ABOUT THE PUBLICATION

Focus and scope

Dixit is an open access, refereed and indexed digital journal of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. It publishes original and unpublished research articles in Spanish and, occasionally, at the Editorial Board's discretion, in English and Portuguese. Its focus is on Communication, which can be in dialogue with other disciplines of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, with an editorial style that promotes agile reading of rigorous work. It is aimed at individuals and institutions interested in the field of Communication and related disciplines.

Dixit is indexed in ESCI (Web of Science), and Catálogo Latindex 2.0; distributed in SciELO, Dialnet, EBSCO, MIAR, HAPI and CLASE databases, and registered in  DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), LA Referencia, LatinREV,  ROAD, SILO and Timbó. The journal is member of AURA and the Red de Investigadores en Diseño (Universidad de Palermo), and is also in the social network X.

Frequency of publication

Starting in 2024, Dixit is published in the form of a continuous publication in an annual volume.

Types of contributions

• Research articles. They are original and unpublished papers, with a length between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including abstracts, references, notes, tables and figures) and a limit of up to 35 references. For literature review articles, up to 50 references are accepted. These collaborations are peer-reviewed in a double-blind system.
  
  
• Bibliographic reviews. They should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words in length. These collaborations are evaluated by the Editorial Board.
  
  
• Thematic dossier. Proposals for thematic dossiers are received and will be evaluated for acceptance and implementation by the Editorial Board. Preference will be given to those proposals that have a regional scope over themes linked to particular territories or countries. They should include a well-founded presentation of the topic (up to 500 words), the names of the persons who will coordinate the dossier as guest editors and a summary of the curricula vitae of each of them (up to 500 words). These proposals will be sent to the journal by e-mail to the editor in charge.

Since 2024, the journal receives manuscripts for early publication (preprints), which have been published as such on a specific platform (e.g, SciELO Preprints, Preprints.org, among others). Occasionally, essays are also published at the invitation of the Editorial Board.

In all cases, the Editorial Board of Dixit decides whether the contributions received are in accordance with the focus and editorial style of the journal, and in which volume they are published.

Free of charge publication

Authors are not charged for publishing in Dixit. The expenses of the editorial process of the articles are covered by the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. Dixit does not charge for subscriptions; access to the full text of published articles has no cost.

Dixit publishes articles in Spanish and, occasionally, at the discretion of the Editorial Board, accepts articles in English and Portuguese. In these cases, if the article is accepted by the Editorial Board and passes the reviewing process, its authors undertake to ensure the professional quality of the edition of the final version of the text.

Review process

1.    First phase of evaluation

Manuscripts are received by the scientific editor and submitted to the Editorial Board. The Board determines the relevance, timeliness or adequacy of the article to the focus and style of the publication and decides whether to proceed to the peer review phase or to reject it.

This first phase of the process takes a maximum of 2 months.

2.    Peer-review

Papers submitted to refereed sections that approve the first phase of evaluation are sent to two external reviewers according to the double-blind system, i.e., the author does not know the identity of the reviewers and the reviewers do not know the identity of the authors.

The evaluators suggest whether or not to publish the article, according to the following possibilities: a) Publishable, b) Publishable with minor modifications, c) Publishable with major changes and resubmit for review, and d) Not publishable.

When an article receives an opinion of “Publishable with minor modifications”, the Editorial Team is in charge of corroborating that such corrections have been incorporated; when the opinion is “Publishable with major changes and resubmit for review”, the reviewer has the possibility of revising the manuscript once it has been corrected, if he/she so wishes. If an article receives one of the two opinions as “Not publishable”, the Editorial Board reserves the right to reject the article. In case of substantial differences between two evaluations, the article may be sent to a third referee.

The anonymous evaluation is given to the authors so that they can incorporate the necessary corrections for the publication of the article. The aspects evaluated are: compliance with editorial standards; originality and contributions to the field of knowledge; solid foundation of the topic; internal coherence; clear enunciation of the main idea of the article; presentation and discussion of the findings or results of the research; adequacy of the conclusions to what was initially proposed; ample and pertinent handling of the bibliographic references; spelling and syntactic correctness. You can access the evaluation form for research articles here.

The judgment is delivered to the authors within a 6-month period, counted from the date the work was received. Also, the Editorial Team reserves the right to define in which volume to publish the articles.

Dixit’s acceptance rate for 2023-2024 was 47 %.

Ethics and editorial policies

Ethical guidelines

The journal ensures good practices in academic publishing by following the guidelines established by the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE). The ethical principles and other policies related to transparency, accountability, intellectual property, accessibility and reproduction rights, among others, are detailed below.

Authors’ responsibility and authorial contribution

Authors of a manuscript are considered to be those persons who have made a significant contribution to the final product. 

Authors should present results of rigorous, transparent and ethical research processes, assuming responsibility for the published research. Their research methods should be described, in such a way that the scientific community can corroborate or replicate the study.

When submitting their papers, authors must complete, sign and attach this Authorship Responsibility Statement in which, among other information, they declare that their work is original and unpublished. Authors should refrain from submitting the manuscript simultaneously to two or more journals.

Authors should carefully select the order of appearance of their names in the submitted paper. The first author will be considered the senior author and, unless otherwise specified, will oversee correspondence with the journal. After the article has been submitted, changes can only be made to the list of authors, both in the order and in adding or deleting people, by sending an e-mail to the Editorial Board and explaining the reasons for the changes.  

For reasons of transparency, each author of a manuscript must declare his or her specific contribution, for which the CRediT taxonomy of roles is followed.

Any controversy related to the authorship of a manuscript should be communicated by e-mail to the journal, and will be resolved by the Editorial Board and communicated to the parties involved in the shortest possible time.

Conflicts of interest

All those involved in the editorial processing of a manuscript must make explicit and/or alert, at any stage of the process, about any personal, academic, political, financial or other interest that may influence or compromise in any way the evaluation and publication of the work.

When submitting their manuscripts, authors must make explicit any possible conflicts of interest, as well as inform if their work has received any type of funding or economic support from agencies, projects or individuals, and make explicit any possible link with parties interested in the research submitted for consideration by the journal. 

The reviewers convened by the journal for the evaluation of manuscripts are responsible for alerting the Editorial Board of any conflict of interest or circumstance that may prevent them from carrying out the task in a suitable and objective manner.

In cases in which a member of the Editorial Board has a conflict of interest or is an interested party in the publication process of an article submitted to the journal, he/she will be replaced in his/her responsibilities by another member of the team, who will be in charge of managing the editorial process with independence and without compromising the principles of confidentiality and privacy of information.

Plagiarism detection

Authors are committed to submit original and unpublished articles. This implies the absence of plagiarism (appropriation of ideas or phrases from third parties) or self-plagiarism (duplicate publication without attribution or excessive self-citation).

Authors should indicate, by means of a note on the first page of the article submitted, whether it was prepared from materials available in previous publications, repositories or on the web. The contents reused in the manuscripts must be duly referenced in accordance with the APA 7 citation guidelines. The degree of self-citation allowed will be at the discretion of the editor in charge, according to each case and in accordance with the guidelines mentioned above.

As part of the initial process of receiving articles and the formal review of submissions, the journal performs a plagiarism check of the manuscript using Crossref and Turnitin software.

If plagiarism or self-plagiarism is detected in an article, the editorial team has the authority to reject the submission directly or to contact the authors to request the corresponding explanations and the necessary adjustments.

When the submitted articles require modifications by the authors —as part of the result of peer review— the new version of the paper will be subjected to the analysis of anti-plagiarism software.

Beyond the technical analysis performed by the journal, all participants in the editorial process (editors, reviewers, as well as readers of an article once it has been published) can alert the responsible editor or the journal to a possible detection of plagiarism by sending an e-mail. Actions to be taken when plagiarism is reported are addressed in the subsection “Corrections, complaints and malpractice claims management”.

Use of generative artificial intelligence

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is not recognized as the author of the work and the ultimate responsibility for the content lies with the undersigned authors.

The use of AI tools should be explicitly stated by the authors in the manuscript, in the methodological section, detailing which tool was used and for what purpose.

Data availability

Following the SciELO Guidelines for Transparency and Openness Promotion in Journal Policies and Practices (Transparency and Openness Promotion)  on data transparency, authors of articles resulting from original research should report whether the dataset used in their study is available and, if so, where to access it.

Some possible repositories for open data are: SciELO Data, Mendeley Data, Zenodo, DANS, DataHub, FigShare.

In case the authors have their data in any server, they should state it alongside the submission as follows: “The dataset supporting the results of this study is available at [name and link to repository]”.

If not, they should include the following statement: “The dataset supporting the results of this study is not available”.

In all cases, authors should make the research data available to the referees, if required.

Review and responsibility of reviewers

Articles published in the journal are submitted to external peer review, using the double-blind refereeing system. Details of the evaluation process can be found in the Review process subsection.

Reviewers undertake to referee articles on a voluntary and honorary basis, in order to contribute to improve the quality of the papers through an objective and constructive review. They must be free of conflicts of interest in relation to the study submitted for evaluation.

They should follow the evaluation guidelines provided by the journal and comply with both the policies of the evaluation process and the deadlines stipulated for the task.

The manuscript under review is a confidential document, implying that reviewers may not quote or use the material or distribute copies of the work to others. If a reviewer intends to consult a third party about any aspect of the work, he/she must ask permission from the editor beforehand.

Ethical oversight and responsibility of the editorial team

The responsible editor and the Editorial Board are committed to supervise the publication processes, following the highest ethical standards.

The editors will ensure that the articles are peer-reviewed by specialists in the subject, clearly informing about the rules of publication and respecting the confidentiality and anonymity of the arbitration process. Editors may not distribute copies of a manuscript under review to persons outside the review process, nor cite the material in their own publications until it has been accepted and published.

Manuscripts submitted for review must meet the international ethical standards set forth by the American Psychological Association and the Declaration of Helsinki.

For all research involving human subjects and animal experimentation, the submission of an Ethics Committee approval will be considered. This approval should provide specific details regarding the institution and the committee that granted it, including the corresponding number and date. The Method section should include a subsection on ethical considerations, detailing the main aspects related to procedures and informed consents pertinent to the study, as well as mentioning the approval (identification number and/or issuing institution) if available.

In research involving potentially vulnerable persons or groups (whether due to age, disability, gender, racial and ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic level, institutionalization, among others, as well as their possible intersections), the procedures and specific care taken to ensure compliance with the ethical guidelines that apply to research with these populations will be detailed.

Open access and copyright policy

Open Access

This journal provides open access to all its content. Under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), users have the right to view, download, store, print, search, index and create links to the texts, provided that the original source and the person in charge of its authorship are cited in all cases and situations.

Authors are free to archive their published article in institutional repositories and/or on their personal web pages, always mentioning the publication in Dixit with the corresponding data.

Following the Guidelines for Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) in Journal Policies and Practices, and in compliance with Level 1 of Guideline 2 (Data Transparency), authors are required to include in the articles that result from original research a section on "Data Availability" in which they report whether the dataset used in their research is available and, if so, where to access it

Licenses

From issue 32 onwards the Creative Commons Attribution/Attribution 4.0 International License is in force.

Issues number 29-31 are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The contents corresponding to number 28 and earlier editions are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Copyright

If the manuscript is accepted, the authors agree to transfer the copyright to the journal according to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), open access system, with the authors retaining responsibility for the content and opinions expressed, which do not reflect the views or scientific policy of the journal.

The authors hereby declare that their work does not infringe on the rights of third parties and that they are the sole holders of the property rights being transferred, allowing them to dispose of these rights without any limitations or encumbrances. They also declare that, in creating the work subject to this transfer, they have not violated any third-party intellectual property rights. Consequently, the authors are obliged to guarantee the authorship and originality of the work’s content to the journal and ensure the peaceful exercise of the transferred rights. The authors will be responsible for any claims made by third parties regarding intellectual property rights over the work, thus exempting the journal from any liability. They will also be liable for any damages that may be caused to the journal due to such claims.

The article’s content will not be subject to any other rights by any other publication, nor has it been previously published. If tables or figures from other publications are reproduced, written permission from the authors or copyright holders will be provided as appropriate. In all cases, the APA guidelines for presenting tables and figures will be followed. 

Editorial policies and best practices

Corrections, complaints and malpractice claims management

The journal will receive via e-mail indications of corrections in the content of published articles, complaints of any kind involving the content of publications, and allegations of research misconduct or plagiarism. These communications may be made at any time during the publication process of an article by any of the parties involved in it or by the community of readers after the publication of the articles.

The Editorial Board will analyze each case following the guidelines provided by COPE for each scenario and will take the corresponding measures for each situation.

In all cases, we will proceed with maximum transparency and the complainant will receive a response on the actions taken by the magazine based on his or her complaint. The persons or institutions involved in the particular case will also be contacted, following up as necessary in each circumstance.

The magazine will communicate, by means of notices published on its website and available to all readers on the home page, any significant news related to the content of the articles.

In the case of errors made by the authors or controversies related to authorship, a correction will be published; whereas, if the error was made by the editorial team, an erratum will be published. Communications about errors will be made only when the information is incorrect or affects the content of the research; minor corrections such as spelling or typographical adjustments will not be announced.

Retractions are reserved for cases of plagiarism, duplicate publication, or research that presents errors of such seriousness as to compromise its results or conclusions. Any retractions will be analyzed by the responsible editor in consultation with the Editorial Board, the reviewers and the authors of the article in question. All authors involved must be notified, and declare to the journal that they accept the retraction.

In such cases, the article will be withdrawn and a notice will be published identifying the title of the retracted article, the names and affiliations of the authors of the article, and the reasons for the decision taken. The retraction will also be included as a document in the Table of Contents of the issue corresponding to the retracted article.

More details on the retraction process can be found in COPE.

Complaints or denunciations against the journal, its staff, the Editorial Board or the responsible editor can be sent to the Vice Rector’s Office for Research and Innovation (vii@ucu.edu.uy).

Use of language

Authors are encouraged to use language that does not discriminate or reproduce discriminatory biases based on gender, race, age, disability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc.

Digital preservation

Through the LOCKSS system (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), the journal Dixit guarantees a permanent and secure archive. LOCKSS is an open-source program developed by the Stanford University Library that allows libraries to preserve selected web journals by regularly searching registered journals to collect and archive newly published content. Each file is continuously validated against records from other libraries, so that any damaged or lost content can be restored. The articles have DOI (Digital Object Identifier) granted by the Crossref registration agency. Through the PKP Preservation Network, preservation is also provided for any journal that is in Open Journal Systems.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal will be used exclusively for the purposes set forth therein and will not be provided to third parties or for use for other purposes.