Information For Readers

The Department of Economic Law of the Universidad Externado de Colombia has as one of its objectives to encourage the development of research relevant to the national and international environments concerning the intersection that exists between law and economy.

Bearing in mind the importance of academic work and the Department’s research on various topics, namely, the Economic Analysis of Law, Competition and Consumer Law, Financial and Stock Exchange Law, Public Services, International Economic Law, among others, the Department publishes semiannually Con-Texto Journal: Revista de Derecho y Economía, which has as its scope and objective: to share and disseminate various academic discussions on topics of law and economics, through the written contributions of national and international authors.

Con-Texto Journal is aimed at the academic public in general, but specifically to university students and researchers, as well as professionals in different areas of knowledge interested in discussions on economic law.

The Journal’s language is Spanish, but texts in English and Portuguese are accepted as well.

The papers submitted by the authors for consideration will be subject to the following:

Rules, publishing standards and editorial procedures

The text will be sent via email in Word format at the Journal’s e-mail: contexto@uexternado.edu.co, with a copy to maria.ortiz@uexternado.edu.co. Besides the text, the corresponding license of use must be attached according to the format provided by the Journal and a summary resumé of the author or authors, the latter for reference purposes within the publication.

With the submission of the text, it is understood that the author(s) (i) agree with the editorial policies of the Con-Texto Journal; (ii) affirm that the submitted text is unpublished; (iii) that they are committed to the international ethical standards of scientific publication detailed below; (iv) that the submitted text is not in the process of being evaluated in another journal or any other publication, otherwise, they shall inform the Journal accordingly.

Preliminary review: Once the text has been received, the Journal’s editors will preliminary evaluate the paper to verify its quality and relevance within the Journal’s subjects. Likewise, the compliance with the rules of style, format and citation set out below will be verified preliminary. If the document does not comply with these requirements, it will be sent back to the author(s) within a period of not more than one month.

Peer review by evaluators: After the preliminary review, the paper will be sent by the Journal to two external evaluators or anonymous reviewers who will independently issue their own opinion on the text. Each one will assess the quality and scientific rigor of the text. This evaluation qualitatively and quantitatively analyses the following aspects: (i) originality, (ii) relevance, (iii) actuality, (iv) argumentation, and (v) methodology used in the paper. While the Journal pursues an expeditious evaluation process, in general, this usually takes between two and no more than six months.

The Journal guarantees the anonymity of the texts sent to the reviewers, as well as the anonymity of the reviewers with respect to the authors. This assures that the arbitrators will be professional experts without conflict of interest with the authors and their works. The Journal recognizes that arbitrators know and commit to comply with the ethical standards of research and scientific publication indicated below, in particular, but not only, commitments regarding the management of plagiarism, compliance with the external peer review process established by the journal and the confidentiality of the evaluation.

The result of each evaluation either could be (i) Accepting the text without modifications, (ii) Accepting with conditions, (iii) Not considering it for the next edition of the journal, or (iv) Rejecting the text. Each evaluation will be informed to the corresponding authors. If there are substantial differences between the evaluations of the two reviewers, the Journal will send the text to a third arbiter to resolve such conflict. In the event that the text is accepted for publishing with conditions, the editors shall set a reasonable period of time for the author to make the modifications required by the referees. Once the adjusted text is returned to the Journal, the Editorial Committee will issue a final concept about the publication of the paper.

Notwithstanding the above, the paper may be rejected at any stage of the editorial and publishing process in the following cases: (i) when serious problems of writing and grammar are detected, (ii) when the author fails to comply with the Journal’s editorial policies these guideline indications or the license of use, (iii) when there is evidence of plagiarism including autoplagium, the latter is defined as "a type of plagiarism in which the author republishes a work in its entirety or reuses parts of a previously written text while writing a new work" (Turnitin, 2016)

Style, format and citation requirements

  • The paper must be presented in Arial Narrow number 12, space and a half. A minimum of 3,000 words and a maximum of 15,000 including footnotes, bibliography and annexes. For text formatting purposes, citations, references, footnotes and bibliography, the Journal requires compliance with the American Psychological Association (APA) standard.
  • The paper should contain a title, an abstract (maximum 10 to 15 lines) and keywords (maximum 5 words) that altogether identify and highlight the main ideas of the paper. All these will be in the original language of the paper and should appear in English as well.
  • The paper should contain a guiding structure resulting from analysis and research on legal and economic aspects such as: introduction, approach and development of the topic, conclusions and bibliography. Added to the references and bibliographic citations within the document.

The presentation, evaluation and publishing in the Journal does not generate any economic cost for the author(s).

The Journal is committed to international ethical standards of scientific publication. In particular, the Journal requires and demands authors and evaluators commitment to the guidelines of the "Singapore Declaration on Integrity in Research" given at the 2nd World Conference on Integrity in Research, 21 July 2010, available in its original version in https://wcrif.org/guidance/singapore-statement or in its translated version in Spanish in https://wcrif.org/documents/300-ss-spanish/file

Through license of use acceptance with the paper’s submission, the author authorizes the edition, publishing, reproduction, distribution and public communication of the work of his authorship, both print or electronic media for exclusively scientific, cultural, broadcast and non-profit purposes. The author retains the moral copyright and grants the Journal the right to be the first place to publish the work, which is be licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial ShareAlike. Reproduction in other print or electronic media must include an acknowledgement of the authorship of the work and its initial publication in the Journal. Authors may disclose their work in any repository or website. The papers published in the Journal will be sent to the different databases and indexing systems for the diffusion of their content. These papers are also available open access on the website: https://revistas.uexternado.edu.co/index.php/contexto and in the databases of Cengage Learning, Proquest, Ebsco, Clase, Dotec, Repec, Latam-Studies, HeinOnline, SSRN and the Open Journal System.