Aims and scope| Preparing your article for submission| Policy on prior publication| Competing Interests| Authorship and contributorship| Author affiliations| Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools| ORCiD| English language editing services| Author Hub|

Aims and scope

Signs and Society is an open access, multidisciplinary journal in the humanities and social sciences focusing on research that examines the role of sign processes (or semiosis) in social interaction, cognition, and cultural formations. Focusing directly on semiosis in its multiple dimensions, the journal aims to promote collaborative translation across analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, and related disciplines, and to uncover unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse empirical domains.

For more details about the journal’s aims and scope, please visit the Author instructions page. The journal’s founding philosophy can also be read in our Mission statement.

Preparing your article for submission

Peer review and anonymisation

Signs and Society operates on a double-anonymous peer review policy: articles submitted to the journal should not bear the author's name or institutional affiliation. Please remove from the manuscript all references or acknowledgements that might indicate the identity of the author. Citations to work conducted by the author(s) need not be anonymised but should be talked about in third person to preserve anonymity. Please ensure that all materials in online repositories are also anonymised (e.g., use anonymised view-only links on OSF and make sure that scripts contain no author-identifying information).

Article requirements

Submissions to Signs and Society should be submitted as a MS Word file via the journal’s online submission system (ScholarOne). The entire manuscript (i.e., the body of the text, footnotes, and references) should be double-spaced and in a standard 12-point font.

All articles submitted to the journal should include:

• Abstract: 100-150 words.
• Word count: Maximum 8,000 words
• Keywords: 3-6 relevant keywords.
• Cover letter: The cover letter should be submitted as a MS Word file separate from the manuscript text. It should state that all authors have read and approved the submission of the manuscript, that the manuscript has not been published elsewhere, and that it is not currently under consideration for publication by another journal (as per the journal’s ‘Policy on prior submission’ below). 

Journal style

Manuscripts submitted for consideration at Signs and Society should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date). The main style elements should be handled as follows:

Headings: Type subheads on a new line, flush left. In general, use no more than three levels of headings. Please note that articles in Signs and Society generally do not number their sections.

The following Chicago Manual of Style guidance may be helpful: “A lower-level subhead may follow an upper-level subhead with no intervening text, but when a section of text is subdivided, there should ideally be at least two subsections.” (see The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edn.)

Transcripts: If your paper contains a transcript, please set it up as a table and ensure that each line of the transcript is contained in its own table row. If transcript lines are to be numbered, line numbers should appear in a separate column.

Appendices, tables, and figures: Appendixes, tables, and figures are numbered in sequential order (e.g., Appendix A, Appendix B, Table 1, Table 2, Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.) and must be called out in order in the body of text (i.e., Table 1 would be mentioned before Table 2).

• Appendices: should be included in the manuscript file following the reference list. Each appendix should start on a new page.
• Tables: Prepare tables using the MS Word table editor (i.e., do not use tabs or hard returns). Include tables in the manuscript file following the reference list. Each table should start on a new page.
• Figures: When submitting manuscripts, authors should include all images, as well as a caption list. 
  

For more information how to submit figures and artwork, visit the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Note: If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. For further details on how to clear permissions for copyrighted material, see guidance on how to seek permissions.

In-text references: Submissions should follow the author-date system as outlined in chapter 15 of The Chicago Manual of Style.

• Simple citations of works are given in the text in chronological order by enclosing the author's last name and the year of publication in parentheses—for example, (Friedman 2003)—and are linked to a reference list at the end of the article.
• Specific page or section citations follow the date, preceded by a comma: (Friedman 2003, 96).
• Other examples are as follows: for dual authorship of a single work, (Newman and Principle 2002); for three or more authors of a single work, (Koehlstedt et al. 1999); for two works by the same author, (McMullin 1985, 1990); for two works by different authors, (Westfall 1977; Burian 1980); for reprints, Hume [1740] 1978).

Footnotes: Footnotes are used for material commenting on or adding to the text, and should also be used for archival materials, unpublished interviews, or other sources that do not have a clear author or publication date or would be difficult to include in an author-date reference list.

• Citations of websites are often included in footnotes as well; access dates should not generally be included.
• Any author-date citations contained in footnotes should be styled as they would in the main text.
• All footnotes begin at the bottom of the page on which they are referenced.

Reference list: Full documentation appears in a reference list. This list should include all works cited in the text, including author-date citations in footnotes. List works alphabetically by author and, under author, by year of publication. References not cited in the text should not appear in the reference list.

• Book, one author or editor: Oswald, Laura R. 2012. Marketing Semiotics: Signs, Strategies, and Brand Value. New York: Oxford University Press. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1979. The Sign and Its Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 1, Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Untermeyer, Louis, ed. 1964. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
• Book, multiple authors and editors: Harris, Roy, and Talbot J. Taylor. 1989. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure. London: Routledge. Bradley, Sculley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds. 1967. The American Tradition in Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Norton.
• Reprint: Hume, David. (1740) 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. 2nd ed. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon.  Pedersen, Holger. (1931) 1962. The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the 19th Century. Translated by John Webster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Book chapter: Dewell, Robert B. 1997. “Construal Transformations: Internal and External Viewpoints in Interpreting Containment.” In Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning, edited by Marjolijn Verspoor, Kee Dong Lee, and Eve Sweetser, 17–32. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
• Journal article: Rao, Chaitra, Shweta Soni, and Nandini Chatterjee Singh. 2012. "The Case of the Neglected Alphasyllabary: Orthographic Processing in Devanagari." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (5): 302–3.
• Multiple works by single author: Parmentier, Richard. 2002. "Money Walks, People Talk: Systemic and Transactional Dimensions of Palauan Exchange." L'Homme 162 (1): 49–80.  ———. 2005. "Description and Comparison of Religion." History of Religions 43 (3): 233–45.
• Online journal: Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. "Coerced Iconicity in Writing and Speech." SemiotiX New Series: A Global Information Bulletin, no. 8, http://semioticon.com/semiotix/2012/07/coerced-iconicity-in-writing-and-speech/.
• Translation: Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Paladin. Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent. 1965. The Elements of Chemistry. Translated by Robert Kerr. New York: Dover. Originally published as Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris, 1793).

Terms, translations, and emphasis: Use double quotation marks when first citing an author's analytical terms, such as Peirce's concept of "infinite semiosis". Double quotation marks are changed to single quotation marks for quotes or terms within quotations, e.g., "containing a 'secret' meaning."

• Glosses should be enclosed in single quotation marks immediately following the term they define, with no intervening punctuation: praxis 'practice'. Any following punctuation (here, a period) is placed after the closing quotation mark.
• Use italics for words in foreign languages that are not part of regular English usage, e.g., the Greek term sēmeion.
• Use italics for citing linguistic forms qua forms in any language, e.g., the English word speech doesn’t sound like the French word parole.
• Use italics for rhetorical emphasis very sparingly and in general avoid using "scare" quotes for figurative usage.

Back matter. The following statements should be included at the end of the manuscript:

• Acknowledgements (optional)
• Author contributions (see 'CRediT Taxonomy' section below)
• Funding statement
• Competing interests (see 'Competing interests' section below)
• References
• Appendices (optional).

Additional formatting requirements

Author affiliations, where applicable, should adhere to the following conventions:

• Department/school, university/institution, city, state/province, country (abbreviate USA and UK), (email address)
• Use two-letter postal codes for state/province names
• If an author has multiple affiliations or if there are multiple authors, use superscript Arabic numerals to differentiate affiliations.

Spelling: either American- or British-English spelling can be used, but either should be used consistently throughout the paper.

Quotes: “double” quotation marks should be used, with periods and commas inside marks and ‘single’ quotation marks for quotes within quotes. Quotes of more than fifty words should be set as extracts with no quotation marks.

Title: the title should be written in sentence case, with subtitle run in and separated from the title by a colon.

Order of parentheses in text: ([])

Commas: the serial comma should be used. 

Abbreviations and acronyms: authors should spell out in full any abbreviations used in their manuscripts the first time that they use it.

Measurements and units: percentages should always be expressed as numerals, even when they are less than 10. However, you should spell out percentages if they begin a sentence. For example: Sales increased 5 percent. Fifty percent of this was due to Aitha. Only use the percent symbol (%) in figures and tables and parentheses.

Numbers: numbers less than 10 should be spelt out. Numerals should be used for numbers of 10 or larger. Exceptions to this rule:

• Numbers of years are always spelled, as in “two to three years.”
• Numbers beginning a sentence are always spelled out, as in “Fifteen different models were used…”
• When a number is spelled out according to one of the rules above and is associated with another number, that second number is also spelled out in order to maintain a consistent appearance. For example, “Fifteen of the twenty-two plans…” instead of “Fifteen of the 22 plans…”.

Punctuation: place punctuation inside the quote if the quote is mid-sentence. For example: “You may confirm this,” said Smith (2008).

Last updated July 2024