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Research article

Research article: with a maximum of 8,000 words (including tables, references, figure captions and endnotes) and 12 images. Research articles longer than 8000 words will be accepted on a very exceptional basis, and only if the Editors consider that the topic requires the extension.

Double-blind peer review

Please note that Built Heritage operates double-blinded peer review. The following information should not be included in the main manuscript file, but should instead be uploaded as part of the cover letter:

  • Title page
  • Competing interests
  • Authors’ contributions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Authors’ information

Title Page

  • present a title
  • list the full names, titles, academic affiliations, detailed institutional addresses, and email addresses for all authors

if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author and include the names of the individual members of the Group in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below

  • indicate the corresponding author
  • include Declarations

please see below for details on the information to be included in Declarations.

download the title page template

Preparing your manuscript

Title

As per our journal style, besides the first letter of the first word, article titles should not include capitalised letters unless these are proper nouns/acronyms.

Abstract

The abstract should briefly summarize the aim, findings or purpose of the article. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. 

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Introduction

The Introduction section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study was necessary. It will introduce the readers to the research methods used and the research questions posed.

Main Text

The main text is to be developed and arranged according to the authors’ best criteria and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings in different levels (less than 4 levels). The authors should elaborate a literature review at the start of the text body. The authors should consider to incorporate the the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.

Discussion (optional, or to be combined with the Conclusions as a ‘Discussion and Conclusions’ section)

For research articles this section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study.

Conclusions

This section should state clearly the main conclusions, answering the research questions introduced in the ‘Introduction’ section. Authors should also provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study to the field in light of the conclusions.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Availability of data and materials
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgements

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
  • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

SpringerOpen  also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number]

If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

For more information please email our Research Data Team.

Competing interests

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

Please use the authors’ initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

Funding

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

Authors' contributions

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Footnotes

Footnotes should be designated within the text using a superscript number. It is not allowed to use footnotes for references/citations.

References

Examples of the Chicago reference style are shown below. 

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

​​​​​​​Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Alber, John, Daniel C O'Connell, and Sabine Kowal. 2002. Personal perspective in TV interviews. Pragmatics 12: 257-271.

Article by DOI (with page numbers)

Slifka, MK, and JL Whitton. 2000. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Journal of Molecular Medicine 78:74-80. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article by DOI (before issue publication and without page numbers)

Suleiman, Camelia, Daniel C O'Connell, and Sabine Kowal. 2002. 'If you and I, if we, in this later day, lose that sacred fire...': Perspective in political interviews. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. doi: 10.1023/A:1015592129296.

Article in electronic journal by DOI (no paginated version)

Slifka, MK, and JL Whitton. 2000. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Online Journal of Molecular Medicine. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Complete book

Cameron, Deborah. 1985. Feminism and linguistic theory. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Cameron, Deborah. 1997. Theoretical debates in feminist linguistics: Questions of sex and gender. In Gender and discourse, ed. Ruth Wodak, 99-119. London: Sage Publications.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito, Yukio, and Hyuga Hiroyuki. 2007. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Topics in Current Chemistry. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Complete book, also showing a translated edition [Either edition may be listed first.]

Adorno, TW. 1966. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. English edition: Adorno, TW 1973. Negative Dialectics (trans: Ashton, EB). London: Routledge.

Online document

Frisch, Mathias. 2007. Does a low-entropy constraint prevent us from influencing the past? PhilSci archive. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003390. Accessed 26 June 2007.

Online database

German emigrants database. 1998. Historisches Museum Bremerhaven. http://www.deutsche-auswanderer-datenbank.de. Accessed 21 June 2007.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe, John. 2006. Title of supplementary material. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2007.

FTP site

Doe, J. 1999. Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt. Accessed 12 Nov 2006.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre. 2006. The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org. Accessed 20 Feb 2007

General formatting information

Manuscripts must be written in concise English. For help on scientific writing, or preparing your manuscript in English, please see Springer's Author Academy.

Quick points:

  • Use double line spacing
  • Include line and page numbering
  • Use SI units: Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text, otherwise they will be lost during conversion to PDF
  • Do not use page breaks in your manuscript

File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

  • Microsoft word (DOC, DOCX)
  • Rich text format (RTF)

Please note: editable files are required for processing in production. If your manuscript contains any non-editable files (such as PDFs) you will be required to re-submit an editable file if your manuscript is accepted.

For more information, see 'Preparing figures' below.


Style and language

For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript you need to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. If you need help with writing in English you should consider:

  • Visiting the English language tutorial which covers the common mistakes when writing in English.
  • Asking a colleague who is a native English speaker to review your manuscript for clarity.
  • Using a professional language editing service where editors will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and identify problems that require your review. Two such services are provided by our affiliates Nature Research Editing Service and American Journal Experts. SpringerOpen authors are entitled to a 10% discount on their first submission to either of these services. To claim 10% off English editing from Nature Research Editing Service, click here. To claim 10% off American Journal Experts, click here.

Please note that the use of a language editing service is not a requirement for publication in Built Heritage and does not imply or guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted.


Data and materials

For all journals, SpringerOpen strongly encourages all datasets on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely to be either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main paper or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spread sheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. Please see the list of recommended repositories in our editorial policies.

For some journals, deposition of the data on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely is an absolute requirement. Please check the Instructions for Authors for the relevant journal and article type for journal specific policies.

For all manuscripts, information about data availability should be detailed in an ‘Availability of data and materials’ section. For more information on the content of this section, please see the Declarations section of the relevant journal’s Instruction for Authors. For more information on SpringerOpen's policies on data availability, please see our editorial policies.


Formatting the 'Availability of data and materials' section of your manuscript

The following format for the 'Availability of data and materials section of your manuscript should be used:

"The dataset(s) supporting the conclusions of this article is(are) available in the [repository name] repository, [unique persistent identifier and hyperlink to dataset(s) in http:// format]."

The following format is required when data are included as additional files:

"The dataset(s) supporting the conclusions of this article is(are) included within the article (and its additional file(s))."

For databases, this section should state the web/ftp address at which the database is available and any restrictions to its use by non-academics.

For software, this section should include:

  • Project name: e.g. My bioinformatics project
  • Project home page: e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mged
  • Archived version: DOI or unique identifier of archived software or code in repository (e.g. enodo)
  • Operating system(s): e.g. Platform independent
  • Programming language: e.g. Java
  • Other requirements: e.g. Java 1.3.1 or higher, Tomcat 4.0 or higher
  • License: e.g. GNU GPL, FreeBSD etc.
  • Any restrictions to use by non-academics: e.g. licence needed

Information on available repositories for other types of scientific data, including clinical data, can be found in our editorial policies.

References

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.

What should be cited?

Only articles, clinical trial registration records and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited.

Unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text and referred to as "unpublished observations" or "personal communications" giving the names of the involved researchers. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited colleagues is the responsibility of the author. Either footnotes or endnotes are permitted. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE.

Any in press articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.

Preparing figures

We accept figures in TIFF, EPS, PS, PDF, JPG and PNG format. For vector graphics, EPS is the preferred format. For bitmapped graphics, TIFF is the preferred format. The following resolutions are optimal: line figures should be higher than 300 dpi; photographs should be higher than 250 dpi; and screen dumps can be left as is. Colour figures can be submitted in the RGB colour system. If there are captions imbedded in the figure, please provide the original figure without imbedded texts as well. Font-related problems can be avoided by using standard fonts such as Times Roman, Courier and Helvetica. Figures should be saved in separate files.

When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.

Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.Tables should NOT be submitted as figures but should be included in the main manuscript file.Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in this order.Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation. Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

If you have any questions or are experiencing a problem with figures, please contact the customer service team:

Submission enquiries: marco.bonete@biomedcentral.com
General enquiries: info@springeropen.com

Preparing tables

When preparing tables, please follow the formatting instructions below.

  • Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, Table 2 etc.).
  • Tables less than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed in the appropriate location within the manuscript.
  • Tables larger than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed at the end of the document text file. Please cite and indicate where the table should appear at the relevant location in the text file so that the table can be added in the correct place during production.
  • Larger datasets, or tables too wide for A4 or Letter landscape page can be uploaded as additional files. Please see [below] for more information.
  • Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls ) or comma separated values (.csv). Please use the standard file extensions.
  • Table titles (max 15 words) should be included above the table, and legends (max 300 words) should be included underneath the table.
  • Tables should not be embedded as figures or spreadsheet files, but should be formatted using ‘Table object’ function in your word processing program.
  • Color and shading may not be used. Parts of the table can be highlighted using superscript, numbering, lettering, symbols or bold text, the meaning of which should be explained in a table legend.
  • Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values.


If you have any questions or are experiencing a problem with tables, please contact the customer service team:

Submission enquiries: marco.bonete@biomedcentral.com
General enquiries: info@springeropen.com

Preparing additional files

As the length and quantity of data is not restricted for many article types, authors can provide datasets, tables, movies, or other information as additional files.

All Additional files will be published along with the accepted article. Do not include files such as patient consent forms, certificates of language editing, or revised versions of the main manuscript document with tracked changes. Such files, if requested, should be sent by email to the journal’s editorial email address, quoting the manuscript reference number.

Results that would otherwise be indicated as "data not shown" should be included as additional files. Since many web links and URLs rapidly become broken, SpringerOpen requires that supporting data are included as additional files, or deposited in a recognized repository. Please do not link to data on a personal/departmental website. Do not include any individual participant details. The maximum file size for additional files is 20 MB each, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. Each additional file should be cited in sequence within the main body of text.

Submit manuscript

Affiliated with

The Journal is financially supported by Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences

ISSN: 2096-3041 (Print)
The print version is owned and produced by Tongji University 

Abstract and indexing coverage

  • Chinese Science Citation Database
  • CNKI
  • Dimensions 
  • DOAJ
  • EBSCO Discovery Service
  • Google Scholar
  • Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China 
  • Naver 
  • OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Primo
  • ProQuest-ExLibris Summon
  • Scopus 



Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    1.2 - Citescore

    0.640 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.263 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    26 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    190 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    204,535 downloads
    41 Altmetric mentions 

Call for papers

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Industrial heritage sites and mega-events: An opportunity for urban redevelopment and social change?
Guest Editors: Florence Graezer Bideau, College of Humanities and Section of Architecture, EPFL, Switzerland; Anne-Marie Broudehoux, École du Design, UQAM, Canada                                                 

Historical Monuments for Countryside Conservation in Hong Kong and Its Surrounding Areas
Guest Editors: Sidney Cheung, Dept. of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China; Thomas Chung, School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Global Climate Change and Built Heritage
Guest Editors: Dr Chris J. Whitman, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, UK; Lui Tam, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, UK; Prof Oriel Prizeman, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, UK

Peer Review Policy for Article Collections
All submissions to following collections have undergone rigorous peer review.