Nuevas instrucciones a los autores y el futuro del artículo científico en ciencias humanas

Abstract

New instructions to authors and the future of the scientific article in the human sciences Some years ago, a senior staff member at SciELO gave me a piece of good advice: it is healthy and necessary for journals to make regular updates to their author guidelines. Over the last few months, the editorial team of História, Ciências, Saúde -Manguinhos, along with our associate and section editors, have attempted to follow this advice by creating a new set of guidelines that we present in this issue. They are now clearer and more up to date, seeking to respond to the open science movement; this involves much more than just open access to documents, which most Brazilian journals have provided for some years now (Santos, Guanaes, 2018).Writing a scientific article is often considered the successful endpoint of a good research project and authors often submit articles to a journal without having studied the specific guidelines of that periodical. This is a mistake. There is a penultimate phase that should be rigorously observed: preparing the text for publication (the final phase involves responding carefully to the comments of the reviewers -who almost never approve the first version of a piece -and sending off the definitive version). In the penultimate phase, authors should not only correct grammatical errors, polish the style, complete statistical charts and bibliographical references, and make sure the images are of the required quality. The goal is to create a piece of writing that is relatively short but clear, orderly and deep in its approach to and interpretation of the problem (generally one or two per article); it should explain the methodology used, avoid repetition in presenting evidence, and establish a dialogue with other researchers (Cueto, 2011). Attention to these matters means that the text will have the virtues of good historical articles, which present discoveries in a way that transcends mere description, trace connections between context, institutions and personalities, and skillfully weigh processes of change and continuity.A phrase from the preceding paragraph should be stressed: "relatively short," because some submitters make the common mistake of assuming that an article is just a chapter from a thesis they have just defended or a book they are about to write. It is not. It is something different. Not just because a chapter is longer and contains more references than an article, but because an article is in some sense "self-contained." In other words, it should form a coherent whole out of all the elements that are distributed throughout a thesis or a book. In those formats, the chapters form a sequential narrative, contain various references and citations and serve to advance various arguments or prove one or more hypotheses. And they do not generally have a maximum word limit. In order to make sense, the chapters should not be read in isolation, since that would lead to a fragmented understanding of the work as a whole. An article, on the other hand, has a concise format and features of