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Before You Submit

Authors are strongly encouraged to review the journal's Aims & Scope before preparing a submission. JAIS will desk-reject manuscripts that fall clearly outside its thematic and disciplinary scope. If you are uncertain whether your work is suitable, you may direct a brief pre-submission enquiry to the Managing Editor before preparing a full manuscript.

All submissions must be original, unpublished work not currently under consideration elsewhere. By submitting to JAIS, all named authors confirm their agreement with the submission and accept shared responsibility for the integrity of the work.

Article Types

JAIS publishes the following article types. Word counts refer to the main text only and exclude the abstract, references, tables, figure captions, and declarations.

Article Type	Description	Word Limit	Peer Review
Original Research Article	Empirical, theoretical, or mixed-methods studies presenting new findings with direct relevance to AI and sustainable development.	6,000 – 10,000 words	Double-blind
Review Article	Systematic, scoping, or narrative reviews of existing literature. Must offer a critical synthesis, not merely a summary.	8,000 – 12,000 words	Double-blind
Policy Analysis	Evidence-based analysis of AI governance, regulation, or SDG-related policy frameworks. May engage with a specific country, region, or international instrument.	5,000 – 8,000 words	Double-blind
Perspective / Viewpoint	An informed, evidence-supported argument on an emerging issue, methodological debate, or policy question within scope. Opinion-based but substantiated.	2,500 – 4,000 words	Editorial review + one reviewer
Commentary	A critical response to a recently published JAIS article or to a major development in the field. Must cite the original work explicitly.	1,000 – 2,000 words	Editorial review
Special Issue Article	Invited or open-call submissions on a defined thematic focus. Follow the specific call for papers for scope and formatting requirements.	Per call	Double-blind

Note: Letters to the Editor and invited editorials may be published at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. These are not open for unsolicited submissions.

Peer Review

JAIS operates a rigorous double-blind peer review process. Authors must ensure that their submitted manuscripts contain no identifying information, including author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, or self-citations that could reveal their identity in the manuscript file itself. All identifying information must appear only on a separate title page.

Editorial Screening: Each submission undergoes an initial editorial screening for scope, originality, language quality, and compliance with these guidelines. Manuscripts that do not meet minimum standards, lack scientific rigor, or fall outside the journal's scope will be desk-rejected and returned to the authors without external review.

Author-Suggested Reviewers: Authors may suggest up to three qualified external reviewers and may request the exclusion of specific individuals (with reasons provided in the cover letter). The journal is not obligated to act on these requests, and the editor's decision on the choice of peer reviewers is final. To safeguard against peer review manipulation, suggested reviewers must:

• Not have co-authored with any of the named authors within the past five years.
• Hold an institutional affiliation entirely independent of the submitting authors.
• Be submitted with a verifiable institutional email address and/or an ORCID ID; non-institutional email addresses (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo) will not be accepted for suggested reviewers.

Reviewer Responsibilities, Confidentiality, and AI Use: Peer reviewers are expected to provide objective, constructive, and timely evaluations. Reviewers must declare any potential conflicts of interest (financial, personal, or professional) to the handling editor before agreeing to review a manuscript.

Manuscripts submitted to JAIS are privileged, confidential documents. Reviewers must respect the confidentiality of the peer review process and must not share the manuscript with third parties. Furthermore, reviewers are strictly prohibited from uploading the manuscript, in whole or in part, into publicly available Generative AI tools or Large Language Models (LLMs), as doing so violates the authors' confidentiality, data privacy, and intellectual property rights.

Editorial Decisions: Following peer review, editorial decisions will be communicated as: Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, or Reject. The journal aims to provide a first decision within eight to ten weeks of submission, though this timeframe may vary depending on reviewer availability and the complexity of the manuscript.

Submissions from Editors and Editorial Board Members (Editor-as-Author Policy)

While the journal welcomes submissions from its editors and editorial board members, we enforce strict protocols to ensure objective decision-making and prevent any impression of impropriety. To guarantee complete editorial independence, the following procedures apply to all manuscripts authored or co-authored by members of the editorial team:

• Mandatory Disclosure: At the time of submission, the editor or board member must explicitly declare their editorial role at the journal within the manuscript's Conflict of Interest / Competing Interests section and in the cover letter.
• Strict Recusal and Independent Handling: The submitting editor is strictly excluded from all stages of the peer review, assessment, and decision-making processes regarding their own manuscript. The manuscript will be immediately reassigned to an independent editor (or a senior board member) who has no personal, professional, or collaborative ties to the submitting author.
• System Restriction: The journal's editorial management system will be configured to restrict the submitting editor's access to the manuscript's backend progress, reviewer reports, and editorial notes.
• Standard Peer Review: Editor-authored submissions receive no preferential treatment. They are subjected to the exact same rigorous peer review process by independent, external reviewers as any other manuscript submitted to the journal. The final decision to accept or reject the manuscript rests entirely with the independent handling editor.
• Post-Publication Transparency: If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the journal will ensure complete transparency for its readers. A disclosure statement will be published alongside the article, indicating the author's conflict of interest and confirming that the peer review was handled independently. The published statement will read: "Given their role as an editor of this journal, [Author Name] had no involvement in the peer review of this article and the decision to publish it. Full responsibility for the editorial process was delegated to an independent editor."

Preparing and Submitting Your Manuscript

Submission System & Cover Letter

Manuscripts must be submitted through the JAIS online submission system. Submissions by anyone other than a named author will not be accepted. The corresponding author takes responsibility for the manuscript throughout the submission and review process and must warrant that all co-authors have reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to its submission.

Cover letter: Addressed to the Editor-in-Chief; briefly explains the contribution of the work, confirms it is not under consideration elsewhere, declares any related manuscripts in press or under review, and confirms that all authors approve the submission.

Submission Checklist

Before submitting, ensure you have prepared the following files:

• Title page: Includes full title, all author names and affiliations, corresponding author contact details (institutional email and ORCID), running head, and word count.
• Anonymous manuscript: Main text with no author-identifying information, including abstract, keywords, and all sections through to references.
• Declarations page: A standalone document containing all required statements (see the Statements and Declarations section below).
• Cover letter: Addressed to the Editor-in-Chief; briefly explains the contribution of the work, confirms it is not under consideration elsewhere, and declares any related manuscripts in press or under review.
• Figures and tables: Embedded in the manuscript file at first submission. High-resolution versions as separate files may be requested at acceptance.

Language

JAIS publishes in English. Both American and British conventions are acceptable, provided usage is consistent throughout the manuscript. Authors are responsible for the language quality of their submission. Manuscripts with significant language deficiencies will be returned before external review. Authors who are not writing in their first language are strongly encouraged to seek professional language editing support or utilize AI-assisted language polishing tools (under human oversight) prior to submission.

Plagiarism and Prior Publication

All submissions are screened for plagiarism prior to peer review using standard similarity detection software. While the journal generally flags manuscripts with a similarity index exceeding 15% (excluding references and quoted material) or single source matches above 5%, all similarity reports are evaluated qualitatively by the editorial team. Acceptability is based on the nature of the overlapping text; any unjustified duplication of core ideas, data, or results will lead to immediate rejection, regardless of the overall percentage score.

Preprints deposited on recognised servers (e.g., arXiv, SSRN, OSF Preprints) prior to submission do not constitute prior publication and will not disqualify a manuscript. Authors should declare the existence of any preprint in their cover letter and, if accepted, update the preprint record with the DOI of the published article.

AI-Assisted Writing and Figure Generation

Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI tools cannot take ethical or legal responsibility for their output and therefore may not be listed as authors. Authors who use AI tools in the preparation of their manuscript for tasks such as language editing or formatting must disclose this clearly in the Methods section or in a dedicated statement in the Declarations. Human authors retain full accountability for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of all submitted content. Please note: The use of Generative AI tools to create, alter, or manipulate original research data, scientific diagrams, images, or figures is strictly prohibited. All visual representations of data must be human-generated.

Manuscript Structure

General Formatting

JAIS does not impose strict formatting requirements at the point of initial submission. Authors may use any consistent, clearly structured format. Formatting to house style is applied by the production team following acceptance. The following guidelines apply:

• Use a standard readable font (12-point) with double spacing throughout.
• Set 1-inch (2.54 cm) margins on all sides.
• Number all pages consecutively.
• Number all lines (facilitates reviewer comments).
• Tables and figures should be embedded in the manuscript at the point of first mention, with captions formatted according to APA 7th edition.

Title Page (Separate File)

The title page must include: (1) the full manuscript title — concise, descriptive, and free of non-standard abbreviations; (2) full names and institutional affiliations of all authors, with department, faculty/college, institution, city, and country; (3) the corresponding author, identified with an asterisk, with institutional email address and 16-digit ORCID; (4) a running head of no more than 60 characters; (5) total word count; and (6) the title, author names, affiliations, and a translated abstract in Arabic, if applicable.

Arabic Requirement

To support accessibility for MENA-region readership, JAIS requests that authors provide the following on a separate page appended to the title page: the manuscript title translated into Arabic; author names and affiliations transliterated or translated into Arabic; and an Arabic-language abstract corresponding to the English abstract. Authors who require translation assistance should note this in their cover letter; the editorial office can provide guidance on available resources. Arabic text should be submitted in Unicode-compatible format.

Abstract

The abstract should be 150–250 words, self-contained, and citation-free. It should state: the purpose and research question; the methodology employed; the key findings; and the principal conclusions or implications. Non-standard abbreviations and acronyms must be defined at first mention. The abstract should be structured for empirical papers and unstructured for reviews, perspectives, and policy analyses.

Keywords

Provide four to six keywords, separated by semicolons. Keywords should reflect the principal topics of the manuscript and support discoverability through indexing databases. Avoid repeating terms already present in the title.

Manuscript Sections

Original Research Articles should follow this order: Introduction; Literature Review (if not integrated into the Introduction); Methodology; Results; Discussion; Conclusion; Acknowledgements; Declarations; References; Appendices (if any). Review Articles, Policy Analyses, and Perspectives may adopt alternative structures appropriate to their genre, provided the organisation is logical and clearly signposted. Authors should use APA 7th edition heading levels throughout.

References

JAIS uses APA 7th edition for all in-text citations and the reference list. References should be compiled in alphabetical order by first author surname. Include DOIs for all sources where available. URLs for online sources should link to a stable, publicly accessible location. Reference lists should reflect current scholarship in the field and avoid excessive self-citation.

Tables, Figures, and Data

Tables and figures should be used selectively to present data that is essential to the argument and that cannot be conveyed efficiently in prose. Each must be numbered consecutively, carry a descriptive caption, and be cited in the main text. At the initial submission stage, tables and figures should be embedded in the manuscript file. Final production-quality files will be requested following acceptance.

Authors are encouraged to deposit underlying datasets in an appropriate open repository (e.g., Zenodo, OSF, Figshare, Harvard Dataverse) and provide a link in the Data Availability Statement. Where data visualisations are generated computationally, authors should make the code or scripts available alongside the data.

After Acceptance

Production and Typesetting

Upon acceptance, the manuscript is transferred to the production team for typesetting. Authors will receive a single set of PDF proofs by email to the corresponding author. Proofs should be checked carefully for typesetting accuracy, completeness, and correctness of text, tables, and figures. Corrections must be returned within 48 hours of receipt. Only typographical or factual errors may be corrected at the proof stage; substantive changes to content will not be accepted. If no response is received within the deadline, the journal reserves the right to proceed with publication.

Revision Submissions

Authors returning a revised manuscript must upload three files: (1) a tracked-changes version of the manuscript clearly showing all modifications; (2) a point-by-point response to reviewers addressing each comment individually; and (3) a clean final manuscript. All files should be uploaded through the submission system using the designated file categories.

Supplementary Materials

Authors may submit supplementary files (datasets, instruments, extended tables, code) for online publication alongside the main article. Each supplementary file should include the manuscript title, journal name, all author names and affiliations, and the corresponding author's contact details. Supplementary files are published as received and are not subject to typesetting or copy-editing.

Statements and Declarations

All manuscripts must include a standalone Declarations section, placed after the References. Submissions that omit required statements will be returned as incomplete. The following statements are required for all article types unless otherwise indicated.

Funding Statement

Authors must identify all funding sources that supported the research and/or the preparation of the manuscript. Where applicable, include the name of the funding body and the associated grant or award number.

Example statements:

• "This work was supported by [Funding Body Name], grant number [XXX]."
• "The authors received no specific funding for this work."
• "This research was conducted as part of the authors' employment at [Institution Name]."

Competing Interests

Authors must disclose any financial or non-financial interests that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the submitted work, including interests held within the past three years. Where no competing interest exists, a nil declaration is still required.

Example statements:

• "The authors declare no competing interests."
• "Author A has received consultancy fees from [Organisation]. All other authors declare no competing interests."

Author Contributions

Authors are required to specify each named author's contribution to the work, using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) framework where applicable. Contributions typically include Conceptualisation; Methodology; Data collection; Formal analysis; Writing – original draft; Writing – review and editing; Supervision; Funding acquisition.

Example statement:

• "A.B.: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – original draft. C.D.: Data collection, Formal analysis. E.F.: Writing – review and editing, Supervision. All authors approved the final version."

Data Availability

Authors must include a statement indicating whether and how the data underlying the findings of the study are available. Where data are deposited in a public repository, provide the repository name, dataset title, and a persistent identifier (DOI or stable URL).

Example statements:

• "The datasets generated during this study are openly available at [Repository Name], [DOI/URL]."
• "The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request."
• "No primary data were generated or analysed in this study."

Ethics Approval

Research involving human participants, personal data, or animal subjects must confirm that appropriate ethical approval was obtained prior to the conduct of the study. Research that was exempt from ethics review should state this clearly and explain the basis for exemption.

Example statements:

• "This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical approval was granted by [Committee Name], reference number [XXX], dated [DD/MM/YYYY]."
• "This study involved analysis of publicly available, anonymised secondary data and was confirmed exempt from ethics review by [Committee Name]."

Informed Consent

Where the study involved human participants, authors must confirm that informed consent was obtained from all participants, or from parents or legal guardians in the case of participants under the age of 18.

Example statements:

• "Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to data collection."
• "This study used fully anonymised data collected through an approved institutional mechanism. No individual informed consent was required."

Consent to Publish

Where the manuscript contains identifying information about individuals, including photographs, case details, or personal narratives, authors must confirm that written consent to publish was obtained from those individuals, or from their legal guardians.

Example statement:

• "All individuals whose data are included in this article have provided written consent to publication."

Declaration of Generative AI in Scientific Writing

Authors must declare the use of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing upon submission of their manuscript. The following guidance refers exclusively to the writing process and does not apply to the use of AI tools to analyze data or draw insights as part of the formal research methodology.

• Permitted Use: Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies should only be used in the writing process to improve the readability and language of the manuscript.
• Human Oversight and Accountability: The technology must be applied with strict human oversight and control. Authors must carefully review and edit the generated results, as AI can produce authoritative-sounding output that may be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Human authors are ultimately responsible and accountable for the accuracy and integrity of all contents of the published work.
• AI Authorship Prohibited: In accordance with COPE and ICMJE guidelines, authors must not list or cite AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author on the manuscript. Authorship implies ethical, legal, and intellectual responsibilities that can only be attributed to and performed by humans.

How to Declare AI Use: The use of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing must be explicitly declared by adding a statement at the end of the manuscript when the paper is first submitted. The statement will appear in the published work and should be placed in a new section immediately before the References list.

• Title of new section: Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process.
• Example Statement: "During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used [NAME OF TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the published article."

Exceptions for Basic Tools: This declaration requirement does not apply to the use of basic tools (e.g., standard grammar checkers, spelling checkers, or reference management software) used to refine human-generated text. If you have nothing to disclose, you do not need to add a statement.

AI Use by Reviewers and Editors: To protect authors' intellectual property rights, data privacy, and the strict confidentiality of their research, JAIS strictly prohibits the use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies (such as ChatGPT or similar public services) by reviewers or editors during the peer review and manuscript evaluation process. Submitted manuscripts and peer review reports must never be uploaded into publicly available AI tools.

Publication Charges

JAIS operates under the Diamond Open Access model. There are no article processing charges (APCs), submission fees, or page charges of any kind. Publication in JAIS is entirely free to authors and readers.