Preparing your materials

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.

Manuscript Preparation

Articles should be typed and formatted as follows:

Please use one font style throughout the article and ensure title, abstract, and all headings are easily differentiated from the text body

Use 1.5 line spacing.

Do not paginate your article.

Do not use the automated foot- or endnotes in your word processing software.

For emphasis in the text, and to identify titles of publications (including electronic publications), use italics.

Do not insert images within the text of the article.

Numbers one through ten are spelled out; thereafter use Arabic numerals except where they begin a sentence.

Gender-neutral phrasing is preferred.

Preferred word forms and spelling:

1950s, 1980s
19th century (noun), 19th-century (adjective)
Disk, videodisk
Email
Internet
Online
UK, US
Website
CD-ROM, DVD
PDF, TIFF, JPG

Abstracts

Articles must be accompanied by an abstract of three or four sentences (up to 200 words), which should attract readers, and should be written as a direct summary of the article. Use questions to attract attention; try not to use phrases like ‘the author describes’ or ‘the article covers’.

Style

Submitted texts should conform as closely as possible to the Art libraries journal conventions for punctuation and word usage. Failure to observe these guidelines may result in your article being returned for further formatting. A copy of the journal can be supplied to new contributors as a model.

We use British English spelling. If you use automated spelling and grammar checking, set your language setting to English (UK). The Chicago manual of style, (16th ed., University of Chicago Press, 2010), should be consulted for grammar and style questions. Use the Shorter Oxford English dictionary (6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2007) for
guidance on contemporary usage in spelling and hyphenation. With particular reference to words ending in 'ise' or 'ize' or 'yse' and derivatives, please note that the ALJ favours 'ize' and its derivatives (however there are some exceptions, which can be found on the following webpage http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/ize-ise-or-yse.)

• When citing the title of a publication or part of a publication, capitalize only the first word and all proper nouns.
• Use one space after a full stop and other forms of punctuation.
• Avoid serial commas, or commas after i.e. and e.g. (e.g. Monet, Picasso and Gauguin).

Quotations

Short (fewer than 25 words) passages of quotation should be enclosed in single quotation marks ('...'). Double quotation marks ("...") are used only to denote direct speech within a quoted passage already enclosed in single quotation marks. Punctuation should come after the quotation marks, unless it is part of the quote, in which case it will come before
the closing quotation mark.

Longer quotations (more than 25 words, such as this one) should not be in quotation marks. They should be indented as a block within the text.

Illustrations

Please refer to the guidelines provided by Cambridge University Press here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/journals/journals-artwork-guide.

Images may be used to amplify the text, and should ideally be TIFF or EPS files. They should be sent as separate files and must be clearly labelled and numbered, with accompanying captions listed at the end of the article. Copyright clearance and payment of reproduction fees are the author’s responsibility and full acknowledgement of sources must be included. Images provided in colour will be printed in colour and will appear in colour online.

References (includes both notes and bibliographic citations)

List citations and notes under the heading ‘References’ at the end of the article.

Please do not use automatic footnotes/endnotes available in word processing packages: they must be removed and re-typing the references manually risks losing the correct data.

References in the text should be followed by a superscript Arabic numeral (not in parentheses) immediately following the relevant passage, word or phrase, and after any punctuation.

Contributors should consult The Chicago manual of style, 16th ed. for the preferred format for citations. The online Quick Guide will answer most questions http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.

Author credit
The author credit follows any references and/or appendices. All information except the first line should be given in italics: Given name and family name (no academic or other titles, qualifications, etc.)

Title of post
Name of institution
Street (etc.)
City or town and postcode
State, province, etc.
Country (USA, UK, etc.)
Email address

Review Preparation

The Reviews Editor will supply the reviewer with the lead citation for the review. This will include a complete bibliographic citation, pagination, description of the number and type of illustrations, standard number and price and/or availability of the item.

Reviews should be written for the art, design and architecture librarian and visual resources curator to use as a selection aid and for reference self-education. The following should be considered and noted in the review when relevant:
• analysis of the item’s content
• intended audience or reader level
• style and quality of writing, design and production
• type and quality of illustrations or reproductions
• evaluative comments, comparing to other works on the same subject
• scholarly apparatus (e.g. indexes, appendixes, bibliographies)
• physical structure (e.g. durability of binding, signatures, paper quality)

Reviews of one-volume publications should generally be 1,000 words in length or less. Comparative reviews of two or more publications, and reviews of multi-volume sets, should run to no more than 2,000 words without prior consultation with the Reviews Editor.

Due dates generally allow three months’ time for preparation of reviews and the editor relies on timely submissions in order to keep the reviews section on schedule. Reviews submitted after deadline may or may not be included in a later issue as space permits.

Titles reviewed for Art libraries journal should not have been reviewed for another publication by the same reviewer, and reviewers should disclose any involvement with the production or authorship of the item under discussion.

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 – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. 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.