For Authors

Sustainable Structures

ISSN: 2789-3111 (Print)

ISSN: 2789-312X (Online)


Guide for Authors


Sustainable Structures (SUST) predominantly publishes Reviews, Research Papers, Technical notes, Meeting Reports, and Case Reports. All papers must be written in English, and follow a clear, concise style. The editors may have to check the language and grammar of your submitted manuscript and make editorial changes if deemed necessary. Manuscripts about materials, structures, and other applications that do not conform to the principles of sustainability are outside the scope of this journal. Authors are requested not to resubmit a rejected manuscript (unless the Editors invite author to resubmit) as it will not be considered and will be rejected without review.


SUST is an open access journal that does not require any publication fees. No fees or charges are required for manuscript processing and open access publishing. All related fees for an accepted manuscript will be supported by Sustainable Development Press Limited (SDPL).


All manuscripts must be submitted electronically via the online submission system, and manuscripts submitted for publication must be prepared according to the guidelines given below and must be prepared following the template for submission. Authors may choose to submit their manuscript as a single Word or PDF file (prioritized) to be used in the review process. This guideline is intended to assist authors as they prepare their manuscripts. To avoid any delay with the publication process, Sustainable Structures (SUST) asks and encourages authors to read the guidelines carefully before writing their manuscripts. Authors are advised to contact assistant editor Lily Guo lilyguo1202@126.com, if they face issue with the online submission system.


Submission Template   /kindeditor/attached/file/20241127/20241127083457765776.docx


Cover Letter

A cover letter must be included with a submitted manuscript. The cover letter must clearly state that the manuscript is an original work on its own merit, has not been previously published in whole or in part, and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. It should also include statements clearly indicating that all authors have read the final manuscript, have approved the submission to the journal, and have accepted full responsibilities pertaining to the manuscript’s delivery and contents. If there are any ethical, copyright, disclosure issues that are relevant to the manuscript, please clearly state those in the cover letter. Authors must declare that there is no conflict of interests or disclose all potential and/perceived conflicts of interest regarding the manuscript.


Basic requirements for manuscripts


1. The paper should be original, innovative, scientific, logical and readable. The paper must not be published previously, or is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the publisher.

2. The length for the abstract should be at least 200 words. 4-6 keywords should be included and each keyword except the first one should be lowercase unless an uppercase is necessary.

3. Authors must provide the original images of both the figures (e.g., diagrams, charts, graphs, and photographs) cited in the main text and the supporting information reported in the article. Images must be clear, high-contrast, and clearly legible at the size in which they are to appear in the journal. If a figure or table has been published previously—even by an author of the manuscript being submitted for review—the copyright holder’s written acknowledgment and permission for its reuse is often required. For any figures (or tables) that contain data from a public database, the source should be explicitly cited in the caption, legend, or title.

4. Only the International System of Units (SI) are acceptable in text, tables and figures. Abbreviations should be defined in parentheses the first time they appear in the abstract, main text, and in figure or table caption and used consistently thereafter. All equations must be typed by the MathType add-on. Please submit math equations as editable text and not as images.

5. References must be cited by number in parentheses in the main text, e.g., [1], [2], [3] etc. If the cited references are consecutive and more than 2, the following format should be adopted [1–2], [2–5]. References should be organized in order of citation in the main.

6. All submitted manuscripts should contain the following parts prior to the list of references:



Acknowledgement: All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in this section.  

Funding Statement: Authors must disclose all sources of funding for the research in the Funding Statement of the article. The statement should be specifying the role of each in the design of the study, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and the composition of the manuscript. Specifically, the full name of each source of funding should be provided accompanied by any associated grant numbers in square brackets, URLs to sponsors’ websites. If the study has no funding support, please include “The author(s) received no specific funding for this study.” in the funding statement. Funding sources should not be written in the Acknowledgments or anywhere else in the manuscript file.

CRediT authorship contribution statement: The contributions statement of all authors are urged to be described in the manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest: Authors must declare all conflicts of interest. If there are no conflicts of interest, it should also be declared as in the following example, please write “The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report regarding the present study”.

7. If you are an author whose native language is not English—or you have any concerns regarding the language quality of your manuscript—we recommend having your manuscript professionally edited by a qualified English-speaking researcher in your field prior to submission.


Structure of manuscripts

Subdivision - numbered sections

Divide your article into clearly defined and numbered sections. Subsections should be numbered 1.1 (then 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ...), 1.2, etc. (the abstract is not included in section numbering). Use this numbering also for internal cross-referencing: do not just refer to 'the text'. Any subsection may be given a brief heading. Each heading should appear on its own separate line.

Introduction

State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background, avoiding a detailed literature survey or a summary of the results.

Material and methods

Provide sufficient details to allow the work to be reproduced by an independent researcher. Methods that are already published should be summarized and indicated by a reference. If quoting directly from a previously published method, use quotation marks and cite the source. Any modifications to existing methods should also be described.

Theory/calculation

A Theory section should extend, not repeat, the background to the article already dealt with in the Introduction and lay the foundation for further work. In contrast, a Calculation section represents a practical development from a theoretical basis.

Results

Results should be clear and concise.

Discussion

This should explore the significance of the results of the work, not repeat them. A combined Results and Discussion section is often appropriate. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature.

Conclusions

The main conclusions of the study may be presented in a short Conclusions section, which may stand alone or form a subsection of a Discussion or Results and Discussion section.

References

Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Any references cited in the abstract must be given in full. Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. If these references are included in the reference list they should follow the standard reference style of the journal and should include a substitution of the publication date with either 'Unpublished results' or 'Personal communication'. Citation of a reference as 'in press' implies that the item has been accepted for publication. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you must use it as a permanent link to any electronic article. Please note the format of all citations should be in the same style as all other references in the paper.


Submission checklist

You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check the relevant section in this Guide for Authors for more details.


Ensure that the following items are present:

One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

• E-mail address

• Full postal address

All necessary files have been uploaded:

Manuscript:

• Include keywords
• All figures (include relevant captions)

• All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)

• Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided

• Indicate clearly if color should be used for any figures in print

Graphical Abstracts / Highlights files (where applicable)

Supplemental files (where applicable)


Further considerations

• Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'

• All references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa

• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)

• A competing interests statement is provided, even if the authors have no competing interests to declare

• Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed

• Referee suggestions and contact details provided, based on journal requirements


Revised Submissions

Use of word processing software

Regardless of the file format of the original submission, at revision you must provide us with an editable file of the entire article and be fitted according to the SUST Journal template (Downloaded from the linkage mentioned above). To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the 'spell-check' and 'grammar-check' functions of your word processor.


Open Access

Sustainable Structures (SUST) makes all content freely available to all researchers worldwide. All published papers have DOI numbers registered through Crossref (https://www.crossref.org/). Content is published online to provide timely communication to the community and keep publication times to a minimum. The PDF edition of all published papers for SUST could be downloaded freely from the journal website: http://www.sustain-dpl.com/journal/sust.



Copyright, Licensing and Repository policy

Sustainable Structures (SUST) publishes all articles under an open-access license, which means that the articles remain accessible to all without charge and without technical or legal barriers and that they can be reused with proper acknowledgment and citation. Financial support for the open access publication is provided by Sustainable Development Press Limited (SDPL) once manuscripts have been accepted. The authors’ institutions or research funding agencies won’t pay any fees for the open access publication. More specifically, SUST publishes articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License. Sustainable Structures is committed to open access publishing as a means to foster the exchange of research among scientists, especially across disciplines.

The copyright and other proprietary rights related to papers published by Sustainable Structures are retained by the authors. If the authors reproduce any text, figures, tables, or illustrations from the papers published by Sustainable Structures in their own future research, they must cite the originally published version. Sustainable Structures (SUST) allow authors to deposit versions of their work in an institutional or other repository of their choice. They are further asked to inform Sustainable Structures’ editorial office of any exceptional circumstances in this regard at the time of submission, for which exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the publisher. Articles published in Sustainable Structures are likely to contain material republished with permission under a more restrictive license. When this situation arises, it should be indicated; it is the responsibility of the authors to seek permission for reuse from the copyright holder.



All papers are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original papers are properly cited.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.