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User Guides
355 words
Jun 25, 2026

Journal Builder

The Journal Builder in the research portal lets you run a scholarly journal and prepare manuscripts. It works in two modes against one set of tools:

  • Journal publication — an institutional journal you publish: define the journal, build issues, place articles, and publish a table of contents.
  • Manuscript — a single article you are drafting toward an external target journal, formatted to that journal's rules.

Open it from the research portal sidebar → Journals (/research/journals).

Journal publications

  1. New Journal — capture the title, ISSN/eISSN, publisher, description, aims & scope, and editor contact.
  2. Add issues — on the journal page, add an issue with its volume, number, title and date. Issues group the articles into a table of contents.
  3. Add articles — each article has a title, authors, abstract, keywords and a Markdown body (the word count is computed on save). Assign an article to an issue, or leave it unassigned while drafting.
  4. Publish — set the journal (and individual articles) to published when ready. The journal page shows the full table of contents grouped by issue.

Manuscripts

A manuscript is a single article aimed at a journal you want to publish in.

  1. New Manuscript — give it a working title and, when available, pick the target journal from the directory (#1107).
  2. Write the article — title, authors, abstract, keywords, body, and the reference style the target journal expects (APA, Harvard, Vancouver, …).
  3. Submission checks — the builder validates the manuscript: title, abstract, authors and body present, and — once the target-journal directory is installed — the target journal's reference style and word limit. Outstanding items are listed at the top of the editor so you can fix them before submitting.

Fields and tips

  • Body is Markdown; it is rendered to HTML and word-counted automatically on save.
  • Status — journals are draft / published / archived; articles are draft / submitted / published.
  • Reference style and target journal drive the manuscript submission checks; set them early so the checklist is meaningful.
  • Deleting a journal removes its issues and articles; removing an issue keeps its articles and simply unassigns them.
  • Target-journal directory (where to publish, with each journal's scope and submission rules) — issue #1107.
  • DOI management for minting DOIs on published articles.