About the Journal

Overview

The journal DELTA: Documentação de estudos em linguística teórica e aplicada is published by São Paulo Catholic University (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo; PUCSP). The journal has been published regularly since 1985, in four yearly issues. Since 2011, publications are exclusively online and since 2021 it has been adapting its publication policies to Open Science Green practices. Authors should refer to the journal as DELTA.

Open Science policies

DELTA follows the Open Access Green practices. As from February 2024, every author that wishes to submit a manuscript has to fill in a form consenting to open access green practices. Such form is available here and authors have to submit it together with the manuscript. Non-submission prevents the beginning of peer review.

Ethics in publishing

DELTA supports COPE practices. The journal does not accept original research done by its editors, to avoid conflict of interests. It also adopts policies to the use of AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing. Such policies are laid out in the guidelines for authors. The software Turnitin is used to detect plagiarism and self-plagiarism after peer review and before the manuscript is published ahead of print in SciELO Preprints. Studies that involve human beings must submit approval by an accredited Ethics Committee together with the manuscript.

Aims and scope

The journal publishes original research from any area of applied and theoretical linguistics.

Digital preservation

DELTA follows the standards defined by the SciELO program digital preservation policy.

Indexing sources

The journal and its contents are indexed by:

 Bibliographic record

Title ISSN: DELTA. Documentação de estudos em linguística teórica e aplicada.

Abbreviated title ISSN: DELTA, Doc. estud. linguíst. teór. apl.

ISSN On-line: 1678- 460X

ISSN Print: 010-4450

Publication information: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo - LAEL

Periodicity: Quarterly

Publication mode: Continuous

Year the journal was launched: 1985.

 Websites and social media:

Editorial policies

Preprints

If authors wish so, accepted manuscripts, whose final versions are being prepared for publication in an issue of DELTA, will be published at SciELO Preprints. Such manuscripts will receive a DOI to be cited as forthcoming. Manuscripts will be potentially accepted sooner if (1) they have already been hosted in a preprint server acknowledged by DELTA and (2) they have followed some of the suggestions given by peers in the preprint server.

 Editorial aim and policy

DELTA: Documentação de estudos em linguística teórica e aplicada publishes original research from any area of applied and theoretical linguistics. Only original unpublished contributions will be considered. Submissions must fit into one of these categories: Article, Debate, Squib, Overview (critical overview of the state of the art), Book Note and Reviews.

Researchers from countries around the world are invited to submit their papers which will be sent to two anonymous referees from the Editorial Board. In the event of a tie, a third review will be called. If necessary, an ad hoc referee will be invited.

Contributions can be submitted in Portuguese, English, or Spanish.

Peer review

DELTA adopts a continuous publication process. The journal reserves the right to reject submissions recommended by reviewers, given the availability of publication within a reasonable time frame. The journal receives a much higher number of submissions than the available spots in future issues. Recommended articles are selected for publication by the editors in view of internal criteria of academic excellence. The editor responsible for the submission will inform the authors of the decision to publish or not the submission recommended by the reviewers. The journal also reserves the right to reject submissions before sending them to reviewers (desk reject), in view of the scope of the work and its quality.

Peer review criteria

  • compliance with guidelines to authors;
  • relevance and contribution to the area of knowledge;
  • theoretical consistency;
  • methodological consistency;
  • up-to-date bibliographical references;
  • consistency with technical standards.
  • idiomatic academic writing; If the author is not a native speaker of English, we strongly recommend that the manuscript be revised by a native speaker before submission. Non-idiomatic writing may cause your submission to be rejected.

After being submitted to the DELTA’s editorial board, the paper is assigned to an editor who will be in charge of the paper. The editor will determine whether the paper can continue to be evaluated. In case the paper is accepted by the editor, it will be forwarded to two referees. Otherwise, the submission will be desk rejected. In case of contradictory reviews, a third referee will be chosen by the editor to evaluate the paper. The editor has the final word on whether or not the manuscript is accepted. In addition to the reviewers, the editor will take other parameters into account to determine whether or not the paper can be accepted for publication. Papers recommended by referees are not automatically accepted.

Reviewers will be kept anonymous throughout the entire editing process of the work and after its publication. During the submission/editing process, authors will also be kept anonymous. To this end, upon submission, the author(s) must replace any self-citation or co-author citation of the author by XXXXXX, 0000, page ???. In the References section citations must be replaced by XXXXXX. Only after the work has been accepted, the author(s) must complete the anonymized citations.

Manuscripts that have a preprint version, on a platform recognized by DELTA, will be evaluated by one of the journal's editors and may be approved without having to be peer reviewed once more. To that end, the manuscript submitted to DELTA must include a link to its preprint version before the title. The manuscript must be accompanied by a supplementary document with the changes that were made to the preprint version.

Open access

DELTA follows the TOP guidelines to grant access to research data. Such guidelines are provided by SciELO. We reproduce some of these guidelines below.

SciELO. Guia de citação de dados de pesquisa [online, p. 6-7]. SciELO, 2018 [20 de janeiro de 2024]. Disponível em: https://wp.scielo.org/wp-content/uploads/Guia_TOP_pt.pdf

Every manuscript based on original research must contain a section called Data availability. This section brings information on the availability of data and where it can be accessed.

We suggest authors choose from the following wording for such section:

Data not available: The data used in this study is not publicly available.

 Data available:

  • The data used in this study is available in the manuscript.
  • The data used in this study is published in the article in the section “supplementary materials.”
  • The data used in this study was made available at [name and link to the home page of the repository] and can be accessed at [URL or DOI].
  • The data used in this study was made available at [name and link to the home page of the repository] with the digital object identifier [DOI].
  • The anonymized data used in this study was made available at [name and link to the repository] and can be accessed at [URL or DOI].

Data available upon request

  • The data used in this study is available upon request to the corresponding author [name of the corresponding author]. The data is not publicly available because [explain in detail why the data is not publicly available, e.g., “it contains information that compromises the privacy of the research participants.”]
  • The data used in this study is available upon request to [name of the institution]. The data is not publicly available because [explain in detail why the data is not publicly available, e.g., “it contains information that compromises the privacy of the research participants.”]

If the manuscript is accepted for publication the section Data availability will be published together with the manuscript.

Article processing charges (APC)

 Delta does not charge APC for manuscripts submitted to the continuous publication process. A charge of 450,00 reais applies to manuscripts published in special issues that are organized by a guest editor. Proposals for special issues have to be submitted through the following link: https://form.jotform.com/210697048061051

Ethics and Misconduct Policy, Erratum and Retraction

 Delta follows SciELO guidelines available at:

Guide to Best Practices for Strengthening Ethics in Scientific Publishing

For errata:

Guide to recording, marking and publishing Correction

For retraction:

Guide for registering, marking and publishing a retraction

Conflict of interest policies

 Conflicts of interest can be of a personal, commercial, political, academic or financial nature. Conflicts of interest can occur when authors, reviewers or editors have interests that may influence the preparation or review of manuscripts. When submitting the manuscript, authors are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial or other conflicts that may have influenced the work. If there is, even potentially, a conflict of interest, the author(s) must disclose this in a signed document attached to the submission platform. For more information: Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest

Sex and genre issues

 DELTA's editorial team, as well as the authors who publish in the journal, must always observe the Sex and Gender Equity in Research guidelines (Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER). The SAGER guidelines comprise a set of guidelines that guide the reporting of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, results, and interpretation of findings. In addition, DELTA observes the gender equity policy in the composition of its editorial board.

 Copyright

 Authors of manuscripts published in DELTA retain the copyright of their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows articles to be reused and distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited. Authors grant DELTA the right of first publication.

Intellectual property and terms of use

Journal responsibility

  • DELTA reserves the right to make normative, orthographic and grammatical changes to the manuscripts in order to maintain language standards, while respecting the authors' style.
  • The mansucripts will not be returned to the authors.

 Author responsibility

  • Authors retain full rights to their published works. Their total or partial reprinting, deposit or republication is subject to the indication of first publication in the journal, by means of the CC-BY license; the original publication source must be cited.
  • The opinions and concepts expressed by the authors of the articles are their sole responsibility.
  • The whole DELTA content and manuscripts published by the journal, unless otherwise specified, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY. Authors of manuscripts published by DELTA retain the copyright of their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows manuscripts to be reused and distributed without restriction, provided that the original work is correctly cited. DELTA encourages authors to self-archive their accepted manuscripts, publishing them on personal blogs, institutional repositories and academic social media, as well as posting them on their personal social media, as long as the full citation to the journal's website version is included.

Sponsors and Funding Agencies

Publication of the journal is sponsored by:

Programa de Apoio a Publicações Científicas, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), PIPEq, Plano de Incentivo à Pesquisa da PUCSP.