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Author Guidelines

General information

The Journal Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales, with ISSN 1132-192X, is a publication of the Faculty of Social and Labour Sciences of the University of Zaragoza (Spain), founded with the same title in 1991 by the University School of Social Studies. Its periodicity is annual.

The journal has not revenue sources, and does not use advertising nor direct marketing activities. There are no Article Processing Charges (APCs)

It is a refereed journal that uses the external peer-review system for the researched objects and methodologies used in the research.

The evaluation will be peer-reviewed through the "double blind" method. All papers submitted to Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales will be evaluated according to strict scientific quality criteria. And they will be subjected to plagiarism analysis through the anti-plagiarism program of the University of Zaragoza.

Each issue is published both in electronic version and is available on the Faculty's web page http://sociales.unizar.es and on the Papiro-OJS Platform for journals of the University of Zaragoza.

The scope of the journal focuses on the dissemination of innovative research in the social field at the international level from the point of view of various disciplines and areas such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, social work, social education, legal sciences, law, economics, and business sciences, provided they are related to social work, social intervention, and the labor field. Priority is therefore given to original research studies, as well as systematic or bibliographic reviews. Short opinion articles (letters to the editor) are also welcome.

Articles are accepted in Spanish, English or French. If this is not the authors' native language, it is recommended to check the grammar.  

Manuscripts shall be submitted through the Papiro-OJS Platform. The use of this platform ensures a more transparent and dynamic process for editors, reviewers and authors.

The article must be submitted using the journal template. This template can be downloaded from the following link.    

 

Presentation and structure of papers

Papers must be original, unpublished and not under consideration for publication in another journal, written in English, Spanish or French. For articles submitted in a language other than Spanish, authors are required to provide an editing certificate verifying that their academic text has been professionally edited and reviewed by a qualified English or French editor.

The following types of papers will be considered for publication: original articles following both quantitative and qualitative methodology. In the case of clinical trials, it is recommended that they follow the CONSORT guidelines. And Systematic and bibliographic review articles, and/or meta-analysis. It is recommended that they follow the Prisma guide.

  1. Manuscripts shall be submitted through the Papyrus-OJS Platform for journals of the University of Zaragoza using its template and anonymizing documents and files.
  2. The manuscript document, in the case of original and review studies, must have a maximum length of 6,000 words (excluding bibliography), following the APA norms (7th edition).
  3. The text of the articles should be sent anonymously: all references and other allusions that could directly or indirectly allow the identification of the author should be deleted.
  4. Authors shall submit a page with the title of the article, authors (with their affiliations and indicating the author responsible for correspondence) and statements, and the manuscript in another document without the authors' data. Manuscripts shall be submitted according to the following order and structure:

 First document:

  1. Title of the article in Spanish / French, and English.
  2. Name and two surnames of each of the authors (consider the signature format for indexing in international databases).
  3. Full name of the work centre of each of the authors.
  4. Name and full address of the person responsible for the paper or the first author as the person responsible for correspondence, including telephone number and e-mail address.
  5. Information on scholarships, grants or financial support for the realization of the work.
  6. ORCID identification number of the authors. If you don´t have one, you can get yours at orcird.org.
  7. In addition, the following statements should be included:
  • Ethical Considerations: Authors must declare whether their research has received approval from a relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board, where applicable. Additionally, they must confirm that the study has been conducted under ethical standards, including the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki and any other relevant national or international guidelines. In cases involving human participants, authors must ensure that informed consent was obtained and that participants’ privacy and confidentiality have been protected by applicable data protection laws (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR).
    A brief statement addressing ethical approval, consent, and compliance with data protection regulations must be included in the manuscript, preferably in the methodology section or in a separate "Ethical Considerations" section.
    Failure to meet these ethical requirements may result in the rejection of the manuscript.
  • Availability of data and materials: Authors must indicate whether the data and materials used in the research are available for consultation, either through a public repository, as supplementary material in the article, or upon reasonable request to the corresponding author. If data cannot be shared due to legal, ethical, or confidentiality reasons, a clear justification must be provided in the manuscript.
  • Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process. Authors are required to disclose any use of generative AI in the writing process when submitting their manuscript. This guidance pertains strictly to the writing process and does not cover the use of AI tools for data analysis or drawing insights as part of the research process. Please note, this declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools for checking grammar, spelling, or references. If no AI or AI-assisted technology has been used, no statement is required.  Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies should only be employed to enhance the readability and linguistic quality of the manuscript. It is important that any AI tools are used under human supervision and control, with authors carefully reviewing and editing the AI-generated content. This is crucial as AI can produce authoritative-sounding text that may be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Ultimately, authors bear full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of their work.
    Authors must not attribute authorship or co-authorship to AI or AI-assisted technologies. Authorship implies roles and responsibilities that can only be fulfilled by human contributors.
  • Conflict of interest: Authors must explicitly disclose any potential conflicts of interest that could influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. This includes financial, personal, academic, or professional relationships with individuals or institutions that may benefit from or be affected by the publication of the article. If there are no conflicts of interest, the following statement must be included: “The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.”
  • Financing: The role of the funding agency, if any, in the design of the study and the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data and in the writing of the manuscript should be stated.
  • Authors' contributions: All authors must clearly and specifically state their individual contributions to the work, using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) model as a reference. This taxonomy identifies various roles in the research process, such as: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing – original draft, review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition, among others. Each author must have made a significant contribution to the preparation of the manuscript and must share responsibility for its content.
  • Acknowledgments (optional)

Second document (anonymized):

  • Summary and keyword pages: an abstract of the article in English and the list of keywords. Both the abstract and the keywords will have an English version. The abstract should be 150-250 words in length. In the case of original articles, the content will be divided into four sections (structured abstract): introduction, material and methods, results and discussion. Each of them will describe in a concise way, respectively, the reason and objective of the research, the methodology used, the most important results and the main conclusions. Emphasis will be placed on the novel and relevant aspects of the work. The abstract must also be submitted in English (or in Spanish if the article is written in French or English).
  • With respect to keywords, controlled terms of reference should be used. There must be between 3 and 5 keywords. In Spanish and English.
  • Manuscript text: the text of the manuscript, which will conform to the specifications of the instructions indicated for each type of work, will be written from the third page onwards. Following the recommended structure of introduction (theoretical framework), methodology, results, discussion, conclusions and references.

Bibliography

  • Only papers that have been cited in the text will be included and all cited papers should be referenced in the final list.
  • The order will be alphabetical according to the author's last name. In the case of several references from the same author, they will be ordered chronologically by year. First, the references of the author alone will be included, secondly, the works compiled by the author, and thirdly, those of the author with other co-authors.
  • Papers accepted but not yet published will be included in the bibliographic citations specifying the name of the journal, followed by the expression "in press".
  • The complete list of bibliographical references will be placed at the end of the text, under the heading "Bibliographical references". For its writing, please follow the APA 7th Guidelines.

 

EXAMPLES:

Bandura, A. (1999). Social cognitive theory of personality. In Journal of Biological Chemistry. Guilford Publications. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0021-9258(19)40792-8

Consejo Social y Económico de Aragón (Economic and Social Council of Aragon) (2021). Informe sobre la situación económica y social de Aragón: Panorama social. [Report on the economic and social situation of Aragon: Social panorama]. Consejo Social y Económico de Aragón (Economic and Social Council of Aragon)

Epstein, J. L., Coates, L., Clark, K., Sandres, M. and Simon, B. (1997). School, Family and Community Partnerships. Your handbook for action. Corwin Press, Inc. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ERIC-ED467082/pdf/ERIC-ED467082.pdf

González Cabanach, R., Fernández Cervantes, R., González Doniz, L., and Freire Rodríguez, C. (2010). Estresores académicos percibidos por estudiantes universitarios de Ciencias de la Salud [Academic stressors perceived by university health science students]. Fisioterapia, 32(4), 151-158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ft.2010.01.005

Instituto Aragonés de Estadística (Aragonese Institute of Statistics) (2011). Definiciones de indicadores demográficos [Definitions of demographic indicators]. Retrieved from Instituto Aragonés de Estadística (Aragonese Institute of Statistics)

https://bonansa.aragon.es/iaest/met_el/Metodologia%20Indicadores%20Demograficos.pdf

Karasek, R. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude and mental strain: implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 285-308.

Lobo, A., Artal, J., and Pérez-echeverría, M. J. (1986). Validity of the scaled version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) in a Spanish population. Psychological Medicine, 16(1), 135-140. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291700002579

Martinez, R. A. (2000). Partenariado familia-centro escolar a través de la metodología de investigación-acción [Family-school partnership through action-research methodology]. In A. M. Fontaine, (Ed.). Parcería familia-escola e desenvolvimiento da crianca [Family-school partnership and child development]. (pp. 303-319). Oporto, Universidade do Porto.

Sandín, B. (2008). El estrés psicosocial: conceptos y consecuencias clínicas [Psychosocial stress: concepts and clinical consequences] (2nd edition). Editorial Klinik.

 

Bibliographic citations

According to APA standards (7th edition):

  • Bibliographic citations should be taken from the original documents.
  • Citations should appear in the body of the text and footnotes should be avoided.
  • It will be cited in parentheses, including the author's last name, and the year and optionally the page or pages cited; for example: (Boudon, 2004: 73).
  • When two works by the same author have the same year, they should be distinguished with lowercase letters after the year; for example: (Boudon, 2004a).
  • If there are two authors, the two surnames joined by "and" should be cited: (Bowles and Gintis, 2005); when there are more than two authors, the surname of the first author followed by "et al." should be cited (Bowles et al., 2005), although all authors may be included in the final bibliography reference.
  • Verbatim quotations shall be placed in quotation marks and followed by the corresponding reference in parentheses, which must include the pages cited; if they exceed four lines, they shall be transcribed separately from the main text, without quotation marks, with greater indentation and smaller font size.

 

Selection and publication process

Once a text that meets all the formal requirements is received, its receipt will be acknowledged and the evaluation process will begin.

In a first phase, the Board of Directors will carry out a general review of the quality and thematic adequacy of the work, and may directly reject without external evaluation those works whose quality is ostensibly low or do not make any contribution to the thematic areas of the journal. For this first review, the Board of Directors may request the assistance, if deemed necessary, of the members of the Editorial Board or the Advisory Board.

The articles that pass this first review will be sent to two external evaluators, specialists in the subject or line of research in question. In the event that the evaluations are discrepant, or for any other reason, the Board of Directors may send the text to a third evaluator.

In view of the evaluators' reports, the Editorial Team may make one of the following decisions, which will be communicated to the author:

  • Publishable.
  • Publishable after review. In this case, publication will be conditional upon the author making the changes requested after the evaluation. The deadline for such changes will be one month. A brief report must be attached explaining the changes made and how they meet the requirements.
  • Not publishable.

In the event that a paper is accepted for publication, the proof copies must be reviewed by the author within a maximum period of two weeks.

 

Publication rights

Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales is published under the Creative Commons licensing system under the "Attribution - NonCommercial (by-nc): Derivative works are permitted provided no commercial use is made. Nor may the original work be used for commercial purposes".

Thus, when the author submits their contribution, they are explicitly accepting this assignment of production and publication rights. They also authorize Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales to include their work in an issue of the journal for distribution.

In order to promote the dissemination of knowledge, Acciones e Investigaciones Sociales adheres to the Open Access journal movement (DOAJ) and submits all of its contents to various repositories under this protocol; therefore, the submission of a paper for publication in the journal presupposes the explicit acceptance by the author of this distribution method.

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  • The article has not been previously published, nor has it been submitted to another journal (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor). It is recommended that the articles have a maximum of 4 authors. In the case of a higher number, the editorial team will consider whether the work in question can justify such a number. However, it will always inform the first signatory of this issue.
  • The file sent uses the journal template and is in Microsoft Word
  • The title page and the text of the manuscript have been sent as separate documents, following the guidelines for authors.
  • If the submitted article is in a language other than Spanish, an editing certificate has been attached to verify that the academic text has been professionally edited and reviewed by a qualified English or French editor.
  • The text complies with the bibliographic and style requirements indicated in the Guidelines for Authors, which can be found in About the Journal. And DOI have been added for references where possible.
  • In Step 3. Enter the metadata, the "Biographical summary" field shall be filled in for all authors.
  • Please indicate in Comments to the Editor the type of manuscript submitted: (1) empirical research (original research, case studies or intervention experiences); (2) literature review; (3) theoretical article (reflections, essays); (4) critical review.
  • Documents have been anonymized, including file properties
  • Statements of ethical approval and consent to participate; availability of data and materials; declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process; conflict of interest; funding; authors` contributions; and acknowledgements (optional) are included at the end of the manuscript.
  • The guidelines regarding the authorship rights and publishing rights of the article have been read and are accepted.
  • In step 3 you will be asked for the metadata of the submission. Have available the title in Spanish and English, the abstract in Spanish and English, the keywords in Spanish and English and the data of each author (name, surname, e-mail, ORCID, affiliation) to copy and paste into the corresponding fields.
  • Authors publishing in this journal agree to the following terms: 1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right to be the first publication of the work as well as licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and initial publication in this journal. 2. Authors may separately establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (e.g., placing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. 3. Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their papers electronically (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their own website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and higher citation of published papers (see The Effect of Open Access).

Articles

Articles AIS

Special issue 52 AIS (2027): "Past, present and future of Social Work: a profession at the crossroads"

This special issue aims to promote debate around 21st-century Social Work, drawing inspiration from the experience of the Island Wood Group in the United States which—as Marilyn Flynn notes in the prologue to Brekke & Anastas's book (2019)—was established as the ideal venue for "testing the ideas that guide 21st-century Social Work thinking." The purpose is to foster that same atmosphere of constructive dialogue and critical thinking that characterized that initiative: encouraging divergent opinions within a framework of intellectual tolerance, openness to multiple disciplinary traditions, attention to theoretical foundations and their practical applications, as well as a sense of shared responsibility for building the future of the profession.

We welcome papers that address the challenges of Social Work starting from its history, connecting with the technological and social transformations defining the present: digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, and data capitalism. In this context, do questions like the ones posed by Abraham Flexner in his lecture "Is Social Work A Profession?" (1915) still make sense? That questioning of the professional nature of Social Work continues to resonate today, as the profession finds itself at a crossroads once again. Similarly, the words of Jerome Davis in 1936—"the field of social work is growing by leaps and bounds (…) every decade witnesses the expansion of government agencies in this complex field to increase the demand for scientifically trained personnel"—acquire surprising relevance in today's context, where technological and economic disruptions present unprecedented challenges to the profession.

Contributions are welcome from Social Work practitioners, researchers, or faculty members who wish to provide their perspective by positioning themselves critically before the crossroads facing the contemporary discipline. Texts must be reflective, either theoretical or empirical, and capable of serving as a baseline for collective debate and contributing to envisioning the future of the profession from its historical roots and present challenges. There is no intention to represent any professional society, interest group, or other organized entity: ideas and arguments debated with freedom and without prior restrictions are highly valued.

 

Key Information

  • Submission period: From June 30, 2026, until December 1, 2026
  • Accepted languages: Spanish, English, or French
  • Evaluation: Blind peer review
  • Start of evaluation: September 2026
  • Online first publication: Starting October 2027
  • Full issue publication: Scheduled for March 2028

Authors must strictly follow the author guidelines.

Publication requirements can be consulted on our website:

 

Issue Coordination: Antonio López Peláez (UNED) and Chaime Marcuello Servós (UNIZAR) Editing: Cristina Lopes dos Santos (UPNA) and Marta Mira Aladrén (UNIZAR) Submission Deadline: December 1, 2026

 

 

Copyright Notice

Authors publishing in this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right to be the first publication of the work as well as licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors may separately establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (e.g., placing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their papers electronically (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their own website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and higher citation of published papers (see The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

The names, e-mail addresses and personal data entered in this journal will be used exclusively for the purposes stated by this journal and will not be available for any other purpose or to any other person. Subject to the privacy and data protection policy of the University of Zaragoza (Spain) (you can consult it here).