Manuscript preparation

The recommended length of articles is 10,000–12,000 words including footnotes. The recommended text-length of review essays is 5,000 words including footnotes, and our commissioned ‘Essay’ sections can typically run to 10,000 words including footnotes.

Articles should normally be written in English.

Authors should submit their article, typed and double-spaced throughout (including notes), in Microsoft Word format. 

The author’s name, mailing address, title of the article, and competing interests declaration should appear separately on the cover sheet. An abstract of 100-150 words should also be printed on a separate sheet. Tables and illustrations should be printed on separate sheets at the end of the article in a form suitable for direct reproduction. They must be clearly referenced in the text. References to sources and descriptive headings must be attached. Photographs should be glossy prints.

Footnotes should be numbered consecutively throughout and typed on the page. Footnotes should normally appear only at the end of sentences.

All authors must include a competing interest declaration on their cover sheet. 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”.

Text conventions

Spelling should follow American convention. Where foreign language words have achieved common currency, accents should be omitted - e.g. elite. Numbers up to 100 should normally be spelled in full. Days of the week and months of the year should appear in full, as should centuries, thus eighteenth century. In citations, the least number of figures should be used in connection with dates and pages - thus 241-5, except with the numbers 10-19 in each hundred, which should be cited as 112-13, not 112-3.

Abbreviations should be followed by a full point, contractions should not. Full points should be omitted in initials which are read as words, as in USA, BBC, but retained for authors' initials, thus J. G. A. Pocock. Capitals should be kept to a minimum but should always be used where individual people or places are referred to specifically.

Use double quotation marks, reserving single marks for quotes within quotes. Periods, commas, and other related marks should appear inside the double quotation marks, using American citation practice as standard (see below). Quotations of more than 60 words should be separated out from the text and indented, without quotation marks.

References and notes should be numbered in one sequence and identified by a superior number in the text. Except in review essays, the journal does not use parenthetical page or title citations within the main body of the text, and references should all be located in footnote form. Authors’ first names should appear in the citations unless they use only initials in their books and journal articles. If they include their middle initial, that should also appear in the citations. References should take the following form, and we ask authors to pay particular attention to the fact that when referencing articles, we require volume number, followed by issue number, followed by date and then page extent. This is crucial to avoid inconsistencies:

Books

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), 25.

Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1992).

Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, 2002).

Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History (Chicago, 2009), 62.

Gabrielle M. Spiegel ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005).

Book chapters

Follow the style below in terms of the order – full author name, “chapter title,” ed.,/eds., Book Title (place of publication, year of publication), x–z, at y (if a particular page is being quoted).

To clarify, give the full page extent of a book chapter the first time it is cited, followed by the particular page reference if quoting directly. For example:

E. J. Hundert, “Sociability and Self-Love in the Theatre of Moral Sentiments: Mandeville to Adam Smith,” in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, eds., Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750­–1850 (Cambridge, 2000), 31–47, at 42.

Thereafter, Hundert, “Sociability and Self-Love,” 42.

For citations of texts in multivolume works

Simple citation:

The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols. (Chicago and Cambridge, 1958­–78).

Citation of one among many:

Rammohan Roy, “Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females,” in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, ed. Jogendra Chunder Ghose, 4 vols. (New Delhi, 1982), 2: 373–84, at 373.

Thereafter, Roy, “Brief Remarks,” 373.

Citation of one volume only:

Edmund Burke, “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” (1795), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford, vol. 9 (Oxford, 1991), 119­–45, at 144.

Thereafter, Burke, “Scarcity,” 144.

For works of complex internal structure

Citations should follow author, main title of work, ed.,/eds., if there are editors, Part w, Bk x, Ch. y, § z (place of publication, date of publication), page number(s) as in other citations.

If using an original text that nevertheless has a standard modern edition (say, for instance, Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis), please provide the original place and date of publication; alternatively, if citing from a modern, standard edition, please give its place and date of publication. In both cases, though, please provide the original date of publication of the text (where it is known), in brackets after the title. Thus:

Charles Louis Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), ed. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1989), Part 1, Bk 1, Ch. 1, 3.

Articles

Simon Schaffer, “States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy,” in G. S. Rousseau, ed., Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 45.

Robin Lenman, “Painters, Patronage and the Art Market in Germany, 1850–1914,” Past and Present 123 (1989), 109–40.

David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History, 98/1 (2011), 21–48.

Michael Kelly, “The Gadamer/Habermas Debate Revisited: The Question of Ethics,” Philosophical and Social Criticism 14/2 (1988), 369–89, at 380.

Theses

Christopher With, “Adolph von Menzel: A Study in the Relationship between Art and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1975).

Subsequent citations

Jordanova, History in Practice, 94.

Schaffer, “States of Mind,” 78.

With, “Adolph von Menzel,” 168.

Note: Ibid should only be used to refer to the immediately preceding citation.

Do not use op. cit. Do not abbreviate journal titles.

Do not use ff., but instead give the full page extent in the first reference to a journal article or book chapter etc., followed by the specific page of a particular quotation.

When citing from archival sources, give the source, followed by the archival location, and page numbers where appropriate. For example:

Donald Davidson, “The concept of Arete and the Two Lives in the Philebus” (honors thesis, Harvard, 1939), copy in carton 12, Donald Davidson papers, BANC MSS 2005/167, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (DDP).

When citing from newspapers or contemporary occasional sources, give the page reference where possible, but if not, then follow the general guideline here:

Eduard Bernstein, “Der Strike als politisches Kampfmittel,” Die Neue Zeit 12/1 (1893­–4), 689­–95, at 693

Datasets and supplemental files

All authors of quantitative empirical articles are encouraged to make the data available for data replication purposes. Modern Intellectual History can host such data on the journal’s website, and authors wishing to avail themselves of this facility should supply all files electronically once an article has been accepted for publication. Other types of supplemental material, including, but not limited to, images, videos, audio and slideshows, can also be hosted online where they are judged to bring additional value to an article.

Artwork, figures and other graphics

For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format authors should consult the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide. If, together with your accepted article, you submit usable colour figures, these figures will appear in colour online but in black and white in print. A charge applies for the reproduction of colour in print and, if this is specifically requested, authors will be contacted by Cambridge University Press.

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.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see here).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].