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Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript:

Structure

The paper should be structured as follows:

  • Article title
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Text
  • Figure captions in correct place in text
  • Tables in correct place in text
  • Acknowledgements
  • References

Capitalisation of titles

  • Capitalise all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and subordinate conjunctions (i.e. as, because, although).
  • Use lowercase for all articles, coordinate conjunctions and prepositions.

Examples:

  • Saving Eighteenth-Century New Smyrnea: Public Archaeology in Action
  • Front Yard, Back Yard: Lessons in Neighborhood Archaeology in an Urban Environment

Book reviews:

  • If you are submitting a book review, the title should read: 'Review of xxx (Name of book)'.
  • Then, as a subtitle, please the following information: name of author, publisher, extent, publication year, ISBN (13-digit). Additional information (if applicable): name of editor/photographer/translator, no. of b&w and colour illustrations.

NOTE: Tier 1 subheads should follow the same rule as the titles. For lower-level subheads, only capitalise first letter (plus proper nouns).

Language
Articles must be submitted in English. Non-native English speakers are strongly recommended to have their articles checked and edited by a native speaker/writer before submission.

Authors are welcome to use American or British spellings and grammar as long as they are used consistently. Some of the key differences between English and American English include the following:

  • Programme (UK) vs. Program (US)
  • Labour (UK) vs. Labor (US)
  • Centre (UK) vs. Center (US)
  • Demobilise (UK) vs. Demobilize (US)
  • 13 January 2011 (UK) vs. January 13, 2011 (US)

Please note that when referring to proper nouns and normal institutional titles, you should always use the official, original spelling. For instance, it is World Health Organization, not World Health Organisation.

Grammar
As with language, American or English spelling and grammar rules may be used as long as they are used consistently. For instance, you may use a serial comma (red, white, and blue) or not (red, white and blue).

Numbers
We are happy for authors to use either words or figures to represent large figures (i.e. one million or 1,000,000) as long as the usage is consistent within an article. For numbers between zero and twelve we would recommend using words rather than figures, except for when it is a part of a dataset or presented in a table.  

When referring to a percentage, please use the words ‘per cent’ rather than the symbol %, again except for when it is a part of a dataset or presented in a table.

Currencies

  • Use £ for British Pound Sterling, € for Euro, e.g. £50, €100.
  • Use US$, C$, NZ$, A$ to distinguish between the different dollar currencies.

Quotation marks
Please use single quotation marks except for quotes within another speech, in which case double quotation marks are used.

Acronyms and abbreviations
With abbreviations, the crucial goal is to ensure that the reader – particularly one who may not be fully familiar with the topic or context being addressed – is able to follow along. Spell out almost all acronyms on first use, indicating the acronym in parentheses immediately thereafter. Use the acronym for all subsequent references. You do not need to spell out abbreviations for US, UK, EU, UN and DC, as in Washington, DC.

Images and figures
Unless it provides key information related to your submission, do not include photographs/pictures. Such images may ultimately be removed from your piece at the editors’ discretion. Figures, including graphs and diagrams, are, however, acceptable if they are professionally and clearly presented. If a figure is not easy to understand or does not appear to be of a suitable quality, you will be asked to re-render or omit it.

NOTE: Please supply all figures separately, if possible in colour and at a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi preferred). File size should not exceed 20MB per file. Standard formats accepted are: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS.

Tables
The same principles which apply to figures apply to tables. They should be necessary and should not repeat significant pieces of information already included in the text.

Use of footnotes/endnotes
Please use endnotes rather than footnotes (which we will refer to as ‘Notes’ at the end of the article, before ‘References’). All notes should be kept to the bare minimum and only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed. Avoid using endnotes for purposes of referencing; use in-text citations instead.  

In-text citations
Authors are strongly encouraged to use parenthetical citations according to the Chicago style (Adam 1984: 120ff.) For publications authored and published by organisations, use the short form of the organisation’s name or its acronym in lieu of the full name. For instance, do NOT do the following (International Committee of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2000); instead, you should write (ICRC 2000). Also, please do not include URLs (web addresses) in parenthetical citations.

References
References containing works cited within an article will be listed at the end of the article, in alphabetical order of authors’ surnames). All reading materials should be included in ‘References’ – even works which may not have been cited within an article but which the author wishes to share with the reader (for these, the author should provide additional information in endnotes explaining the relevance of the work). 

This journal uses the Harvard (author-date) system – see below for examples of how to format:


Books:

Adam, D J 1984 Stakeholder analysis. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Silverman, D F and Propp, K K (eds.) 1990 The active interview. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Achebe, C 1995 Colonialist Criticism. In: Ashcroft, B et al The Post Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 57–61.

NOTE: If multiple works by the same author are being listed, please re-type the author’s name out for each entry, rather than using a long dash.

Journal articles:

Martin, L 2010 Bombs, bodies and biopolitics: Securitizing the subject at airport security. Social and Cultural Geography, 11(1): 17-34. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360903414585.

NOTE: Please include DOIs for journal articles where possible.

Newspaper articles:

Tate, P 2007 Illicit organ trade increasing. The Jordan Times, 6 June, p. 3.

Conference papers:

Lynch, M 2003 Dialogue in an age of terror. In: The Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA on 18 August 2003, pp. 4-7.

Organisational publications/Grey literature:

World Health Organization 2010 The world health report – Health systems financing: the path to universal coverage. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO.

Theses and dissertations:

Yudis, A 2004 Failed responsibility of the media in the war on Iraq. Unpublished thesis (PhD), University of Manchester.

Webpages / PDFs:

Pascual, A C 2005 Stabilization and Reconstruction: Building peace in a hostile environment. Prepared statement to Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 16 June 2005. Available at http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/crs/rls/rm/48644.htm [Last accessed 14 August 2012].


Author contact details

Whilst there will not be a space for full author biographies in the article itself, it is our practice to insert the affiliations and contact details in the space (2-3 lines per author) on the bottom left hand corner of the first page of each article. Please include full postal and email addresses.

 

 

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for both the print and the online editions of the journal.

  3. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  4. Where available, URLs and DOIs for the references have been provided.
  5. The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and the positioning of all illustrations, figures, and tables are clearly indicated within the text at the appropriate points, but not embedded in the word file.
  6. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
  7. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
 

Copyright Notice

Present Pasts is an Open Access journal, which permits the full rights enshrined in the Creative Commons Attribution licence that allows users free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.

 

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

 

Author Fees

This journal charges the following author fees.

Article Publication: 100.00 (GBP)
If your paper is accepted for publication, you will be asked to pay an Article Publication Fee to cover publications costs. This fee can normally be sourced from your funder or institution, and we recommend approaching them about this at the time of submission.

You will be able to pay any amount from nothing to full charge, as we recognise that not all authors have access to funding, and we do not want fees to prevent the publication of worthy work. The editor and peer reviewers of the journal will not know what amount (if any) you have paid, and this will in no way influence whether your article is published or not.

ISSN: 1759-2941 | Published by Ubiquity Press | Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.