Manuscript Submissions
» Please note
Please note that contributions to ZeHf can only be submitted electronically via the following e-mail address: zehf@psychologie.uni-hannover.de. After your submission you will receive a confirmation of receipt from the editorial office. Please do not submit your contribution online via Budrich Journals (see Online Submissions)!
The content objectives of ZeHf and the format of the contributions can be found in the profile of the journal. Author guidelines are summarized below.
1 General Information
ZeHf – Zeitschrift für empirische Hochschulforschung is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes theoretically and methodologically sophisticated original works on topics of higher education research. It sees itself as a forum for researchers from various disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, educational sciences, subject didactics) at all stages of their academic careers.
ZeHf primarily publishes empirical papers based on qualitative or quantitative analyses of original empirical data or on corresponding secondary analyses. The contributions can focus on different actors or characteristics at the micro-, meso- and macro-level of the higher education system (e.g. students, graduates, teachers and researchers, university administrations, faculties, universities, university systems).
By submitting the manuscript, the author or group of authors declares that the contribution has not already been published or submitted elsewhere. The authors also confirm that they alone or jointly are the sole authors and owners of the exploitation rights according to the Copyright Act and that no rights of third parties are infringed.
Manuscripts of an essayistic nature, purely descriptive field reports, or presentations of site-specific evaluations will not be accepted.
Essays should not exceed 50,000 characters (including footnotes). In addition, an English translation of the article title and the abstract are required. Four to six keywords in German and English are also required.
Priority will be given to the publication of German contributions. However, the submission of English manuscripts is explicitly possible in certain cases (e.g. foreign authors, international comparative studies).
2 Peer Review
After a preliminary review by the editors (see below), all submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process with external reviewers. Therefore, we require two versions of your manuscript from the authors (an anonymized version and an original version). In the anonymized version for the review process, self-citations and comments from which authorship can be inferred should be avoided (this includes references to project contexts, acknowledgements, listing of collaborators, etc.).
Manuscripts that do not meet the formal guidelines or content requirements of ZeHf will not be forwarded for review (desk rejection). For all other contributions, the editorial board decides on the basis of the incoming reviews whether the contribution is (a) to be accepted, (b) to be revised slightly (minor revision) or (c) to be revised extensively (major revision), or (d) to be rejected. The Editorial Board will inform the first author immediately of the decision and the reasons for it. In the case of revision requests, concrete information on necessary and desirable changes as well as deadlines will also be provided.
The editors of ZeHf aim for the shortest possible review time. If you have any questions, please feel free to send an e-mail to the editorial address (zehf@psychologie.uni-hannover.de).
3 Requirements for the Structure of Manuscripts to be submitted
3.1. General notes on the scope and layout of the contributions
- The papers to be submitted must not exceed a total length of 50,000 characters including footnotes and references (not counting the cover page, abstracts and keywords).
- Choose as font and font size: Arial 11 with a line spacing: 1.5 lines
- Chapters and subsections should be organized according to decimal classification (example: 1 Introduction, 2 State of the Research, 3 Data Set and Variables, 3.1 Data Set, 3.2 Variables) although outlines as early as a fourth level should be avoided. Please note that no concluding point should be placed.
- On the first page (cover page), information about the title and the authors (last name, first name, title, institution, contact address including e-mail address) should be noted.
- On the second page a condensed abstract of the paper in English and German with 4-6 keywords should be included. The abstracts should be max. 1,000 characters long each.
3.2 Notes/Footnotes
- Use annotations only for substantive explanations and comments, not for references or bibliographic information.
- Please use footnotes sparingly and compile them at the end of each page (no endnotes).
3.3 Highlighting
- Please use italics for emphasis in the text; underlining, capital letters, blocking and small caps should not be used.
3.4 Figures/graphs/tables
- If possible, figures and tables should be integrated into the text.
- If figures and tables are not integrated in the text, they must be submitted as a separate file and the places where they are to be inserted must be marked in the text.
- After acceptance of the article, a reproducible copy of all figures and tables is required as a separate file.
- If possible, image material is to be submitted in the original (as a single jpg or tiff file) and in a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.
3.5 Abbreviations
- Abbreviations should not be used; instead, the previous literature reference is repeated.
3.6 Citation in the text and design of the bibliography
When citing literature sources in the text as well as in the bibliography, please follow the APA citation rules for scientific work (American Psychological Association Publication Manual, 7th Edition 2019). Deviations from these citation rules arise for German articles only due to the replacement of English by German abbreviations or additional information in the bibliography (e.g., "Ed." or "Eds." is replaced by "Hg."; "pp." is replaced by "S."; "Retrieved" is replaced by "Abgerufen", "from" is replaced by "unter", etc.). These substitutions are omitted if the article is written in English.
- References are not made by footnote but in the text (American citation). The complete bibliographical reference is given in a bibliography at the end of the article in a separate section (see below).
- If reference is made in the text to an author and a corresponding publication and the name is given, this is supplemented by the year of publication of the source, e.g. Weber (1972). For literal citations, page numbers should be added after a comma, e.g. Weber (1972, 91).
- Several consecutive literature references are enclosed in a common bracket and separated by semicolons (Müller, 2001; Maier, 2009).
- If there are two authors, they are separated by "&" (Müller & Maier, 2009); if there are more than two authors, they are abbreviated by "et al." (Müller et al., 2009).
- Publications of an author that appeared in the same year are marked alphabetically with "a", "b", "c" etc., e.g. Schimank (2005a) and (Schimank, 2005a) respectively.
- Quotations in the continuous text, such as individual sentences, parts of sentences, or terms, are set in basic typeface without emphasis. Quotations are to be placed in quotation marks.
- Longer quotations/blocks of quotations are to be set off from the main text with paragraphs in each case.
- Under the heading "Bibliography", all cited titles are arranged alphabetically according to the last name of the authors and, if applicable, several titles of one author are arranged according to the year of publication. If available, the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) must be included with the literature sources.
4 Incompletely Submitted Manuscripts
Incompletely submitted manuscripts will be rejected.
» Open Access & Open Express
ZeHf is published with a 24-month embargo period. Every issue will be provided for Open Access 24 months after the date of publication. An overview of current issues and contributions in Open Access can be found here. With our Open Express offer, we offer you to release your contribution for Open Access before the 24-month embargo period expires. You can find more information here.