Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text adheres to APA 7 and the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Submissions section of the Journal's website.
  • All Document Properties and identifying information have been removed from the manuscript.
  • If the work has been made public in any way, it is the submitter's responsibility to share that with editor upon submission.

Author Guidelines

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

REGISTER AS AN “AUTHOR”

To submit your reflection, you need to Register on the Reflections home page (www.rnoph.org) and follow the email instructions to activate your account.

After registering, login and hover over your username in the top, right corner of the home page, “View Profile,” and complete the details requested in the various tabs. Most importantly, click “Author” in the “Roles” tab so the “make a submission” link will be available under the “Submissions” tab on the home page when you are logged in.

FOR NARRATIVE AUTHORS

Reflections welcomes the following types of narratives, which have not appeared in or are not being considered for a referred publication:

  • A first-hand account of one or more authors’ experiences
  • An interview that highlights another person’s experiences
  • A review of one or more books in which their relevancy for the helping professions are integrated into a narrative of the author’s experiences

If the work being submitted to Reflections has been made public in any way, it is the submitter's responsibility to share that information and the reference with editor upon submission.

Guidelines for Writing a Successful Narrative

These guidelines will be used by reviewers to evaluate your manuscript:

  • Narrative: The author conveys interpersonal interactions, witnessed events, and felt experiences in a narrative format and is clear about the author(s)’ role (e.g. practitioner, recipient of service, teacher, field instructor, student, researcher, other).
  • Story: The author places the narrative within the context of a well-told story that helps readers discover new ways of thinking about the personal, the professional, and the political in our lives.
  • Portrayals: The author roots the narrative in the rich and detailed portrayal of key moments, examples, and vignettes that fully portray the interaction taking place between and among the people involved.
  • Context: The author places the reflection within an historical context, focusing on the present, and considering the implications of the narrative for the future.
  • References: The author uses references that might draw connections between the content and the published literature or that might assist the reader in understanding conceptual or theoretical conclusions about the nature of professional practice.
  • Conclusions: The author draws conclusions about the need for qualitative or quantitative research related to the issues arising from the narrative.

As you finalize your manuscript, use these guidelines to assess readiness for submission.

Prepare Your Manuscript

It may be helpful to look at articles in a published issue to use as examples of formatting. See, in particular, Kanary (2014) for more information about narrative style.

De-identify your manuscript. For example, use pseudonyms for persons and organizations that would identify you as author, and if you cite yourself, use Author instead of your name.

Manuscript length may vary from 1,200 to up to 8,000 words.

Submit as a Word file, single-space, flush-left (non-justified) with a blank line between paragraphs.

Use 13-point Times Roman font.

On the first page, center and bold your Title.

Skip one line and put Abstract flush-left, followed by an abstract not to exceed 250 words.

Skip one line and put Keywords, followed by 4-5 keywords (separated by commas) that do not appear in your title.

Skip one line and begin your narrative.

Use APA 7 style for references but do not use headers, footers or page numbers.

Bold and center primary headings; bold and flush-left subheadings.

Avoid using footnotes or endnotes.

FOR POETS, ARTISTS & PHOTOGRAPHERS

Reflections authors and readers familiar with the mission of the journal are welcome to submit poetry, artwork, and photography that fit with the journal’s purpose. We welcome creative forms of expression that engage helping professionals in poetic and visual ways.

Guidelines for art, poetry, and photography submissions

  • Is original imaginative work which has not appeared in (or is being considered for) a refereed publication
  • Conveys a theme relevant to the helping professions
  • Portrays interpersonal interactions, witnessed events, or felt experiences in a creative format
  • Sparks engagement, reflection, and meaning-making
  • Contains a narrative paragraph that provides the reader with an understanding of what inspired the poet/artist/photographer to produce this creative expression

If the work being submitted to Reflections has been made public in any way, it is the submitter's responsibility to share that information and the reference with editor upon submission.

Prepare Your Submission

 In your contextual narrative:

  • Be sure there is no identifying information such as your name or the name of someone featured in your expressive work.
  • At the beginning of your narrative, center and bold your Title.
  • Skip one line and begin your contextual paragraph that introduces your submission
  • If you have references in your paragraph, use APA 7 style, but do not use headers, footers or page numbers.
  • Avoid using footnotes or endnotes.

For poetry, submit as a Word file, single-space, flush-left (non-justified) with a blank line between your contextual paragraph and the poem. 

For photography, submit a Word File in which your photograph has been embedded immediately following your contextual paragraph.

Artwork could include drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, or any form of art that can be photographed and embedded in a Word File along with your contextual paragraph.

FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS

Submit Your Manuscript

From the Reflections home page, click the “Submissions” tab, click “make a new submission,” and follow the prompts.

Track Your Manuscript Through the Review Process

Once submitted, you will receive an automatically generated message from the Editor-in-Chief acknowledging receipt of your manuscript.

The editors will assess your manuscript to be sure it is ready to be sent out for review.

Once assessed as ready for review, your manuscript will be sent out for double-blind peer-review.

Publication decisions will take approximately three to four months. 

Once you have registered and submitted your reflection, you can login to track your manuscript’s status from your “Dashboard” (accessible by hovering over your username in the top, right corner of the home page) or by clicking “view your pending submissions" (under “Submissions” on the home page).

If you have a question, use the “Add Discussion” link in your submission record to communicate with the Editor of the Section to which you have submitted. If you need further assistance, contact the Editorial Leadership Team at reflectionseditorialteam@gmail.com.

Practice

This is a permanent section. Submissions to this section comply with the following overview.

Practice Section (Dr. Jon Christopher Hall, Editor): The process of being a practitioner or becoming a recipient of service can stimulate valuable narratives. For example, these narratives give voice to practitioners who work and advocate with individuals, couples, families, groups, organizations and communities; participate in social justice and civic engagement work; or become recipients of service in the very systems in which they have practiced.

All articles published in this section are peer-reviewed.

Field Education

This is a permanent section.  Submissions to this section comply with the following overview.

Field Education (Dr. Beth Lewis, Editor): The process of field advisement and field instruction, as well as the experience of being a student in a practicum, can stimulate valuable narratives. For example, consider building narratives around insights gained from process recordings and verbatims or from supervisory relationships or other field experiences in which co-learning occurred.

All articles published in this section are peer reviewed.

Research

This is a permanent section. Submissions to this section comply with the following overview.

Research Section (Dr. Monica Leisey, Editor): Although Reflections does not publish research results or literature reviews, the journal has a long history of publishing narratives of the personal and/or interpersonal aspects of the research process. Some examples of research narratives could be sharing the author's experience of collaboration during the research experience, engaging in the research project, or sharing lessons learned from the research process.

All articles published in this section are peer reviewed.

Teaching & Learning

This is a permanent section. Submissions to this section comply with the following overview.

Teaching & Learning (Dr. Arlene Reilly-Sandoval, Editor): The process of teaching, or being a student, continues the journal's practice of publishing narrative accounts about education and training. For example, classroom experiences, teaching innovations, university-community partnerships, continuing education, and other formal learning opportunities offer valuable insight.

All articles published in this section are peer reviewed.

Care & Control: Intersections of Professional Helping & Citizen-Based Belonging

Care & Control: The Intersections of Professional Helping and Citizenship-Based Belonging

Submissions Due: April 1, 2022

Rationale

Disciplines within the broad field of “professional helping” have long been critiqued as operating within the discourses of charity, paternalism, surveillance, and benevolence. Importantly, such discourses and their accompanying practices have their roots in racism, sexism, colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, cisgenderism, sanism, and ableism to name a few axes of privilege and oppression. Within North American nation-states, professional helpers are concurrently functioning as purveyors of care and control of marginalized individuals and groups in society. It has been documented in the extant social sciences literature that care and control discourses and practices play an insidious and significant role in building the nation. This simultaneous mobilization of benevolent charity work operating as a site and technology of power and dominance in nation-building, rights-conferring, belonging, borders-patrolling, and homecare making warrants critical interrogation. This interrogation will enable the unravelling of the underlying chasms, pulls, ambiguities, and liminal spaces constructed and maintained within ‘professional helping’ discourses and practices. This special section will contribute to the critical and intersectional social science scholarship by addressing contradictions, negotiations, possibilities, and the im/possibilities of providing professional care within the broad nexus of “citizenship.”

Aim and Scope of Special Section

The guest editors are seeking narratives from critical, Indigenous, postcolonial, anti-colonial, transnational feminist, and intersectional perspectives on the contradictions and negotiations of professional helping within the context of citizenship from scholars, community builders, and community activists.  Submissions will elucidate critical narratives, and reflections on what it means to provide care within the limits of citizenship-based belonging in nation states.

We recognize that various professional helping disciplines have a complex and colonial history with Indigenous, racialized, poor, and (dis)abled to name a few individuals and communities, with varying foci that covers and is not limited to specializations (i.e. Indigenous-centred social work, individual, group, community related, and policy centred); thus, we invite and welcome a diversity of submissions and their intersections without necessarily situating them within a “formal profession.”

Some threads of exploration and reflection we are interested in might include the following:

  1. The active processes of citizenship-making that coincide with globalization, settler colonialism, surveillance, and sustaining the boundaries of citizenship locally and geopolitically, and negative impacts on Indigenous and racialized individuals and communities;
  2. Citizenship-making involving operations of power not limited to and including bio-politics, eugenics, genocide, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ that build and maintain a white-settler and a settler society;
  3. Discourses of belonging and identities rooted in constructed concepts of nationhood, territories, and borders that discuss ‘isms’;
  4. Community building, allyship, and alliance building within and across geopolitical landscapes grounded in critical empirical and experiential research and perspectives;
  5. Activism within communities of belonging that move beyond ‘rights-based’ approaches on local and international fronts;
  6. Liminal spaces of resistance, subjectivity, and subject-hood that simultaneously enables and resists marginality, structures and processes of power and domination.

This Special Section Focuses on Narratives From

Emerging and established scholars including graduate students, community builders and activists, and consumer/practitioners of professional helping are encouraged to submit. We are particularly interested in amplifying the critical voices of those who identify as Black, Indigenous, racialized, sexually and gender diverse, (dis)abled, anti-sanist, and so on.

We welcome a range of submissions such as short narratives focused on a single vignette, longer stories with multiple portrayals of interaction, and other forms of creative expression (poetry, visual art) with an accompanying narrative reflection that grounds the work for helping professionals.

All submissions will be reviewed by the guest editors before moving forward to the double-blind peer review process. The final papers/submissions are due April 1, 2022 and should adhere to the journal’s formatting guidelines including a word count limit of 1,200 to 8,000 inclusive of references, and references should follow the APA Guide 7th Edition.

For inquiries about submissions for this Special Section, please contact Guest Editors:

Anh Ngo, PhD, MSW, at the Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University. Anh can be reached at email: ango@wlu.ca and telephone: 1-519-756-8228, ext. 5421. Inquiries sent by email are preferred.

Maryam Khan, PhD, MSW, at the Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University. Maryam can be reached at mkhan@wlu.ca and telephone 1-519-884-1970 ext. 5239. Inquiries sent by email are preferred.

To submit a manuscript, please visit http://www.rnoph.org, register as an author, login and submit to the Special Section on Care and Control. For further instructions, see Submissions at the of the Reflections home page.

Copyright Notice

REFLECTIONS:
NARRATIVES OF PROFESSIONAL HELPING
Cleveland State University

PUBLICATION AGREEMENT

1. COPYRIGHT: In consideration for the publication of your work, if accepted and published by the journal noted above, the author(s) agree to transfer copyright of the work to REFLECTIONS: NARRATIVES OF PROFESSIONAL HELPING, Cleveland State University, including full and exclusive rights to all media now known or later developed, including but not limited to electronic databases and microfilm, and in anthologies of any kind (NOTE TO U.S. GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES: SEE YOUR EXEMPTION, PARAGRAPH 4 BELOW.)

2. AUTHOR RE-USES OF WORK: As a professional courtesy, the author retains the right to reprint the author's article again after publication in the journal, in any work the author is sole author, or in any edited work for which the author is senior editor. No further permission is necessary in writing from REFLECTIONS, nor will the journal require fees of any kind for this reprinting. This statement is intended to provide full copyright release for the purposes listed above, and a photocopy of this release may be used when another publisher requires a written release.

3. READER RE-USES OF WORK: The author(s) acknowledge that registered readers of REFLECTIONS and others with access to the article may use their work consistent with Fair Use under 17 U.S.C. § 107.

4. AUTHOR WARRANTIES: The author(s) represent(s) and warrant(s):
a.) that the manuscript submitted is the author's (authors') own work;
b.) that the work has been submitted only to this journal and that it has not been previously published;
c.) that this article contains no libelous or unlawful statements and does not infringe upon the civil rights of others;
d.) that the author(s) are not infringing upon anyone else’s copyright.
e.) that the author(s) are responsible for any individual or organizational names that are mentioned, as Reflections disclaims responsibility for references to individuals, organizations, facts, and opinions presented by the published authors.
f.) That the author(s) have taken care to ensure that the article does not contain any identifiable information about clients or patients except as pursuant to appropriate permissions and forms of informed consent as provided for in all relevant laws and codes of ethics.
g.) That the author(s) content in no way violates any individual’s privacy rights.
The author(s) agree that if there is a breach of any of the above representations and warranties that the author(s) will idemnify the publisher and editor and hold them harmless.

5. AUTHOR RETENTION OF PATENTS: The author(s) may have, within the article, descriptions of the author's (authors') own proprietary patents. It is not the intention of the editor or publisher to require copyright transfer of such materials. If any of these materials appear in the work, the author(s) may add personal copyright notice to patents, with this understanding:
a.) the author(s) retain copyright for said patents, with full and exclusive rights to the author's (authors') publication, not to include any other material from the article/publication;
b.) the publisher retains full and exclusive rights to publication to the article/publication in any format, including patents when published as part of the entire article or production.

6. NOTE FOR U.S. GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES: If the article is single authored by an U.S. government employee as part of the employee's official duties, it is understood that the article is not “Work of the U.S. Government.” However, if the article was not part of the employee’s official duties, it may be copyrighted. If the article was jointly written, the authors understand that they are delegating the right of copyright to the non-government employee, who must sign this agreement.

7. “WORK FOR HIRE” AUTHORS: If the article was written by an author who was hired by another person or company to do so, the article is called a “Work for Hire” manuscript. This agreement must be signed by the “employer” who hired the author, as well as the author.

8. NO AMENDMENTS: This form is not valid if the author(s) add(s) any additional constraints and amendments. Please submit the article elsewhere for publication if the author(s) do not sign the form without alteration.

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