APA Style
A convention for preparing citations and references developed by the American Psychological Association. The currently valid version is the 6th edition (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition). Available at: http://www.apastyle.org. Additional useful guides can be found at: http://www.phil.muni.cz/wupv/home/studium/citacni-norma-apa
Indexed Journal (Current Contents)
A scientific journal registered and available in one of the thematic series of Current Contents Connect (CCC).
Impact-Factor Journal
A journal for which an impact factor has been calculated, with this information available in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).
Median Impact Factor
A value defined as the median of impact factors within a specific field (thematic category) in which a scientific journal is classified in the JCR database. It is not calculated for an individual journal.
Hirsch Index (h-index)
Indicates how many articles by a given author have a citation count higher than to their rank when all of the author’s articles are ordered by citation count. It is not a universal number; it is always calculated within a specific database. The value does not refer to a journal, but always to a specific researcher or article.
IMRAD Model
The acronym IMRAD expresses the recommended structure of a scientific article, reflecting its logical organization and content:
- Introduction (What is the main research question?)
- Methods (What methods were used?)
- Results (What was found?)
- And Discussion (What do the results mean?)
The model is not strictly mandatory; authors should always follow the publisher’s guidelines (instructions for authors).
Citation (Bibliographic Citation)
The inclusion of a reference within the text or another form of content (Decree No. 456 of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, December 18, 2012). A citation refers to a source, while the reference provides detailed information about the cited publication. The information must be clear enough to identify the cited material. Therefore, the citation style also affects how references are formatted, placed, and organized (STN ISO 690 Information and documentation – Guidelines for bibliographic references and citations). Recently, the APA style has become increasingly common both internationally and in domestic scientific journals.
Reference
A description of a source or part of a source detailed enough to allow its identification and retrieval. It is usually presented in the form of references or a list of used literature (Decree No. 456 of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, December 18, 2012).
Open Access
Open and unrestricted access to scientific publications (research outputs) in a networked communication environment. It is an alternative to the traditional model of scholarly communication. It also includes the possibility of self-archiving by authors and storing publications in repositories. It originated with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and the Berlin Declaration (2003).
Open access has two main routes:
- Green route – based on self-archiving by authors
- Gold route – based on publishing in open-access journals
Open access often uses public licensing systems such as Creative Commons Licenses.
Creative Commons Licenses
Through these licenses, authors offer users a license agreement granting certain rights while reserving others. Authorship remains protected, and there is no conflict with copyright law. The license is indicated using a graphical symbol (logo). There are six types:
- Attribution (BY)
- Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA)
- Attribution-NoDerivatives (BY-ND)
- Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC)
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (BY-NC-ND)
Predatory Journals
Journals that actively use email communication for unsolicited promotion, offering publication opportunities while providing misleading or false information (e.g., about indexing in major databases or impact factors). A well-known list of such publishers is available at: http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/01/02/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2015.
Before publishing, authors are advised to verify whether a journal truly has an impact factor in Journal Citation Reports or is indexed in databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, or SCImago Journal Rank.