• Publication Criteria
• General Requirements for the Formatting of the Manuscript
• Technical Requirements for Formatting the Manuscript
• References

The Scientific Publishing Department of RSUTS (RSUTS SPD) accepts for publication materials – scientific articles, communications, reviews, and (commissioned) book reviews – on topical issues in the field of service and tourism, to be published in the scientific journals “Service and Tourism: Current Challenges”, “Service in Russia and Abroad”, and “Service plus”. All manuscripts submitted to the editorial office must comply with the basic formatting requirements for journals included in the HAC list and with GOST R 7.0.110-2025.

Articles are peer‑reviewed and checked for plagiarism (the required originality rate of the author’s text is at least 90%). The editorial board does not necessarily agree with the opinions and statements expressed by the authors of publications. Nevertheless, we provide an opportunity for discussion in the pages of our journals. Any use of materials or citation of articles published in the journals issued by the RSUTS SPD must include appropriate references.

Publication Criteria

1. Materials submitted for publication in the scientific journals published by the RSUTS SPD must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
2. By submitting a manuscript to the RSUTS SPD, authors undertake to strictly comply with all moral and ethical norms and requirements that form the basis of the Editorial Policy. In entering into relations with the RSUTS SPD and the journal editorial boards, authors automatically accept all components, norms, and provisions of the Policy and the Offer Agreement.
3. Along with the manuscript, authors must submit to the editorial office a completed application form in the prescribed format (if the article has several co‑authors, a separate application must be submitted for each co‑author).
4. A certificate (report) on the originality of the manuscript text, obtained from a plagiarism detection system, must be provided as a separate file. This should be in the form of a PDF report or a screenshot showing the verification results. The full report MUST be generated using search modules such as “RSL Collection”, “eLibrary Collection”, “Ring of Universities Collection”, etc. Legal and moral responsibility for the authenticity of the certificate and the originality of the text rests with the authors.
5. The manuscript must be submitted to the editorial office as an electronic file in Word, OpenOffice, or RTF format.
6. The editorial board does not notify authors about editorial changes or abridgements made to the manuscript that do not affect substantive content.
7. Based on the recommendations of external independent reviewers, the author may be required to revise the article and address any comments or shortcomings. Revised manuscripts are sent for a second round of peer review.
8. The final decision to approve or reject the submitted material is made by the editorial board based on the recommendations of external independent reviewers and is final. The editorial board will notify authors by email in the event of a negative review or if reviewers have recommended revisions. 
9. Authors retain unrestricted copyright to their publications. Authors grant the Scientific Publishing Department of RSUTS the right of first publication of the article in the relevant scientific journal, which is automatically licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, allowing others to distribute the work provided that references to the authors and the original publication in this journal are retained.

General Requirements for the Formatting of the Manuscript  

Total length of the manuscript: at least 10 printed A4 pages, including the Russian and English abstracts and the reference list.

1. UDC index – Universal Decimal Classification index (a librarian can help determine the correct index).

2. Full surname, first name, and patronymic (if applicable) of the author(s). The surname is given in ALL CAPS.

3. Affiliation of the author(s) – information provided in the following order: the institution where the author works (without legal abbreviations such as “FGBOU VO”, only the full name), followed by the city and country in parentheses; academic degree, academic title; e‑mail: name@pochta.ru. If the article has two or more co‑authors, the above information is provided for each co‑author.

4. Title of the article – concise, preferably a single sentence that clearly indicates the object, subject, and problem area of the article. It is written in ALL CAPS without abbreviations. Any explanatory (or clarifying) part of the title placed in parentheses may be given in lower case if it is lengthy.

5. Abstract – no less than 180 and no more than 220 words. Underlining or bold type for words in the abstract is not permitted; no paragraph indentation. The abstract should be informative (avoiding general words and phrases), substantive (reflecting the main content of the article and the research results), and internally structured in accordance with the logic of the article itself, but without repeating sentences verbatim. The abstract is an independent scholarly text from which the reader should understand the topic of the article and its value to the academic community (i.e., the author’s contribution and the main novelty of the research).

After the abstract, on a separate line beginning with “Acknowledgements.” or “Funding.”, information about grant support for the publication may be provided.

6. Keywords – on a separate line (5–10 keywords or phrases). These are not a list of the most frequent words in the article, but rather a list (most often phrases) that gives a general idea of the article’s content and makes it easily discoverable by search engines.

7. Text of the article. It is recommended to highlight the structural parts of the article: introduction, review of publications on the research problem, methods and methodology, discussion, thematic subsections / research results, conclusion / findings. The decision to highlight these structural parts (all or some of them) remains with the author, but in international publications, doing so is considered a sign of good practice for any serious scholarly work. Section headings should be in bold.

8. Reference list. Specific formatting instructions for the reference list are provided below. In the text of the article, the sequential number of the reference according to the numbering in the list is indicated in square brackets. Each cited source must have at least one corresponding reference in the text.

9. For articles prepared for publication in Russian, the following must be provided in English: author(s) details, affiliation, article title, abstract, and keywords, as well as an additional “References” list (Russian‑language sources are given simultaneously in transliterated and translated form). Specific formatting instructions for the “References” list are provided below.

10. For articles prepared for publication in English, the following must be provided in Russian: author(s) details, affiliation, article title, abstract, and keywords. The reference list is provided once, in the “References” format (specific formatting instructions are provided below).

Technical Requirements for Formatting the Manuscript

1. The text should be typed using Calibri (preferred) or Times New Roman font, font size 14 pt, line spacing 1 (or font size 12 pt, line spacing 1.5), with a standard paragraph indent of 1 cm. The text should be set without hyphenation.

2. Distinguish between the em dash (—) and hyphen (-) and use them correctly.

3. Complex formulas should be created only in formula editors such as MathType or EquationEditor.

4. Terms, definitions, and units of physical quantities must comply with current national or international standards.

5. Technical instructions for formatting the reference list and the “References” list are provided below.

6.The article may contain tables; the font size in tables may be 10 pt. Vertical orientation of the table and its data is preferred. A table may occupy the full width of the page, including landscape orientation. All tables must have their own titles, placed above the table after its sequential number. The title should clearly indicate the information and the objects/territories/phenomena to which the table refers. If the article is in Russian, the table title must be translated into English.

7. Illustrations/figures should be created in graphic editors as color graphic files with a resolution of at least 300 dpi and embedded in the text of the manuscript. Vertical orientation of figures is preferred. A figure may occupy the full width of the page, including landscape orientation. Each figure must have its own title, placed below the figure after its sequential number. The title should clearly indicate the information and the objects/territories/phenomena to which the figure refers. If necessary, legends and textual information related to the content of the figure may be placed in the caption (as part of the figure title) rather than within the figure itself. If the article is in Russian, the caption must be translated into English and placed below the Russian caption.

8. In figure titles, the abbreviations “Рис.” and “Fig.” are used. Table titles do not use abbreviations – “Таблица” and “Table”. Tables and figures are numbered consecutively, separately for figures and tables. An em dash is placed between the number and the title. The total number of tables and figures in an article is not limited, but should be reasonable. If any figures or tables are taken from other sources, references to the source must be provided.

9. It is not recommended to repeat verbatim in the text the titles of tables and figures, nor to recount the numbers and data presented in them. Listing the data, indicators, parameters, and values shown does not constitute an analysis of a chart or table. If the author uses specific statistical data from a source and creates a chart based on them, this does not represent scientific novelty or statistical analysis, nor does it count as the author’s own findings. Such illustrations may be included only in exceptional cases, when the original statistical information is difficult to access, cannot be directly hyperlinked, and is of fundamental importance for subsequent calculations, conclusions, and generalizations. From a scientific perspective, it is considered unethical to duplicate in the text statistical tables and the charts based on them.

10. Footnotes may be used in the text. These are placed at the bottom of the page (in Word, use “References – Insert Footnote” or the shortcut Alt+Ctrl+F). A separate sequential numbering system is used for footnotes, which is applied automatically when using the footnote insertion function. Footnotes may contain explanatory text, comments, or minor supplementary information. Sources that are not of a scholarly research nature (e.g., normative and legal documents, statistical data/compilations, reference information, reports of international organizations and institutions, archival documents, unpublished materials, links to non‑scholarly, popular science, analytical, or other publications, interviews with experts, articles from online encyclopedias, etc.) should also be placed in footnotes.

References 

The journals “Service and Tourism: Current Challenges”, “Service in Russia and Abroad”, and “Service plus” are included and indexed in a number of international citation databases. One of the most important requirements of international scientific information aggregators is the impeccable formatting of bibliographic sources accompanying articles. Therefore, providing bibliographic references as accurately, completely, and correctly as possible is one of the most important requirements that the editorial boards of our journals impose on authors’ manuscripts. To help authors properly prepare the reference lists for their articles, the following methodological recommendations have been developed.

We kindly ask authors to pay close attention to the preparation of the reference lists for their manuscripts and to use the recommendations provided for this purpose.

General Principles for Formatting the Reference List and Citations in the Manuscript

1. The article must be accompanied by two lists of sources used: a “Reference List” (formatted according to GOST standards) and a “References” list (formatted according to APA style). Specific formatting instructions are provided below.

2. The number of sources for a scientific article should be at least 10 items; around 20 is optimal. It should be borne in mind that the reference list is an indicator of the authors’ erudition and their familiarity with current research in a given field of knowledge.

3. The “Reference List” is presented in alphabetical order: first, publications in Cyrillic alphabets are listed in the order of the standard Cyrillic alphabet; then publications in Latin alphabets are listed according to the same principle. The numbering of sources is consecutive, from the first Cyrillic entry to the last Latin entry (roughly from Cyrillic A to Latin Z).

4. The reference list should include citations to publications with clearly identified authors or editors – i.e., scientific articles (the highest priority type of information source for citations in a scientific article), monographs, dissertations, and dissertation abstracts; in cases of extreme necessity, encyclopedia articles may be included if they have an author or authors.

5. The reference list may not include any sources that are not of a scholarly research nature (e.g., normative and legal documents, statistical data/compilations, reference information, reports of international organizations and institutions, archival documents, unpublished materials, internet links to non‑scholarly, popular science, analytical, or other publications, interviews with experts, articles from online encyclopedias, etc.), as these typically do not contain information about authors or editors. However, such sources may be cited in footnotes (in Word, use “References – Insert Footnote” or the shortcut Alt+Ctrl+F).

6. In a scientific article, it is not recommended to include encyclopedias, handbooks, textbooks, study guides, course manuals, or similar publications in the reference list. Authors should also avoid citing articles published in periodicals included in Cabell’s Blacklist (cabells.com), as well as in publications that have been removed from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (doaj.org), Scopus, Web of Science, or the RSCI for violations of publication ethics.

7. When citing sources available on the internet but originally published or laid out in printed form, it is recommended to provide the bibliographic description of the printed version (including articles in electronic journals if such articles have their own page numbers in the journal). For example, if an article is available on CyberLeninka or RSCI/eLibrary, the citation should be the full bibliographic description with the journal title, year, volume, issue, and page numbers, rather than a web link.

8. If a cited source has a DOI, it must be provided at the end of the bibliographic description in both the “Reference List” and the “References” list.

9. Self‑citations (i.e., previously published works by the author(s) of the article) should not exceed 20% of the total number of sources in the list.

10. If a cited Russian‑language source has English‑language information (author surname and initials, article title, journal title, etc.), it is recommended to include that information in the “References” list, even if, in your view, the English information does not fully comply with English grammar norms.

11. It is recommended that at least 20% of the sources be in foreign languages, published in leading international scientific periodicals.

12. In the text of the article, references to each source in the bibliographic list are given in square brackets according to the numbering. Citations are formatted as a digit (or series of digits) enclosed in square brackets, where the digit is the sequential number of the source in the bibliographic list. Examples of how to format citations in the manuscript text:

[2] – reference to source number 2 in the reference list;

[2, 5, 8, 15‑17] – reference to several sources simultaneously;

[2, p. 345] – reference to a source with a precise quotation, indicating the page where the cited text appears;

[2, p. 345; 7, pp. 27‑28; 12, p. 98] – reference to several sources from which quotations are taken.

13. It is inadmissible to cite a group of more than 3–4 sources without analyzing or specifying the contribution of the authors of the cited publications to the issue under discussion (e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or [1‑7]).

	Reference List No. 1 SPISOK ISTOCHNIKOV (“Russian‑language” – sources in Cyrillic‑based languages + sources in Latin‑based languages)	Reference List No. 2 REFERENCES (Latinised – transliterated and translated Cyrillic sources + sources in Latin‑based languages)
Placement in the manuscript	Follows the main text of the article. May be omitted if 100% of the sources are in Latin‑based languages.	Appears at the end of the article, after Reference List No. 1, or immediately after the text of articles prepared in English. In terms of the sources included, it is analogous to Reference List No. 1.
Style / formatting standard	The reference list must be compiled in accordance with GOST R 7.0.100‑2018“Bibliographic record. Bibliographic description”. Abbreviations in bibliographic descriptions follow GOST R 7.0.12‑2011 “Bibliographic record. Abbreviation of words and phrases in Russian” and GOST 7.11‑2004 “Bibliographic record. Abbreviation of words and phrases in foreign European languages”. Do not abbreviate: titles in all areas of description, names of places of publication (cities). All data in the bibliographic description may be presented in full form.	APA style (American Psychological Association).
Order of presentation	In alphabetical order: first Cyrillic sources according to the standard Cyrillic alphabet, then Latin‑alphabet sources according to the standard Latin alphabet. Numbering is consecutive – from the first Cyrillic entry to the last Latin entry (from Cyrillic A to Latin Z).	Sources are numbered in the same order as in Reference List No. 1 (the “Russian‑language” list), but Cyrillic sources are transliterated into Latin characters and translated into English.
Number of sources	At least 10 items; the optimal number is around 20.
Useful resources for formatting	Online reference list formatting: https://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200161674	Transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin:  http://translit-online.ru/ http://translit.net/ https://www.itranslit.com/