
The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:
Purpose,
Methods,
Results,
Conclusions, and
Applications in Sport.
Be brief and concise and include only the important findings and outcomes and how they relate to sport.
Keywords
Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article chosen from terms not used in the title.
Introduction
The introduction should be a brief review of the topics being presented and how they relate to your study purpose and hypothesis. The focus of this section is to give a brief background of your topic and explain why your paper/research is necessary. This section is typically one to three pages double-spaced and highly referenced. The end of this section should include a statement of what the article will include and/or a purpose and hypotheses.
List of abbreviations
If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations can be provided.
Methods
Should clearly include the complete study design referencing when necessary and include the setting, type of participants and/or type and location of the database, what methods were used, what type of statistics were used. This section should also include a statement regarding the subjects’ consent to participate when appropriate.
Results
This should include the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis, which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.
Discussion
For research articles, this section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study. For study protocols and methodology manuscripts, this section should include a discussion of any practical or operational issues involved in performing the study and any issues not covered in other sections.
Conclusions
This section should summarize your findings and the overall importance and significance of your research results.
Applications in Sport
This section should be written to the audience for whom the paper is intended. Such as a coach, trainer, athlete, parent, etc. This is the most important section because it unites the research findings with the practitioners. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and clearly explain how your findings can and/or will impact the professional within the field of sport.
Acknowledgments
Use this section for acknowledging individuals that assisted with your research who are not authors. Also, declare any funding sources for the research.
In this section, any financial and/or non-financial conflicts of interest should be disclosed. This includes any monetary reimbursement, salary, and/or stocks or shares in a company who may financially gain from the publication of this manuscript. This also includes patents related to the topics in the published article.
Footnotes should not be used.
References
The referencing style used for The Sport Journal is modified from the American Psychological Association (Current Edition from APA.org). References are identical to those published in the current APA Publication Manual with the addition of a reference number left of each reference. The order of references should be alphabetical as determined using the APA.org criteria (first author’s last name, etc.). Citations should include the reference number in parentheses (1). Three or more consecutive citations should include the first and last citation with a hyphen (1-4). Non-consecutive citations should be separated with a comma (1, 3), and both methods should be used when using consecutive and non-consecutive references (1-4, 6).
When using an author’s name, please use et al. if more than two authors are reported in the reference and use the appropriate reference number after the name. For example, authors Smith and Jones could be used in the sentence “In 2009, Smith and Jones (8) discovered…”. If there are more than two authors in the Smith article the sentence would read “In 2009, Smith et al. (8) discovered…”.
Copyright law requires that authors correctly reference the work of others and that of themselves if they are using their own previously published work. “Ideoplagiarism” (Plagiarizing yourself without referencing) is an unethical practice and is unacceptable. In addition, if authors are submitting a manuscript using the same dataset from a previously published study, this should be revealed in the manuscript (e.g., ‘this is part of a larger study’), as well as outlined to the editor in the cover letter.
All submitted manuscripts are subject to screening by plagiarism detection software that includes reference and citation screening.
Figures and Tables
All tables should be included in this section and should be in the form of an MS Word document (doc). MS Excel files are not acceptable. All tables should be numbered based on the order you expect them to appear in the manuscript and formatted in APA style.
Figure Requirements
Figures should be submitted as a jpg or ppt. All figures should be numbered based on the order you expect them to appear in the manuscript.
Final figures should be approximately the following sizes:
Width of 8.5 cm (3.35 in) for single column;
Width of 17.6 cm (6.93 in) for double column;
Maximum height of 23.0 cm (9.1 in) for figure and legend;
Final image resolution should be at least 300 dpi (dots per inch).
Non-research manuscripts (book and other reviews, methodologies, letter to the editors, and commentaries) do not require all the sections listed above. All sections should be in all capital letters and bold. Subheadings should be identified on their own line using italics. If multiple subheadings are used, the first subheading should be in lowercase bold and the next subheading under that subheading should be in italics.
