About the Journal

Focus and Scope

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios is an academic journal in the scientific area of Urban Studies that was established in 2000 by a team of researchers from the former Centre for Territorial Studies, consolidating an acquis of scientific research and academic work at ISCTE for over twenty years. Its founder and first director was Professor Vítor Matias Ferreira.

CIDADES, now in e-journal format, strives to disseminate research and discussions in the scientific area of Urban Studies, seeking to consolidate itself in the academic publishing scene, nationally and internationally, as a reference publication in its field.

The orientation of CIDADES is based on the plurality of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches to the analysis of the city, as enshrined in the array of multidisciplinary scientific area of Urban Studies. CIDADES seeks further knowledge about urban problems and policies in order to intervene and, in general, concerning the processes of transformation of cities, communities and territories.

Editorial Statute

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios (CCT) is a scientific journal which specializes in urban studies. It mainly publishes original research articles, although other materials, such as review papers deemed relevant towards the advancement of knowledge in this area, are also encouraged.

The selection of published materials at CCT is exclusively under the responsibility of the editorial committee and is done according to the stated criteria in terms of scope and publication guidelines, promoting quality and innovation, with no academic degree, institutional affiliation, nor geographic origin restrictions. Original research articles are selected and evaluated following a double-blind peer-review process.

CCT is a DINÂMIA'CET-ISCTE publication, situated in Lisbon, Portugal. Nevertheless, CCT has an international and diversified character in terms of its published authors and subjects, its editorial and consultung bodies, publication languages (Portuguese, English, French, Spanish or Italian) and overall circulation.

CCT actively strives for ethical principles in social science research and publication. The editor reserves the right to act by whichever legal means necessary should those principles be not respected by published and submitting authors, including cases of plagiarism, fraudulent manipulation of data and other instances of disrespect for audiences' good faith.

CCT is published exclusively online (ISSN 2182-3030) triannually. Its is wholy available in open access with no restrictions on the journal's website (http://revistas.rcaap.pt/cct) as well as in other scientific publications collections, such as OpenEdition and SciELO, under a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence. Authors are exempt from any sort of publication fees and receive no financial compensation for published materials.

Peer Review Process

Cidades, Comunidades e Territórios is a peer reviewed journal; a Double Blind Peer Review is ensured as strict anonymity is accorded to both authors and referees. In order to ensure the Blind Peer Review process, authors are asked to make sure that all information about their identities (names, emails, affiliations, and references) is removed from the text (See also Author Guidelines).

Each article will be reviewed by two external referees designated by the Editorial Committee for their expertise.

In case of ressubmission recommendations, updated versions of the manuscripts shall go through additional reviewing rounds by the original referees. Additional referees may be requested to contribute in case of highly divergent stances. Final decisions in these circumstances are up to the Editorial Committee.

Open Access Policy

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios advocates free, open, public, online: (i) access by person or machine to the publicly-funded archival scientific and technical research literature; and (ii) computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature into higher-order knowledge elements.

Open Data

In line with Open Science communication practices, since 2026, CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios adopted the following practices:

- Encouraging sharing in appropriate data repositories of analysis data, programme codes, and other materials underlying the manuscript text prior to or at the time of publication. Exceptions are allowed in cases of duly substantiated legal and ethical issues. The goal is to facilitate the evaluation of the manuscript and, if approved, contribute to the preservation and reuse of content and the reproducibility of research;

- To facilitate reproducibility and reuse of data, it is also recommended to make information about software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials related to research available;

- Research data varies according to the area of ​​knowledge and covers: textual documents, spreadsheets, statistics, laboratory notebooks, field notebooks, diaries, questionnaires, transcriptions, audio files, video, photographs, workflows, partial reports and other materials prepared and/or collected during the development of the research;
- If any of the files mentioned above are shared, the address to access the materials must be included in the manuscript.

Examples of repositories:

• SciELO Data - repository for depositing research data.
• Zenodo - repository for depositing research data.
• GitHub - repository for depositing codes (such as statistical analysis, software, models, among others).

Preprints

CIDADES, Comunidades e Território accepts the publication of content previously made available on preprint servers, namely SciELO Preprints, allowing open discussion before final publication. In these cases, it is essential that authors explain the location of the publication in preprint format, including the respective DOI, in compliance with the periodic publications policy defined by SciELO.

In case of acceptance and publication of an article by CCT, authors must update the registration on the preprint server, including the complete reference to the final publication in the journal.

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios is committed to ensuring ethics in publication and quality of articles.

Conformance to standards of ethical behaviour is therefore expected of all parties involved: Authors, Editors, Reviewers, and the Publisher. As of 1 January 2019, COPE practices are actively enforced.

In particular, 

Authors: Authors should present an objective discussion of the significance of research work as well as sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the experiments. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable. The authors should ensure that their work is entirely original works, and if the work and/or words of others have been used, this has been appropriately acknowledged. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Authors should not submit articles describing essentially the same research to more than one journal. The corresponding author should ensure that there is a full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication.

Editors: Editors should evaluate manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their academic merit. An editor must not use unpublished information in the editor's own research without the express written consent of the author. Editors should take reasonable responsive measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper.

Reviewers: Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments, so that authors can use them for improving the paper. Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

In cases of misconduct, the retraction policy will be applied by the journal, in accordance with the Guide to good practices for strengthening ethics in scientific publishing proposed by SciELO. The journal Board will publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when necessary and requested by interested parties.

Any allegations of misconduct pre-publication and post-publication are taken seriously. Authorship and contributorship must be disclosed upon publication, allowing for full transparency around who contributed to the work and in what capacity. Complaints will be handled by the Editorial Committee and, in case of unsettled dispute, the Editorial Advisory Board will be consulted. Any conflicts of interest must be fully disclosed, whether identified before or after publication. Discussions and/or corrections are welcome and available through letters to the editor.

Download our statutes here.

Conflicts of interest policy

Conflicts of interest, whether personal, commercial, political, academic or financial, may influence the preparation or evaluation of manuscripts. Authors must declare any conflicts, even potential ones, through a signed document attached to the submission.

Similarity check

In the initial screening, all manuscripts will undergo an anti-plagiarism assessment using Turnitin software (or other equivalent software).

If there are elements that indicate plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, or that indicate a considerable lack of due citation, the article will be preliminarily rejected (“desk reject”). If there are no signs of bad faith and the similar text can be corrected, the article will be returned to the author for corrections.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

This policy guides the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) in CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios content, ensuring the integrity, transparency and excellence of the research we endorse.

Responsibility: The use of AI must be carefully supervised by the authors, who are responsible for errors, plagiarism and other bad practices that may result from the use of artificial intelligence mechanisms.

Declaration of use of AI: All manuscripts that use AI, whether in generation, analysis, review or any other capacity, must clearly indicate this in the methodology section, explicitly including the extent of AI involvement in the work and detailed information about the technology and parameters used.

Limitations: If AI is used as a research tool, authors must discuss in the text the limitations and potential biases arising from this option.

Research Centre

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios is an online journal published by DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte. DINÂMIA'CET – Research Centre on Socioeconomic Change and the Territory – is an ISCTE study centre with the primary aim of conducting multidisciplinary and comparative research and studies on processes of social, economic and territorial change in the European and international contexts. It currently has over 200 researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds (economics, sociology, law, architecture, regional and urban planning, anthropology, geography, management, quantitative methods, etc.). The unit is certified and evaluated by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Foundation for Science and Technology).

Abstracting and Indexing Services

CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios is currently covered by the following abstracting and indexing services:

Scopus

 

SciELO Citation Index

OpenEdition

SciELO

DOAJ

EBSCO Publishing

Latindex

RCAAP - Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal

IBSS - International Bibliography for the Social Sciences

Google Scholar

SHERPA/RoMEO

Redib - Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico

Sponsors

• FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
• ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa