N4M Science And Technology – Submission Guidelines

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

science and technology
Science and Technology (Representative Image, Photo credits: Chokniti Khongchum / Pexels

Kindly go through the below guidelines before submitting your articles for publication at N4M (News4masses.com)

The broad guidelines below give you a fair idea of the type of articles that get accepted at N4M. We also discuss your proposed idea / paper / article on a case to case basis. If interested you can send yours to R Chauhan: reviews[at]news4masses[dot]com or news4masses[at]gmail[dot]com

PN: In addition to the science and technology, these guidelines also broadly apply to other types of articles/stories

  1. The articles to follow the standard format of Heading/Subject and the Main Body. Average sentence length should ideally be 20 words/sentence or less.
  2. Try and ensure your submission is approx 1,500 words. The max upper limit is 2000 words. For any exceptions you can always discuss with the editor.
  3. Please submit the story / article as a word document. You can simultaneously attach a PDF, if you are apprehensive that the placement of tables, pics or graphs in the doc/docx file might go astray.
  4. Cite all relevant sources. This can be done as hyperlinks and not the erstwhile traditional footnotes. This includes statements made available in the public domain. For journal articles, provide the link to the paper on the publisher’s website. If there is a legally unpaywalled version available, go for that. You can reference a book via a link to its Google Books version, especially if the quoted lines show up in search. Otherwise, a link to the publisher’s site will do.
  5. If you do not know how to add hyperlinks in MS Word, insert all sources as URLs inline, next to the words you would like linked.
  6. If your submission has graphs and charts, please use a separate spreadsheet for the data and clearly mention the source.
  7. Do not cite papers published in shady journals with questionable antecedents or in unreliable preprint repositories (like viXra).
  8. Always try quoting a primary or firsthand source over a secondary or secondhand one. If a primary or firsthand source isn’t available, make sure there is more than one secondary or secondhand source and that they are all reliable. If you are discussing the results of a preprint paper, please say so.
  9. As far as possible, quote scientists working outside the West as independent experts, unless you have specific reasons to quote a particular scientist. Avoid speaking to the same set of people over and over again.
  10. Any Facebook writeup is considered in the public domain if the post’s visibility is set to ‘public’. Stuff said via a public Twitter account is also in the public domain and may be quoted, but please check with the author before you embed their tweets in the article.
  11. Be as descriptive as possible. Avoid typical statements like “In the following story, we are going to show you,” etc.
  12. Write in the active voice to the extent possible (Use this tool to check, if required).
  13. Do try including some suggested images. We prefer those licensed Creative Commons Attribution (like Flickr) or Zero (like Pexels). Make a note of the username of the user who uploaded an image and the specific license version.
  14. Disclose any conflicts of interest there may be between you as the author and any reports, papers or activities cited in your pitch/article.
  15. After you have submitted your article, please give the editor at least 24 hours to respond (48 hours on weekends). If you think your submission needs to be considered on priority, please make sure it really is urgent before you attempt to draw the editor’s attention.
  16. Originality is paramount. Try using online tools like copyscape etc to check of any plagiarisation. Plagiarisation, if any, detected over 5%, you will be warned the first time and banned the second time. No third time opportunity requests to be entertained. If you happen to plagiarise from your own pieces – i.e. the unattributed use of your own previously published passages – you could be given more than one warning but we will prefer not to engage with you.
  17. We do not pay on word count basis. We pay per article basis, with each story valued according to usefulness, length, amount of work required to produce it, newsiness and quality of writing.

In case of any doubts relating to N4M Science And Technology publishings, write to R Chauhan, reviews[at]news4masses.com or to news4masses[at]gmail.com

Latest Articles: