Thank you for agreeing to write a review for the Review of Middle East Studies (RoMES). We greatly appreciate the time and effort you are contributing to the journal. Below you will find instructions on how to prepare and submit your review.
In order to ensure timely publication of reviews, RoMES asks that they be completed within 60 days of receipt of the book or other material to be reviewed. If you are unable to meet the deadline listed above, please contact your Associate Editor as soon as possible to make alternative arrangements.
Please submit your review directly to the Associate Editor who assigned the review to you (not to the Editorial Office) via e-mail attachment in MS Word. The Associate Editor will evaluate your review in terms of its ability to make a relevant and substantive contribution to scholarship in the field. He or she may ask you to make revisions at this point. Once the review is accepted by the Associate Editor, it will be forwarded to the RoMES Editorial Office at Virginia Tech for final copyediting and typesetting. During this process, you may be asked to provide additional information. RoMES reserves the right to edit for length any review over the word limit indicated above.
RoMES invites clearly written reviews that inform readers about topics in Middle East studies and offer critical evaluation of the work. Reviewed works are primarily books but also may include films, software, and other media.
Book Beview Format
File Type: MS Word file
File Name: Please name your file "Book Author by Reviewer" (e.g., Goldziher by Hodgson).
Word Count: Reviews of single books should be no more than 750 words. Reviews significantly exceeding this limit will be returned to the author for editing.
Font: RoMES uses Gentium Plus for all text. It has virtually all of the diacritical symbols necessary for transliterating Middle Eastern languages. If possible, submit your review in this font (11 point). The font can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.fontspace.com/sil-international/gentium-plus. If this proves difficult, choose a similar font, such as Time New Roman.
Review Book Bibliographic Information: Your review must begin with a bibliographic reference for the review book in the following format:
Author's Full Name. Title: Subtitle. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Front matter + number of pages, back matter. Cloth or Paper Price ISBN.
For example:
GILBERT ACHCAR.The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Spring. Translated by G.M. Goshgarian. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. xviii + 310 pages, figures, tables, acknowledgements, preliminary notes on region and transliteration, notes, references, sources, index. Cloth US$65.00 ISBN 978-0-5202-7497-6.
MICHELLE PENNER ANGRIST AND JOHN SMITH, EDS. Politics and Society in the Contemporary Middle East.2nd ed. Translated by Samah Selim. Boulder, CO: Lynn Reinner Publishers, 2013. xi + 217 pages, afterword by Roger Allen. Paper US$19.95 ISBN 978-0-8156-0999-5.
Author Byline: Your name and institutional affiliation should appear flush right on separate lines, at the end of the review:
John Smith
State University
Direct Quotations: If you use direct quotations from the book under review, please include the page number(s) in parentheses after the quotation [e.g., (30), not (p. 30)].
Citing Other Works: Cite works other than the review book sparingly, if at all. RoMES does not include Works Cited or Endnote sections in single-publication reviews. For references to books other than the one under review, basic bibliographic information should be incorporated into the review text [e.g., "Johnston devotes the first chapter of this book to a detailed and well-argued critique of Kermit Frog's theory of green as presented in One Frog's Life(Routledge, 1978)."]. Likewise, any information you might relegate to an endnote should be incorporated into the review text or eliminated entirely.
Translations and Transliterations: RoMES follows the transliteration rules established by our sister MESA journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). Guidelines can be found at http://ijmes.chass.ncsu.edu/IJMES_Translation_and_Transliteration_Guide.htm. Loanwords from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other languages spoken in the Middle East should be transliterated following IJMES guidelines. A transliteration chart is available for Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at http://ijmes.chass.ncsu.edu/docs/TransChart.pdf. Note that words found in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary or Webster's Third New International Dictionaryshould be spelled as they appear in the dictionary: They should have no macrons or dots, nor should they be italicized (e.g., mufti, jihad, shaykh). RoMES does preserve the letters ayn (ʿ) and Hamza (ʾ).
Copyright Statement: All material published in RoMES is protected under copyright law. In accepting the invitation to review the enclosed title, the reviewer agrees that he or she has not published and will not publish a review of the same title, in this or any other version, in another publication. Requests to reprint material published in RoMES are considered on a case-by-case basis.
Questions about the content of your review or the submission deadline should be sent to your Associate Editor. If you have additional questions about journal style or layout, you may wish to consult a recent issue of RoMES or contact me at the RoMES Editorial Office ([email protected]).
Thank you again for contributing to MESA's Review of Middle East Studies.
Christine Calorusso
Managing Editor, Review of Middle East Studies
Virginia Tech
[email protected]