About the Journal
Focus and Scope
"Hoplos" is the student journal of the Postgraduate Program in Strategic Studies of Defense and Security (PPGEST) linked to the Strategic Studies Institute (INEST) of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). It is a biannual journal constituted as a plural space for analysis and discussion on topics that permeate Strategic Studies, International Relations, and Political Science. Receiving contributions in a continuous flow system, the journal publishes scientific articles and book reviews. Its main goal is to contribute to students' and researches' pubications in these areas. Received texts are analyzed in blind review system and published upon recommendation of the Editorial Board.
Journal Evaluation Process
Hoplos's evaluation process has two stages: Evaluation of norms by the Editor-in-chief and evaluation of the work by the pairs.
After an article is submitted in the system, the Editor-in-chief evaluates if the file has the following criteria: identification, scope, originality, titration, and words.
Identification: authors are expected to omit their identity, or any identification in their files;
Scope: the file is expected to be aligned with the journal's areas of interest: Strategic Studies and International Relations;
Originality: the article is expected to have unpublished and original studies within the journal's areas of interest;
Titration: the authors are expected to have a minimum of undergraduate degree;
Words: the article is expected to meet a minimum and maximum of words: between 5.000 to 7.000, excluding bibliographic references.
After certifying that the above criteria have been met, the Executive-editor appoints two of the peer reviewers who are most aligned with the article's theme.
Peers Review Process
The peers review process is made by two reviewers, external to the Journal's Editorial Board.
To ensure the integrity of the double blind peer review process, precautions must be taken to not reveal the author's and reviewer's identities. That requires that authors, editors and reviewers take these precautions towards texts and documents:
- Authors must exclude from the text: names, replacing with "author" and the year in references and footnotes, instead of author names, article title, etc.
- In Microsoft Office's documents, the author's identification must be removed from the document's properties (i.e.: File > Save as > Tools (pr Options) > Security Options > Remove personal information from file > Ok > Save).
- PDF files also need to have the authors' names removed (on the main menu on Adobe).
The journal uses Copy Spider to check for plagiarism in texts evaluated by Hoplos, which may receive the following feedback:
Ask for changes: the document is sent back to the author to check notes and informations, and to send a new version that will, eventually, go through a second review;
Ask for a resend: the author should send a new version of the file, which will necessarily go through a second review;
Accept submission: the author is informed about the acceptance, and the text is directly sent to the writing editors and layout editor to be published;
Reject submission: the author is informed about the rejection and the text goes to storage.
After an article is accepted, it also goes through proofreading, grammar and ABNT norms correction, by our text editors. Then the article is scheduled for publication on the following number.
Frequency
Biannual
Open Access Policy
This journal offers free open access to its material, in accordance to the principle of global democratization of the access to knowledge.
We would like to reassure that Hoplos does not charge for the processes of submission, editing and reviewing.
History
'Hoplos' comes from the greek word 'hoplon' (ὅπλον, plural: hopla ὅπλα), which was the shield used by the well known 'hoplites' (ὁ πλίτης hoplitēs, plural: ὁ πλῖται hoplitai). The hoplites were citizen-soldiers - not professional, usually - from the old greek city-states infantry, which had adopted the famous phalanx formation, more effective in war when outnumbered by the adversary. In this sense, by paying tribute to the hoplites and the hoplon, we highlight the choice for a weapon that represents protection, defense and security in face of combats, and not aggressive, offensive weapon. Just like this weapon characterized the combatant before it, Hoplos was born to defend critical thinking and to publish diverse, heterogeneous debates in the area of Political Science, Strategic Studies and International Relations.
