Instructions for authors

Authors submitting a manuscript for evaluation to TEC Empresarial must first review the Editorial policy and Publication ethics section.

Manuscripts must be submitted via the platform available at the journal’s website. The review process can take up to twelve weeks. All articles submitted to the journal are subject to a double-blind peer-review evaluation process by academic experts.

TEC Empresarial publishes regular manuscripts that follow the traditional journal process as well as short papers that follow a fast-track process.

Regular manuscripts are original, high-quality, and high-impact studies dealing with economic problems relevant to academics, managers, and policymakers. Therefore, regular manuscripts must be of interest to a wide range of people within the scientific and policy-making communities, and they should have the potential to impact management practices.

Short papers are high-quality, original, and high-impact short research studies that are evaluated under a fast-track format (up to two review rounds). Short papers can be empirical or theoretical with a significant contribution and a concise presentation. Authors must clearly indicate in the Cover Letter that they are submitting to the short-paper category.

General article format guidelines

MS Word, language: English (for regular manuscripts and short papers). We also publish short papers in Spanish

Extension: For regular manuscripts 8000 words maximum, all included. For short papers 6000 words maximum, all included

You must send two documents

1) First, the blind manuscript (without authors' information), including:

Title of the article in uppercase, bold and centered.

Abstract: Authors must include a one-paragraph abstract of up to 250 words for all articles. The abstract is a concise summary of the entire paper and must be able to stand alone, separate from the rest of the paper. The abstract must include the objective of the study, a brief description of the data and methods used in the study, and a summary of the most relevant results and conclusions.

Keywords: Authors should include a maximum of five keywords that describe the theoretical and methodological orientation of the paper.

Information in Spanish: the title, abstract, and keywords. This information should appear next to the corresponding text in English. For articles written in Spanish, the said information should be provided in English.

Body of the article

Bibliographic references: APA format (accessible at http://www.apastyle.org/)

2) The second document is the title page, including:

Title of the article in uppercase, bold and centered.                                                          

Authors: names, affiliation, email, ORCID identifier. Below the title, in bold and aligned to the left

Acknowledgments: When submitting a manuscript, authors should add only to the title page an acknowledgments section that includes the names of any sponsors of your research, including grant numbers, and/or people you would like to thank. The acknowledgments section should appear immediately before the list of references when the paper is accepted for publication.

Disclosure statement:  No potential conflict of interest was declared by the authors.

Copyright policy

All authors submitting an article to TEC Empresarial acknowledge that the said article has not been published previously and that the work is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Likewise, the authors confirm that the study is original and that its content is the product of the authors’ intellectual contribution. All data and references to previously published materials are duly identified and included in the bibliographic notes. Also, the authors assume full responsibility for any litigation or claim due to intellectual property rights, exonerating the Business School at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (ITCR) from all responsibility. 

For accepted manuscripts, the authors keep the copyright and give to the journal the right of first publication and the rights to edit, reproduce, distribute, and communicate the study in the country and abroad through printed and electronic media. 

The digital version of the journal is registered under the  BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license. Therefore, this work may be copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

The authors keep the copyright and give the journal the right of the first publication and the possibility of editing, reproducing, distributing, exhibiting, and communicating in the country and abroad through printed and electronic means. On the other hand, the author declares to assume the commitment on any litigation or claim related to the rights of intellectual property, exonerating of responsibility to the Business School of the Costa Rica Institute of Technology.

Checklist before submission

As part of the submission process, authors are asked to verify that their submission meets all the aspects listed below. Manuscripts that do not comply with these guidelines will be returned to the authors.

- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).

- Extension: For regular manuscripts 8000 words maximum, all included. For short papers 6000 words maximum, all included.

- Bibliographic references: APA format

- For new submissions at least two documents: an anonymous article file and a title page. For revised versions of your paper: the anonymous article file and a response letter to the reviewers’ comments.

Privacy statement

The names and e-mail addresses included in this journal will be used exclusively for the purposes stated by the journal and will not be available to others for any other purpose.

Instructions for authors updated on September 2021