The Journal of the American Philosophical Association will consider manuscripts on any philosophical topic. APA membership is not required for submission or publication. The Journal does not accept book reviews.
The Journal rarely accepts discussions of articles originally published in other journals.
Papers must be no longer than 10,000 words including footnotes and references.
Papers should be accessible to readers outside the author’s specialization, so authors should refrain from unnecessary technical flourishes, gratuitous deployment of symbols, and reader-unfriendly abbreviations.
The Journal cannot consider more than one paper at a time from any one author, whether as author or as co-author. So, until a final decision to publish or reject as been made on one paper, its author(s) will not be eligible to submit another paper for consideration.
Manuscript preparation
Articles submitted to the Journal must be double-spaced, 10,000 words or less (including footnotes and references) with pages numbered throughout consecutively.
In addition to discouraging discursive footnotes, the Journal regards split infinitives and grammatical infelicities inconsistent with Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2d ed) as aberrations that will not survive copy editing.
Articles should be submitted as Word files, not as PDFs. Although multiple word processing formats are supported by ScholarOne, we recommend saving your text documents in .doc or .docx format, if possible. The Journal will accept LaTeX files. If your paper includes symbols, be sure they are created with a Unicode font.
Articles must be accompanied by an abstract of up to 150 words. Keywords will be requested during the article submission process.
All articles should be in English.
Articles must be prepared to allow for anonymous editorial review; acknowledgements, competing interest statements and materials that would allow identification of the author should be included in a title page.
Competing interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in a 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 A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Style
Articles will be checked and copy-edited for journal style and US English. Unless the notes below suggest otherwise, please follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
Notes
Footnotes should be used sparingly and, where possible, avoided altogether. The journal style does not allow for endnotes. Notes should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals.
References
Contributors should use the author-date system (‘Harvard system’) with a list of works cited at the end of the article under the heading 'References'. The following style should be used:
In text:
(Allison 1983: 201)
In Allison (1983: 201)
In reference section at the end of the article:
Works cited should be set out in alphabetical and chronological order in the following format:
Allison, Henry E. (1983) Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine M. (1989a) ‘Morality as freedom’. In Yirmiahu Yovel (ed.), Kant's Practical Philosophy Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 23-48.
Matthews, H. E. (1969) ‘Strawson on transcendental idealism’. Philosophical Quarterly, 19, 204-20.
Please note that where a passage is cited reference to a page, or sequence of pages, should always be given.
The Journal encourages authors to ask themselves whether there might be significant but under-recognized papers or books by women philosophers, or philosophers from other under-represented groups, that were overlooked in the course of writing their papers and/or assembling their bibliographies.
Tables and diagrams
Tables and diagrams should generally be included in the Word file. However, any complicated images or diagrams should as far as possible be submitted as high resolution tiff or eps files and their approximate position within the text should be indicated in the Word file. References in the text should take the form 'Table 1' for tables and 'Figure 1' for other forms of illustration.
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.
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.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
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.