Before submitting your Research Article or Letter, please ensure that you carefully read and adhere to all the guidelines and instructions to authors set out in the Preparing Your Materials section. Manuscripts that do not conform to these guidelines may not be reviewed. Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously, and that it is not currently being considered by another journal. Authors must also confirm that each author has seen and approved the contents of the submitted manuscript. Cambridge’s Ethical Standards for journals can be found here.
How to Submit
This journal uses ScholarOne - http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pa - for online submission and peer review. ScholarOne is a “comprehensive workflow-management system for scholarly journals, books and conferences”. Further information on ScholarOne can be found here, and queries can be directed to the Editorial Office at [email protected].
If you do not already have an account, click the "Register Here" link on the login page to create an account. For ScholarOne help, go to "Get Help Now" by clicking the "User Tutorials" link on the login page or the "Help" tab on any page in your Author Center. The "Get Help Now" page lists contact information for email and telephone customer support from ScholarOne Manuscripts. Click the orange "Author" button to find a detailed user guide for Authors. Follow the online prompts in your Author Center to submit your manuscript. Note all revisions require a point-by-point response to the previous decision letter and reviewer comments. Should you have any problems uploading LaTeX files, you may contact ScholarOne directly for assistance or you may upload an Adobe PDF for earlier versions of your manuscript. Once a manuscript receives conditional acceptance, the manuscript files must be uploaded in Microsoft Word or LaTeX format, along with a separate PDF version. Carefully read the guidelines for Conditionally Accepted Articles before uploading your final Research Article through the online system.
Publishing Statements and Declarations
Before you submit, please ensure that you have included the following at the back of your manuscript, each under a separate heading (see Preparing your materials for more information on each one):
- Funding declaration
- Competing interests declaration
- Data availability statement (optional)
- Ethical statement (optional)
ORCID
We require all corresponding 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 will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
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.
Licence to publish
Before Cambridge can publish your manuscript, we need a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged. For full details see the publishing agreement page.