Contributions
The Editors welcome correspondence (via email) from prospective authors regarding the intellectual focus, word length, and matters of illustration of potential contributions.
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 is optional but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the editor and any reviewers. We list a number of third-party services specialising in language editing and/or translation, and suggest that authors contact as appropriate: https://www.cambridge.org/core...
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.
Articles should normally be no longer than 10,000 words and should include an abstract of between 150 and 200 words. In addition to standard articles, we also welcome ideas for two new commissioned article types: ‘Classics in Rural History Revisited’, a review of the reception and influence of ‘classic’ texts of rural history; and ‘Where Next in Rural History?’, extended essays considering recent developments and future prospects in the sub-fields of rural history. Both article types should be no more than 8,000 words and presented and formatted in the same style as standard articles. To discuss a commission for either article type please contact one (or all) of the editors by email.
Texts must be completely anonymous to allow double-anonymous refereeing. Acknowledgements and the like can be added later to submissions which are accepted for publication.
Illustrations
We welcome illustrations as accompaniments to articles, but it is the responsibility of contributors to provide illustrations in a form suitable for direct reproduction. If you are including tables, graphs, maps or illustrations: a) fine copy must be provided; b) number in sequence throughout the article; c) references to sources and descriptive headings must be attached; d) please indicate clearly where the material is to appear in the text; e) ensure that there is a reference to it in the text.
Illustrations must be supplied as high resolution electronic files in accordance with CUP's journal artwork guidelines, preferably saved as TIFF or EPS files, not as Postscript files. Line drawings should be scanned at 300 dpi. Halftones should be scanned at 600dpi with the preset dot range from 1-96%. If you wish to compress the files make sure that the ‘lossless’ compression software is used to maintain the quality of the image.
Charges apply for all colour figures that appear in the print version of the journal. At the time of submission, contributors should clearly state whether their figures should appear in colour in the online version only, or whether they should appear in colour online and in the print version. There is no charge for including colour figures in the online version of the Journal but it must be clear that colour is needed to enhance the meaning of the figure, rather than simply being for aesthetic purposes. If you request colour figures in the printed version, you will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.
Permissions. Contributors should provide full details of the illustration source and obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. Any necessary acknowledgement should be included in the caption.
Competing interests declaration
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their submission. 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”.
Citations
Contributors may follow either of the standard conventions: (a) in-text citation of sources; (b) citation in footnotes; (c) In-text citation.
Give author's surname, date of publication and page references (if any) in parentheses in the body of the text, e.g. '(Falassi, 1980b: 114)'. Where a second or subsequent work by a particular author in the same year is cited, references should be distinguished by letters (a, b, c, etc.) placed after the date.
A complete list of references cited, arranged alphabetically by authors' surname, should be typed double- spaced at the end of the article in the form:
Falassi, A. 1980b. Folklore by the Fireside: Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia (Austin, Texas).
Give place of publication, but not the publisher. Titles of books, articles and journals should be in the form of the examples in these Notes.
(b) Citation in footnotes. References should be given in notes, numbered consecutively through the typescript with raised numbers. Type the notes double-spaced on separate pages at the end of the article.
Full publication details should be given at first mention, a short form thereafter.
Books: Capitalize the principal words and underline the title. Give place and date of publication. Page references should be preceded by 'p.' or 'pp.' Use 'ed.', 'eds.'.
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730 - 1840 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 89.
D. Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches to Hardy's Fiction (London,1979), pp. 17 - 18.
Articles: Capitalize only the first word and proper names in article titles, which should be in single inverted commas. Underline the title of the journal. Use arabic numerals for volume numbers. Do not use 'p.' or 'pp.' with a preceding volume number.
B. Reay, 'The last rising of the agricultural labourers: the battle in Bossenden Wood, 1838', History Workshop 26 (1988), 81 - 2.
Short forms:
Barrell, Dark Side, p. 90
Kramer (ed.), Hardy's Fiction, pp.175-6.
Reay, 'The last rising', p. 82.
Quotations
Quotations should be in single inverted commas, with double used only for quotations within quotations. Quotations of more than about five lines should be set off from the text and indented. Type double- spaced.
Abbreviations and Latin conventions
Cf. Use to mean 'compare', not 'see'. Ibid. Use to refer to an immediately preceding citation. Do not use loc. cit. or op. cit.
et. al. Use for second and subsequent citations of works by three or more authors. Note: f., ff. (with full point), n.d. (when no publication date), passim.
Tables and illustrations
Tables, graphs, maps and line drawings should be provided on separate sheets.
Tables. Tables must be numbered consecutively and referred to in the text as such: '(see Table 1)', not ('see table below)'. The table number and table title should be typed above the table. Type horizontal rules above and below the body of the table and below column headings, but avoid vertical rules. Notes and source(s) should be typed below the bottom rule.
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.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)].