Submission guidelines

1. Before you submit

• The manuscript must not be under review at any other journal, and must not have been published before.
• BJIM accepts manuscripts in English only. Write in clear English with standard grammar. A manuscript that needs heavy language editing may be returned.
• Every submission is checked for plagiarism and then goes through double-blind peer review. Read the plagiarism policy before you submit.

2. Preparing the manuscript

3. Title, authors and abstract

• Title: no more than two lines.
• Authors: give each author’s full name, affiliation and email address, and a phone number for the corresponding author. Enter these in the submission form, not in the manuscript file (see below).
• Abstract: no more than 250 words (aim for 200 to 250), single-spaced. The submission form does not accept a longer abstract.
• Keywords: listed under the abstract, single-spaced.

4. References, tables and figures

• Use APA 7th edition for all citations and references. The citation guidelines give the patterns and examples.
• Place tables and figures in the text where they are discussed, not at the end of the file. Number and title them in APA format (Table 1, Figure 1).

5. Ethics and originality

Authors are expected to follow accepted standards of research ethics and integrity. In practice this means:

• the work is your own, and every source you used is cited;
• data are reported honestly, without fabrication or manipulation;
• research involving people had their informed consent, and approval where your institution requires it;
• everyone listed as an author contributed to the work and agrees to the submission;
• any use of generative AI tools is described in the methods and cited.

The plagiarism policy explains how we check submissions and what happens when we find a problem.

6. Rights

You must hold the rights to the work you submit. When an article is published, you share those rights with the publisher, Bayero University Library, so that it can publish and distribute the article. Make sure you have permission to reuse any table, figure or image that belongs to someone else, and credit it.

7. Submitting through the portal

1. Register and choose the Author account type, or sign in if you already have one.
2. Open New submission. The form has four steps: article details, authors, files, and a final check. You can save a draft at any step and come back to it.
3. Upload the anonymised manuscript. You can add one supplementary file, such as a data set or appendix.
4. Confirm that the work is original, anonymised and follows these guidelines, then submit.

You get a tracking code (for example, BJIM-2026-AB12C) by email straight away, and you can follow every stage from your dashboard.

8. What happens next

1. 1 Screening. An editor checks the scope, the formatting and the plagiarism report. Manuscripts that fail screening are returned without review.
2. 2 Double-blind review. At least 2 reviewers assess the manuscript. Neither side knows who the other is.
3. 3 Decision. The editor sends a decision letter with the reviewers’ comments: accept, minor revisions, major revisions, or reject.
4. 4 Revision. If revisions are requested, you upload a revised file and, ideally, a response explaining each change. The revised version may go back to the same reviewers.
5. 5 Production. Accepted articles are copyedited. You approve a proof before anything is published.
6. 6 Publication. The article appears in an issue on this website with its page numbers and a DOI.