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INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

General Guidelines

In terms of general style, writing concisely helps the reader, but clarity is most important. Short sentences and paragraphs make reading the article easier. You should aim for consistency within your article in matters such as hyphenation and spelling. Do not make a list of nomenclature, instead all acronyms and abbreviations should be clearly explained when they first appear in the text. All units should be consistent throughout the article.

Authorship

The student should be named as the first author followed by his/her supervisor. It is expected that the content of the manuscript is transferred (or transformed) from FYP thesis and therefore naming the student as first author is appropriate. The corresponding author will be the supervisor. Each author should list their affiliation(s).

Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it; AND has approved the submitted version (and any substantially edited by journal staff that involves the author's contribution to the study); AND agrees to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and documented in the literature.

For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. The following statements should be used “Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; Methodology, X.X.; Software, X.X.; Validation, X.X, Y.Y and Z.Z.; Formal Analysis, X.X.; Investigation, X.X.; Resources, X.X.; Data Curation, X.X; Writing - Original Draft Preparation, X.X.; Writing - Review & Editing, X.X.; Visualization, X.X.; Supervision, X.X.; Project Administration, X.X.; Funding Acquisition, Y.Y.”, please turn to the CRedit taxonomy for the term explanation. For more background on CRedit, see here. "Authorship must include and be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work.

Length of paper

The manuscript should be no less than 1500 words and no more than 2500 words. Students are allowed to copy and paste contents from their FYP thesis but needs to be shortened and referenced appropriately.

Figures and tables

Figure format (Inclusive of schematics diagrams, excel graphs etc) must be high resolution. File types acceptable are PNG, JPG, and TIF. Each figure should be orderly numbered and with clear and precise caption (no more than two sentences). Any figures and tables from external sources need to be reference properly. All figures and tables should be referred within the manuscript. If there is more than one part to a figure (e.g. figure 1(a), figure 1(b) etc), the parts should be identified by a lower-case letter in parentheses close to or within the area of the figure.

Carefully chosen and well-prepared figures, such as diagrams and photos, can greatly enhance your article. We encourage you to prepare figures that are clear, easy to read and of the best possible quality. Characters should appear as they would be set in the main body of the article. We will normally use figures as submitted; it is therefore your responsibility to ensure that they are legible and technically correct. To get the best possible results in print and online, please consider the following points when preparing you figure files:

·         Shading and fill patterns should be avoided wherever possible because diagrams containing them have to be printed as half-tones and undesirable interference patterns may be produced on printing.

·         Readers of your online article will probably download and print it on a black and white printer which may make coloured lines difficult to distinguish. To avoid this problem, please consider identifying curves by methods other than colour, for example: by letters (upper case Roman), by the symbols used for the data points (e.g.*, : or by the type of line (e.g. --, full curve; ---, broken curve; -·-·-, chain curve).

·         When producing figures using colours, light colours such as yellow, light green, light blue, light grey, etc should be avoided because they generally reproduce poorly during the black and white printing process.

·         Wherever possible electronic figures should be tightly cropped to minimize superfluous white space surrounding them. This reduces file sizes and helps the alignment of figures on the printed page.

Equations

For manuscripts contains equations, all equations should be numbered orderly and mention in the manuscript. A short description or explanation on the equation are expected as readers come from diverse field can understand the equation better.

Publish format

A template will be provided or available from FCUC online portal. Authors are welcome to download the template and use it directly with all fine-tuned format in place.

General Manuscript Content/Structure

The general content/structure of the manuscript is based on other journals and hence there should be very minor differences.

 1. Abstract

An abstract is a short summary of the FYP. An abstract should briefly describe the objectives of the research (problem statement), the significance of the research, research methodology, as well as the findings and conclusion of the research. As the abstract is not part of the text it should be complete in itself; no table numbers, figure numbers, references or displayed mathematical expressions should be included.

An abstract must not exceed 250 words, typed in a single paragraph without spacing. A maximum of five (5) keywords should also be listed below the abstract.

2.  Introduction

This section contains the introduction to the issues in which the research is concerned with, the aims and objectives of the study, and the scope or outline of the research of the FYP. This should be concise and describe the nature of the problem under investigation and its background. It should also set your work in the context of previous research, citing relevant references. Introductions should expand on the highly specialized terms and abbreviations used in the article to make it accessible for readers.

 3.  Literature Review

A literature review is a description of the literature relevant to a particular field or topic of study. It consists of a critically written and comprehensive account of the published works on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. A critical literature review is a critical assessment of the relevant literature. It is directly related to the research, providing information on theories, models, materials and techniques used in the research. The literature review should be comprehensive and include recent publications which are relevant to the research.

4.  Materials and Methodology

This chapter describes and explains the materials as well as the research methodology used in the study. The sub-sections for this section include the key research questions, the research design, and the research procedures adopted. It may also, where appropriate, indicate sampling methods, research instruments and statistical methods employed. The purpose of this is to inform the reader on the methods used to collect the data and generate the findings reported. This section should provide sufficient details of the experiment, simulation, statistical test or analysis carried out to generate the results so that the method can be repeated by another researcher.

5.  Results

This section explains the results which are commonly presented in the form of text, figures and tables, complete with data analysis. The results section should detail the main findings and outcomes of your study. You should use tables only to improve conciseness or where the information cannot be given satisfactorily in other ways such as histograms or graphs.

Tables (or results in the form of figures) should be numbered serially and referred to in the text by number (table 1, figure 1, etc.). Each table (or figure) should have an explanatory caption which should be as concise as possible.

If your article consists of a very large amount of tabular material such as long lists of crystallographic results, computer programs and spectrographic results we would not normally publish these in full. Instead, these may be published online as supplementary data files.

6. Discussions

This section contains the interpretation of the results. The findings of the research should be compared and contrasted with those of previous studies presented in the literature review. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the findings and the outcomes of the research in relation to the results that have been obtained.

7. Conclusions

In this section, the findings are summarized, and their implications discussed. This section may include suggestions for possible and feasible future work.

8.  Patents

This section is not mandatary but may be added if there are patents resulting from the work reported in this manuscript.

9.  Acknowledgements

All authors and co-authors are required to disclose any potential conflict of interest when submitting their article (e.g., employment, consulting fees, research contracts, stock ownership, patent licenses, honoraria, advisory affiliations, etc). This information should be included in an acknowledgments section at the end of the manuscript (before the references section). All sources of financial support for the project must also be disclosed in the acknowledgments section.

The name of the funding agency and the grant number should be given, for example:

This work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a National Cancer Institute grant R21CA141833.

10.  Conflict of Interest

Authors must identify and declare any personal circumstances or interest that may be perceived as influencing the representation or interpretation of reported research results. If there is no conflict of interest, please state "The authors declare no conflict of interest." Any role of the funding sponsors in the design of the study, in the collection, analyses or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results must be declared in this section. If there is no role, please state “The funding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results”.

11.  References

All works or studies referred to in the manuscript in the form of quotations or citations must be included in the references. The references should be written consistently in the American Psychological Association (APA) format or in another format approved by the faculty. Each reference should be written in single spacing format and a double space should be left between references.

A complete reference should provide your reader with enough information to locate the article concerned and should consist of: author(s) name(s) and initials, titles of articles in journals, date published, title of journal or book, volume number, editors (if any) and, for books, town of publication and publisher (in parentheses), and finally the first and last page numbers or article number.

Where there are up to three authors, all authors' names should be given in the reference list. Where there are more than three authors, only the first name should appear followed by et al.