Submission guidelines

Submission of a manuscript implies: that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the place where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Please make sure your title page contains the following information. 

The name(s) of the author(s)

The affiliation(s) of the author(s), i.e. institution, (department), city, (state), country

A clear indication and an active e-mail address of the corresponding author

The 16-digit ORCID of the author(s), If available.

For authors  we will only capture their e-mail address not their city and country of residence unless specifically requested.

Please provide an abstract of 150 to 250 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references.

Please provide 6 to 10 keywords which can be used for indexing purposes.

Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter.

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables. 

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols. 

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Acknowledgments of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section on the title page. The names of funding organizations should be written in full.

Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses. Some examples:

Negotiation research spans many disciplines (Thompson, 1990).

This result was later contradicted by Becker and Seligman (1996).

This effect has been widely studied (Abbott, 1991; Barakat et al., 1995; Kelso & Smith, 1998; Medvec et al., 1999).

Authors are encouraged to follow official APA version 7 guidelines on the number of authors included in reference list entries (i.e., include all authors up to 20; for larger groups, give the first 19 names followed by an ellipsis and the final author’s name). However, if authors shorten the author group by using et al., this will be retained.

The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Personal communications and unpublished works should only be mentioned in the text.

Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last names of the first author of each work.

If available, please always include DOIs as full DOI links in your reference list (e.g. “https://doi.org/abc”).

Color art is free of charge for online publication. Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.

Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order. 

For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table.

Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption.

Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).

Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).

Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.

Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc

All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.

Figures should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.

Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).

If an appendix appears in your article and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text. 

Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.

Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.

Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption; and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.

Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Figures should be submitted separately from the text, if possible.

When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.

The figures should be 84 mm (for double-column text areas), or 174 mm (for single-column text areas) wide and not higher than 234 mm.

Supply all supplementary material in standard file formats.

High resolution (streamable quality) videos can be submitted up to a maximum of 25GB; low resolution videos should not be larger than 5GB.

Aspect ratio: 16:9 or 4:3

Maximum file size: 25 GB for high resolution files; 5 GB for low resolution files

Minimum video duration: 1 sec 

Supported file formats: avi, wmv, mp4, mov, m2p, mp2, mpg, mpeg, flv, mxf, mts, m4v, 3gp

Submit your material in PDF format; 

A collection of figures may also be combined in a PDF file.

Spreadsheets should be submitted as .csv or .xlsx files (MS Excel).

Specialized format such as .pdb (chemical), .wrl (VRML), .nb (Mathematica notebook), and .tex can also be supplied.

If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables.

For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.

If you include figures that have already been published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format. Please be aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that Springer will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions. In such cases, material from other sources should be used.

Please use  “Submit manuscript” to upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions given on the screen.