Aim and Scope

The Editorial Team considers international relations to be a worldwide phenomenon, indescribable according to any universal theory. Moreover, a pluralism of conceptual approaches (reflecting a national-specific view of international-political facts, processes, and actions) should be acknowledged in the theory of international relations (TIR) in order to acquire a complex understanding of the events unfolding throughout the world and to carry out their objective evaluation in the context of actions performed by various countries, non-state subjects, and other non-anthropogenic factors. In this respect, a domestic school of TIR can and should exist, formed by specific academic priorities and a research vector resulting from the peculiarity of Russia’s national interests and its current standing in the world system.

The Journal’s key mission is a theoretical comprehension of the world as a whole, of international tendencies and the planetary political environment, and of the world-integrity our country finds herself in and develops with.

The editorial team and the authors’ shared task is to understand what happens with the world as a whole and, from this particular point of view, to look at Russia and to assess the extent to which its policy corresponds with worldwide tendencies.

In this regard, the Journal’s remit is not so much to perform an analysis on the basis of our Western colleagues’ best developments, as it is to foster a theoretical comprehension of world politics phenomena connected, in the first place, with the influence of its non-Western components, relatively less studied by foreign (European and American) political science.

The Journal’s key spheres of interest are the following:

• international-political analysis and problems of world-system regulation;
• general issues of world economics and international law overlapping with world politics;
• conceptual issues of international security in its various dimensions;
• philosophy of international relations, political psychology, states’ foreign policy behavior;
• theory of international conflict;
• agenda of international cooperation and negotiations.

Section Policies

Publication Frequency

4 выпуска в год

Open Access Policy

"International Trends" is an open access journal. All articles are made freely available to readers immediatly upon publication.

Our open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition - it means that articles have free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

For more information please read BOAI statement.

Archiving

• Russian State Library (RSL)
• National Electronic-Information Consortium (NEICON)

Peer-Review

General guidelines for reviewing

• Manuscripts, submitted to the International Trends Journal, are assessed in accordance with the double-blind peer-review procedure. For this purpose the manuscripts are sent to the external experts without any identification of authorship. Similarly, the journal does not disclose names and positions of reviewers to the authors or third parties in accordance with the Publication Ethics & Publication Malpractice Statement, as well as international standards of peer-reviewing in academic journals.
• Reviewing is conducted on the basis of the standardized questionnaire.
• The journal invites for the reviewing recognized specialists in the field of the study covered in the manuscript or, if there are no such experts available in related topics. The experts are selected given their professional credentials, academic achievements and previous publications. The editors also should avoid conflicts interests between authors and reviewers. Therefore, the assessment of the manuscripts cannot be conducted by members of the family and relatives, faculty of the same academic department or division in a research institute as well as scholars who co-authored publications. The same expert cannot be invited to conduct peer-review more than three times within one academic year.
• In the selection process the journal could take into account suggestions made by the author of the manuscript.

Peer-review schedule

1. A submitted manuscript is initially assessed by the editors in order to confirm that it corresponds to the scope and standards of the journal. Then, the editors exclude any references to the author and code the manuscript. The coded manuscript is submitted to the reviewer.

2. The editors select no less than two external experts and invite them to review the manuscript.  Such experts are informed that they should assess the relevance of the issue and academic level of the manuscript, its contribution to the field and correspondence to the scope of the journal.

3. The coded manuscript is sent to the external experts together with the standardized questionnaire via e-mail. The editors in the covering letter mention the deadline for the review (it is decided individually after consultation with the reviewer, but in any case cannot be longer than 2 months).

4. Throughout the review process, the editors provide consulting services to the experts regarding the questionnaire.

5. After receiving of the results of the external assessment the editors examine the review, in order to confirm that it corresponds to the existing criteria. If the review does not give an adequate evaluation of the manuscript the editors could seek additional review by other experts.

6. If the review includes recommendations for improving the manuscript it is forwarded to the author. The editors exclude comments, which are provided by the reviewer to them exclusively as well as any offensive or insulting comments.

7. The deadline for resubmitting the manuscript is defined each time individually, but could not be longer than 3 months. If the manuscript is rewritten significantly before resubmission (no less than 15% of the text), it could be sent for additional reviewing.

8. It is preferable to invite for this additional reviewing the same experts as for initial review (in case they agree). However, other experts could also be invited as well.

Role of peer-review

The results of external peer-review are taken into account in the decision on publication of the manuscript or before sending to the author request to revise it. However, the final decision on the publication is left to the editors.

Indexation

Articles in "International Trends" are indexed by several systems:

• Russian Scientific Citation Index (RSCI) – a database, accumulating information on papers by Russian scientists, published in native and foreign titles. The RSCI project is under development since 2005 by “Electronic Scientific Library” foundation (elibrary.ru).
• Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest scholarly publishers, plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals.

Publishing Ethics

The editorial team of the ‘International Trends' Journal is fully aware that publication malpractices remain widely spread in the academic community. The most perceptible and reprehensible instances of misconduct include plagiarism, duplicate submission, misappropriation of research results, and fraud. We categorically denounce all these forms of malpractices as well as any other abuses of publication ethics.

We firmly believe that violations of both legal norms and moral standards not only are ethically inappropriate, but also impede development of scholarship and undermine authority of International Relations as an academic discipline. Therefore, we consider struggle against publication malpractices to be a joint responsibility of authors, editors, peer-reviewers, and readers. We urge all stakeholders to engage in continuous dialogue and information exchange on all instances of violation.

On our behalf, we ensure comprehensive approach to identification and elimination of ethical misconduct. We promise to respond to all evidences of malpractice and to pay attention to any information to this effect provided by the stakeholders. The editorial team reviews all articles to identify any kind of misconduct on its own. In the process of peer-reviewers selection the ‘International Trends' takes into consideration the issue of possible conflict of interests and chances of hidden biases.

The Journal will withdraw any unpublished article in a case of revealed violations. It will also retract previously published articles if they contain any evidence of misconduct and publicly report on these instances. In cases of clear defamation, abuse of legal rights or rightful court order the editorial team reserves the right and obligation to remove involved article from its web-site and online databases. This extreme move could be accomplished in a transparent and public manner only.

The ‘International Trends' continuously ensures transparency of its publication policy and its requirements for submission of publication. We see such transparency as a part of our responsibility to the authors, readers, and academic community in general. All the stakeholders are expected to strive to meet the high ethical and publications standards in accordance to COPE guidelines. The Journal confirms that it does not accept payments of any sort for publication from authors or any affiliated stakeholders. Any attempts to propose such incentives could lead to the immediate rejection of the submission.

As part of its ethical code the ‘International Trends' and its editors are bound by the principle of confidentiality regarding individual articles under review or in the process of publication, as well as their authors and peer-reviewers. The ‘International Trends' will require the same level of ethical awareness from it peer-reviewers.

The ‘International Trends' is eager to study and introduce in its activities best practices of other journals and publishers and welcomes such cooperation. It will follow closely evolution of approaches to academic publishing and will continue to revisit its rules and procedures to remain at the forefront of globally accepted scholarly standards.

Founder

• Academic Educational Forum on International Relations (AEFIR)

Author fees

Publication in “International Trends" is free of charge for all the authors.

The journal doesn't have any Arcticle processing charges.

The journal doesn't have any Article submission charges.

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Plagiarism detection

“International Trends" use native russian-language plagiarism detection software Antiplagiat to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

Preprint and postprint Policy

Prior to acceptance and publication in “International Trends", authors may make their submissions available as preprints on personal or public websites.

As part of submission process, authors are required to confirm that the submission has not been previously published, nor has been submitted. After a manuscript has been published in “International Trends" we suggest that the link to the article on journal's website is used when the article is shared on personal or public websites.

Glossary (by SHERPA)

ISSN 1728-2756 (Print)
ISSN 1811-2773 (Online)