International Journal of Learner Corpus Research

1. Submission types

Articles under consideration are double-blind peer-reviewed and decisions on all published content are made by the editors. IJLCR invites original submissions in the following categories:

Research articles

Research articles are original research papers presenting research findings based on the analysis of learner corpora. Research findings should move the field forward, by proposing theoretical developments, methodological advances, and/or pedagogical applications.

Length requirement: between 7,000 and 10,000 words, including references.

Replication studies

Replication studies are empirical studies motivated by a previously published study (not necessarily published in the IJLCR). They reproduce and/or extend the methodology proposed in an initial study of significant impact and of credible methodological rigour within its domain of research. They aim to verify findings and/or examine the generalizability of the insights obtained in earlier learner corpus studies.

The background and motivation sections may be shorter compared to research articles but should clarify why there is a need for replicating the selected study.

Length requirement: between 7,000 and 10,000 words, including references.

Systematic reviews

Systematic review articles are empirical in nature, and cover analyses of research published in the field. Manuscripts submitted to this category can be of many different types, for example methodological syntheses/systematic reviews of study quality in LCR, or meta analyses of a particular domain of LCR.

Length requirement: between 7,000 and 10,000 words, including references.

Corpus reports

Corpus reports present a detailed description of new learner corpora (i.e. corpus design, collection, transcription, annotation and distribution). Such reports should focus on learner corpora that are original in their design and/or construction, and that are made available to the research community (e.g. via online data repositories) and that have high potential for reuse by the research community. Authors are strongly encouraged to follow open science and FAIR principles by providing clear documentation, metadata, and access conditions that facilitate reuse.

Length requirement: between 4,000 and 7,500 words, including references.

Materials & methods reports

Materials and methods reports provide details about methods and/or protocols developed and materials used during a research cycle (e.g. corpus annotation schemes, learner questionnaires). The materials described must be accessible to the research community, with clearly stated access conditions. Authors are encouraged to share these resources via repositories and to provide sufficient documentation to facilitate transparency and reuse. Researchers can co-submit their report to IJLCR together with the original research article.

Length requirement: between 4,000 and 7,500 words, including references.

Software reports

Software reports present a detailed description of a new software tool or code and how it can be used to compile, annotate and/or analyze learner corpus data. Software reports should focus on tools that offer researchers new ways to compile, annotate, and/or analyse a learner corpus and that are freely available to the research community. Authors should indicate how the software can be obtained or accessed, under what conditions, and provide adequate documentation to support its use and reproducibility. Open-source distribution is encouraged but not required provided that the tool itself can be accessed and meaningfully used for research purposes.

Length requirement: between 4,000 and 7,500 words, including references.

Shared task reports

Shared task reports present the cumulative results of shared tasks organized to promote research advancement by solving a problem of general interest to the community (e.g. error identification and correction, native language identification) on the basis of learner corpus data.

Length requirement: between 7,000 and 10,000 words, including references.

Position papers

Position papers are not based on original empirical research; instead, they are shorter papers motivated by current theoretical, methodological and/or pedagogical issues that are of general interest to the community. Position papers should present a reasoned, evidence-based stance on a specific topic. We also welcome responses to position papers.

Length requirement: between 2,500 and 7,500 words, including references.

2. Language

Contributions should be in English and have to be carefully proofread (preferably by an expert) prior to submission. Spelling should be British English or American English and should be consistent throughout the paper.

3. Preparing your manuscript for submission

Ethics

John Benjamins journals are committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics and to supporting ethical research practices. Authors and reviewers are kindly requested to read this Ethics Statement.

Style requirements

IJLCR does not require manuscripts to conform to the full stylesheet until acceptance, although authors are asked to include DOIs for all references at first submission. Manuscripts accepted for publication have to conform to the IJLCR stylesheet. In general, the journal adheres to the recommendations of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7th edition.

AI policy

IJLCR follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adheres to the Guidelines on the Responsible Use of Generative AI in Research developed by the European Research Area Forum. These guidelines emphasize transparency, accountability, and human responsibility in the use of generative artificial intelligence in the research process.

Please consult Benjamins’ guidance on (the declaration of) the use of Artificial Intelligence for further recommendations.

Authors are required to ensure that:

• the use of AI tools does not introduce inaccuracies, fabricated references, or plagiarism;
• confidential or copyrighted material is not uploaded into AI systems without permission;
• the intellectual contribution of the authors remains primary.

Given the nature of research published in IJLCR, authors should also ensure that:

• generative AI tools are not used to fabricate learner data, linguistic examples, or corpus material presented as empirical evidence;
• any use of AI tools in data processing, annotation, or analysis is transparently documented in the Method section.

An AI Disclosure Statement is required for all submissions, whether or not generative AI tools were used (see below).

Disclosure statements required at first submission

Data Availability Statement

A Data Availability Statement is mandatory for all submissions and must be included at the time of submission. This statement informs readers where the data supporting the findings can be found, how they can be accessed, and under what conditions they may be used. Templates are available online (e.g. via Taylor & Francis Author Services or KU Leuven Research Data Management pages).

In addition, when authors reuse existing learner corpora or datasets, these must be formally cited in the reference list, in accordance with the Data Citation Principles developed by FORCE11 (see below).

These two practices are complementary: the Data Availability Statement ensures transparency about data access, while data citation ensures proper attribution, traceability, and recognition of datasets as scholarly outputs.

AI use and AI Use Disclosure Statement

An AI Disclosure Statement is mandatory for all submissions. Authors must include this statement at the time of submission, regardless of whether generative AI tools were used in the preparation of the manuscript.

The use of AI tools for simple proofreading and copy-editing does not have to be declared in this statement.

The AI Disclosure Statement should appear at the end of the article (together with the acknowledgements and data availability statement). If generative AI tools were used, authors must clearly specify which tool(s) were used, including the name, version, and date, and describe how they contributed to the preparation of the manuscript and affected the research process. If no generative AI tools were used, authors must explicitly state this.

Please consider the following example for the statement(s): "The author(s) incorporated [NAME TOOL / SERVICE, version] into their research/writing workflow for [REASON]. Following this assistance, the author(s) performed thorough quality control and content revision as needed, maintaining full responsibility for all aspects of the published article."

Where relevant, and in line with open research principles, authors should also make available the input (prompts) and output associated with the use of generative AI tools.

AI tools that have contributed to the research or the preparation of the manuscript should also be properly referenced when appropriate. Authors are requested to follow the citation guidelines provided by the American Psychological Association (APA) for this purpose, particularly when AI-generated content is discussed or analyzed in the manuscript.

Anonymization and manuscript blinding

This journal applies third-person anonymization. That is, when referring to one’s own previous work, authors should cite their work as if citing the work of others. However, the wording should not indicate in any way that the author also authored the previous work: For example, rather than “In our previous work (Paquot & Plonsky, 2017), we found….”, the reference should read “Paquot & Plonsky (2017) found…" This includes published work as well as work that is in press or in FirstView.

Citing available corpora/datasets

IJLCR endorses the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles and is implementing a mandatory data citation policy. When citing or making claims based on available corpora (or other datasets), authors must refer to the corpus/data at the relevant place in the manuscript text and in addition provide a formal citation in the reference list. See the Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics for more info.

Reporting corpus research findings

Manuscripts considered for publication will, among other things, be reviewed for their rigorous presentation and analysis of corpus data, and expert use of appropriate research methods.In addition to the latest edition of the APA publication manual, authors are encouraged to consult Gries & Paquot (2020) for specific recommendations for how to write about the data and methods used and how to report the results of a corpus linguistic study.

Gries, S. Th. & M. Paquot (2020). Writing up a corpus-linguistic paper. In M. Paquot & S. Th. Gries (eds.). Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Berlin & New York: Springer, 647-659. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46216-1_26 (copy of the article available upon request from the editors)

If the study also includes experimental, quasi-experimental, survey/questionnaire, and other primary research approaches that rely on the quantification of observations, authors are also referred to:

Norris, J. M., Plonsky, L., Ross, S. J., & Schoonen, R. (2015). Guidelines for reporting quantitative methods and results in primary research. Language Learning, 65(2), 470–476. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12104

4. Rights and Permissions

Authors must ensure that they have permission to use any third-party material in their contribution; the permission should include perpetual (not time-limited) world-wide distribution in print and electronic format.

For information on authors' rights, please consult the rights information page.

5. Open Access

Articles accepted for this journal can be made Open Access; for more information consult the publishers’ Open Access information page.

For information about permission to post a version of your article online or in an institutional repository ('green' open access or self-archiving), please consult the rights information page.

If authors do not wish for the article to be made available Open Access, there is no fee for the authors to publish in this journal.

6. Open Science badges

This journal encourages Open Science practices and participates in the Centre for Open Science badges. If you want your submission to qualify for any COS badges, read this information before submitting.