JSI Submission Guidelines

Version: July 2021

By submitting your manuscript to the Journal of Systematic Investing (JSI, henceforth), you agree to the below submission guidelines and related policies. Please read this document carefully, as submissions will not be reviewed until they adhere to these guidelines.

The JSI promotes the free circulation of research. On that basis, should a manuscript be accepted for publication in the JSI, the authors are not precluded from making their work freely available via their personal academic webpage, SSRN, Google Scholar, and other such websites, as long as they reference ‘The Journal of Systematic Investing’ in the title page. Simplified/shortened versions of accepted manuscripts can also be published by a third party firm (e.g. the company employing the author(s) publishing a client- friendly version of the published manuscript to be distributed to a selected audience of clients), subject to seeking approval from the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editors of the JSI; the only exception to this is, understandably, seeking publication to another academic or practitioner journal.

This document is split in three sections. Section A contains details regarding the submission of the manuscript to the JSI; Section B contains details regarding the format of the manuscript; Section C contains all other relevant details, including details on the review process, the editing process and the management of potential conflicts of interest.

A. Submitting your Manuscript

All submissions to the JSI must be original, unpublished, thought provoking, and contributing to the existing literature in the field of systematic investing. Once a manuscript has been submitted to the JSI, it should not be submitted to any other journal, book or magazine until a decision has been made by the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editors. Authors should guarantee that their submitted manuscript has not been published before.

Submit your manuscript by clicking “Submit Your Paper” on the JSI main page: https://eqderivatives.com/research/journal-of-systematic-investing

When submitting a manuscript, it is assumed that all co-authors have read and agree to the submission guidelines, set out in this document. It is at the responsibility of the corresponding author to assert this. Any potential conflicts of interest must also be disclosed during the submission process; see Section C below for further information.

There is no fee to submit a manuscript.

Your submission should contain the following three separate files, all in PDF format:

Manuscript: The manuscript should be written in English and should contain a title, authors and their affiliations, abstract, keywords, main text part, acknowledgments, references, figures/tables, and supplement/supporting information if any. For further details, see Section B below.
Blind copy of the manuscript: Please include an anonymous version of the manuscript containing no details on authors, affiliations, acknowledgments, or any other reference to the authors.
Highlights: The highlights documents should be a list of three to five bullet points (of up to 125 characters each) that describe the essence of the research (e.g. results or conclusions) and highlight the most important contributions. No cover letter is necessary.

B. Manuscript Guidelines

The following guidelines apply to all submitted manuscripts. Any manuscript that does not conform to these guidelines may be returned for necessary revisions before the review process.

Formatting: The manuscript should be double spaced, with wide margins, and the font size should be at least 12 points. All pages must be numbered consecutively. Titles and subtitles should be short and clear. References, tables, and figures should be printed on separate pages. The manuscript must be a PDF file.
Page limit: The authors are encouraged to make their manuscripts as concise as possible and certainly no longer than 60 pages (note that this is an extreme upper limit and not a target). This page limit includes appendices, bibliographies, figures, and tables. Additional material may be included in an Internet Appendix that does not count towards the page limit; note that the manuscript should be self-contained without the reader needing to read the Internet Appendix.
First (title) page: The first page of the manuscript must be numbered page 1 and should contain the following information: (i) the title of the manuscript; (ii) the name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and e-mail address(es) of the author(s) – a corresponding author should be identified; (iii) an abstract of not more than 150 words, which should set out briefly and clearly the main objectives and results/conclusions of the work.
Acknowledgments and information on grants: Any acknowledgments and/or information on grants received (provide the grant number(s) and the name of supported foundation items for identification purposes) should be given in a separate footnote in the first page of the manuscript, which should not be included in the consecutive numbering of footnotes. Any information regarding potential conflicts of interest (or lack thereof) should be disclosed in the same footnote; for further details, see Section C below.
Footnotes: The footnotes should be kept to a minimum and numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript with superscript Arabic numerals. Do not include endnotes.
Equations and formulae: All equations and formulae should be numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript as (1), (2), etc. against the right-hand margin of the page.
Figures: All graphs/charts should be referred to as figures, should be numbered consecutively in the manuscript in Arabic numerals, and printed on separate pages in the order they should appear in the main text. Figures must be self-contained, in the sense that the reader must be able to understand them without going back to the text of the manuscript. Each figure must have a title followed by a descriptive legend.
Tables: All tables should be numbered consecutively in the manuscript in Arabic numerals and printed on separate pages in the order they should appear in the main text. Tables must be self-contained, in the sense that the reader must be able to understand them without going back to the text of the manuscript. Each table must have a title followed by a descriptive legend. Authors must check the tables to make sure that the title, column headings, captions, etc. are clear and to the point.
References: The references must follow the “author-date” format of The Chicago Manual of Style. The list of references must follow the main text (after any appendices, and before figures and tables) and should be in alphabetical order by first author’s surname. There must be a strict one-to-one correspondence between the names and years in the main text of the manuscript and in the references list. References must include DOI URLs where applicable.

C. Relevant Policies

Role and Responsibilities

In accordance with the JSI Statement of Purpose, the Editor-in-Chief and the Executive Editors are jointly responsible for making final decisions on the manuscripts that are submitted to the JSI, and for making sure that the prescribed procedures are followed with regards to the peer-review process.

Conflicts of Interest

The JSI Editor-in-Chief, and the Executive Editors adhere to the JSI Code of Conduct policy are beholden to the Publication Ethics.
All authors of submitted manuscripts are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict(s) of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years from beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work. The authors must add a ‘Conflict of Interest’ footnote, ahead of the ‘Acknowledgments’ footnote in the first page of the manuscript. If there are no conflicts, please state: Authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

The Review Process

Upon submission, the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editors (and if necessary, a member/members of the Editorial Board) decide whether the manuscript in question is suitable for review. If the manuscript is not deemed to be a good match for the JSI, it will be desk-rejected without a formal review. Please keep in mind that a desk rejection does not necessarily suggest that the work is bad. Instead, it can simply reflect that the Editor-in-Chief and the Executive Editors believe that the manuscript is not appropriate for the JSI and depending on the occasion, they might recommend another potential publication venue.

For manuscripts sent for a review, the JSI uses a blind process.

The Editing Process

Once a manuscript has been submitted, reviewed and accepted for publication in the JSI, the editorial team of the publishing company will begin editing the manuscript. The manuscript will be edited for style and grammar only. For example, this will include, but is not limited to: editing manuscripts for U.S. English, fonts, margins, paragraph and sentence spacing, page numbering, punctuation. The authors will be contacted at that stage in order to provide editable versions of all parts of the accepted manuscript (figures, tables, etc.).

Final manuscripts can be submitted as a Microsoft Word document, with accompanying data files for all figures and tables or in LaTeX. If using LaTeX, authors must utilize the JSI class available at Overleaf or on our website. A zip file containing the figures, tables, data for figures and tables, bib and tex files can then be submitted.

Publishing Ethics

The publication of a manuscript in a peer-reviewed journal such as the JSI is an essential building block in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge. It is a direct reflection of the quality of the work of the authors and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed manuscripts support and embody the scientific method. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author(s), the journal Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editors, the Editorial Board, the peer reviewer(s), the publisher and the society of society-owned or sponsored journals.

For any questions regarding the JSI submission guidelines, please e-mail journal@eqderivatives.com.