This post is the last one in the series about the types of popular research publications: 1) Special issues; 2) Conference Proceedings; 3) Stand-alone paper collection.
The enormous world of scientific publication till nowadays keeps on publishing one of the most classical and popular publication type – periodicals, or simply periodic. Such journal has several announced volumes per year that occurs at fixed intervals or appears on a regular schedule. Periodic publication, unlike the conference proceedings or special issues, has a set of the features to be uncovered in this post.

As a rule, the scientific publishing company (publisher) handles several periodicals and accumulates the papers for them. In order to be published each sent paper has to go through the selection stages. The initial (draft) selection controls the general requirements to be met:
– paper subject should correspond to the journal scientific area;
– all the obliged points of scientific study such as title, authors, e-mails, abstract, introduction, research problem statement, problem solving, foreign experience survey, results, conclusion, references should be in the paper;
– the paper must be written in acceptable English.
The aforementioned points should be under the Chief Editor’s control. This person is also responsible to assign the reviewers whose scientific interests match to the paper subject or close to it. At least each paper has to be reviewed twice. According to the reviewers’ decision the paper can be accepted, sent to revision or rejected. After the revision the paper can be rejected either, if the mistakes or unclear points have not been corrected or the author’s problem understanding and solving principally do not coincide with journal editorial board vision. In this way the periodical editor compiles a set of stand-alone papers for further publication.
The periodical Volume as a rule is not dedicated to the single topic, unlike the conference proceedings or special issues. It can a bit narrow the potential reading audience and subsequently reduce the citation amount. Such volumes contain the papers around the journal scientific area which can be quite extended occasionally.
The publication time of stand-alone papers collection can be significantly shorter. This is because of the less paper number. The necessary time to process them is quite less as well. For further authors it is necessary to be guided by the journal description on the website. Such information is open and accessible and each responsible publisher tries to follow it. If the publisher is going to publish 2-3 volumes per year, the publication time will be quite long. Generally, the periodical has 5-6 volumes per year, it allows the authors to get the published paper in 2-3 months.
The scientific level of stand-alone paper collection in most cases is higher than the conference proceedings and not worse than the special issues. All the papers go through the peer-review process and are controlled by the periodic Chief Editor. The Policy and Ethics requirement and plagiarism detection control are the responsibility of Editorial Board, Reviewers and Chief Editor.
The scientific authors of stand-alone papers should take into account that the conversation during the publication period will be between them and publisher directly. It can simplify the understanding since there are not third party. On the other hand, the authors cannot rely on the conference editor and should control all the publication stages on their own. The timely responses and deliberated approach to the assigned mistakes/inaccuracies increase the possibility to be published in the near future and in the forthcoming Volume and not to lose the valuable time for scientific promotion, which is not possible without research publications.