The submission requirements are the same for regular articles and for discussion notes, except that the word limit on the latter is 3,000 words.
There are two sets of requirements: one for submission, the other (in case of acceptance) for preparation for publication the instructions for which can be found in the 'Publication process after acceptance' tab.
- PDF file format
- Double line-spacing; 12 point font size; 1 inch margins; US letter paper size
- Numbered pages
- Normally fewer than 10,000 words, including footnotes and references. (Longer papers may be considered but must evidently require the extraordinary length.)
- No author-identifying information in the text or footnotes, or in metadata embedded in the PDF file
- This doesn’t rule out citations of other papers of yours, if they are done in a way that doesn’t suggest your authorship of the present manuscript. (In some cases doing this may be less author-identifying than having placeholder references to other papers of yours.) It does rule out acknowledgements and references to personal communications.
- Please do what you can to minimize the chance that an Internet search will reveal your authorship of the paper (e.g. by not posting it or listing it by title on your personal web page, or by changing its title from conference presentations of it).
Requirements for initial submissions
- An editable file (not a PDF), e.g. Microsoft Word or LaTeX source file
- If LaTeX: include the bibliography in the source file. (Run bibtex, then replace the \bibliography{...} line with the contents of the .bbl file.)
- Use footnotes rather than endnotes.
- Put citations in the text using the author-date system, and put a list of referenced works at the end of the paper.
- Any images should be high resolution (> 300 dpi)
- No images embedded in Word documents; send as separate files
- Names and institutional affiliations, including country, of all contributing authors are required.
Requirements for accepted manuscripts
Copyrighted material
If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, please see the seeking permission to use copyrighted material page for instruction.
Publishing ethics
Please refer to the publishing ethics page while preparing your materials for submission to ensure you comply with the relevant policies.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.