Authors can download the Utilitas style sheet here: 
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.
Structure for Articles and Replies
1. Preliminaries: Please head your article/reply in the following way:
Title (Please don’t attach a footnote reference to the title.)
Authors(s) and Affiliation(s)
Corresponding (first) author’s email address
An abstract of no more than 150 words.
2. Footnotes: These should be double-spaced and consecutively numbered. Please keep footnotes as brief as possible. Superscript numbers used as footnote markers should appear outside the relevant punctuation, except in the case of a dash. Note in particular that this means that footnote numbers in the text should be superscripted after the full stop. Please do not juxtapose two note indicators (e.g.: ‘This is text.7, 8’); either merge the notes into one or place the indicators further apart. Please do not attach a footnote indicator to a subheading.
3. References: Utilitas now follows a very slightly modified version of the Modern Humanities Research Association reference formats. The MHRA offers both a footnote-based reference format sans bibliography and an author-date format with bibliography, either of which is acceptable. Whichever style is used, no quotation marks should be used around book chapter titles, article titles, etc. Book and journal titles should still be italicized. Details of the MHRA reference styles, with examples, can be found at http://www.mhra.org.uk/style/.
4. Punctuation and Spelling: Authors may choose between American and British spelling and punctuation conventions, but each article should follow one usage or the other consistently. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is perhaps the ultimate guide to UK style, as is Garner’s Modern American Usage to US style, although numerous online guides are available for each that cover most common issues. (Authors using US punctuation may still use single quotation marks to indicate words that are being mentioned rather than used.)
5. Italics: Do not use underlining instead of italics.
6. Capitalization: Keep to a minimum. Use lower case for ‘utilitarianism’, ‘egoism’, ‘government’, and so on.
7. Quotations: Quoted material of 50 words or more should be set out from the text through being block indented. Leave a line of space above and below the extract. Do not use quotation marks around block quotes. In quotations, the exact spelling and punctuation of the original must be faithfully copied. Your own interpolations into quoted matter should be clearly enclosed in square brackets, not round ones.
8. Sections: You are welcome to divide your article into sections. Titles of sections (‘A’ headings), if included, should be in boldface (‘Section One’). Sub-sections (‘B’ headings) should be in italics (‘Recognition’). The first line of any section or subsection should not be indented. Authors may choose whether to number sections and, if they are numbered, whether to use Arabic or Roman numerals.
Instructions for Book Reviews
Where applicable, reviews should follow the instructions for articles and replies above. Head your review following the example below:
Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry (eds.), To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 464. $35.00.
If you have any questions, please consult Nigel Hope ([email protected]).
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 A is employed at organisation B, Author C 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”.
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.
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.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
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.
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.