[split] Questions about academic publication of Voynich papers

[Jorge_Stolfi]

?

I believe Cryptologia is a typical academic journal, so my experience elsewhere may be useful:

• could you write in first person "I discovered..." or do they prefer personless forms "It was discovered..."?
  The "I discovered" is unusual and makes the article seem like it is more about the author than about the topic.  Thus passive voice is the norm.
  (I recall a non-technical writing expert complaining that tech articles make it seem that labs are deserted places where the instruments operate themselves, chemicals mix on their own, etc.)
  If you must refer to yourself, use the majestic plural "we discovered", even if you are the only author.
  But, more importantly, the article should not spend any words telling how you reached the conclusions, much less your failed attempts.  It should state only the conclusions and the evidence that supports them. The article should describe only procedures, like statistical tests, that do work, and that others can use to confirm the conclusions; not what you actually did to reach them.
    YES: "The ruins can be reached by cable car from the village of Al-Kaputt in the valley below."
    NO: "The locals told us that there were ruins at the top of the mountain.  It took us three days to climb the North slope (not counting one day wasted because we read the map upside-down), during which we sprained our ankle and ran out of food, only to find, when we finally reached the top, that there was a cable car reaching there from the village Al-Kaputt in the valley below."
  
• It it okay to give internet resources (blogs, forum posts, Wikipedia videos etc.) as your references?
  Generally not, except for repositories where you make available additional data or programs that readers may need to check or use the paper.  Or to give credit to someone else who came up with a key idea. Or to a digital repository in a respectable institution, like digital scans and transcriptions served by a museum, state archive, university, etc..
  Otherwise the references should be only to scientific articles published in journals, books, or at least proceedings of conferences.  
  
• is it okay to refer to publications which aren't in English?
  Yes, no problem there.
  
• is there any template for writing your bibliography?
  If the journal requires one, just look at a few examples in that same journal.  As long as it is serious and of reasonable size, the journal will not care about what is in it.
  
• do they accept just established facts or your hypotheses as well?
  The paper must contain at least some claims that have substantial evidence.  Given that, it is OK to add a few conjectures which would need further work to prove or disprove.  They usually go at the end of the article, at the end of the "Conclusions" section.  But of course you should distinguish them from the conclusions: "Several symbols remain to be deciphered or confirmed.  In particular, we conjecture that the symbol {\spac} may represent an alien spaceship, based on its shape and the tiny human figure that appears to be being sucked up into it by a powerful beam."
  

Hope it helps, --stolfi