Manuskript guidelines
You can submit your manuscript to the editorial office: dds@uni-bielefeld.de.
Please consider the following guidelines when submitting a manuscript. We also provide you with a Word document template. Please compare your manuscript with our Word sample. The editorial office reserves the right to return texts for additional editing that do not comply with the formal requirements.

When preparing your manuscript, please make sure to use appropriate language regarding the journal’s target groups (see “Aims & Scope”). Please explain terms, models, theories, and concepts related to specific contexts, and present methodological considerations and empirical results in a way that is easy to comprehend. If possible, please refrain from presenting results without commentary, and instead focus on the interpretation and significance of the results with regard to our readers’ fields of practice.

Types of papers
The DDS distinguishes different types of papers:
Contributions in the sense of classic empirical or theoretical papers, reports, and contributions for discussion. For focus issues, authors are usually invited to write a contribution by the editorial board. For each of these types of papers, a free submission of manuscripts outside of a focus issue is also possible. Details on the respective types of papers and their maximum length (number of characters and number of pages) can be found in our Beschreibung der Textsorten. Reviews are requested by the editorial office in exceptional cases. Unsolicited reviews will not be considered.

Free submissions and review process
In case of a free submission, please make sure to look at our information on our different types of papers (see above) and let us know which type your manuscript is assigned to. If it is a freely submitted manuscript for the section "Further contributions", the text will be externally reviewed after a positive internal editorial review. If it is a freely submitted report or a contribution for discussion, it will be reviewed internally by the editorial board. In both cases, the author will receive a message from the editorial board after the review stating whether the manuscript has been accepted, including suggestions for revision if necessary, or whether it has been rejected.

Freely submitted contributions that are not assigned to a focus issue are published in the "Online First" section after successful review and possible revision until they are assigned to the "Other Contributions" section in a regular print and online issue.