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  6. Preparing your materials
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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. 

Preparing your article for submission

To upload your manuscript and other materials to Democratic Theory, visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/democratic-theory and include the following:

  • An abstract of up to 125 words
  • 5-8 keywords
  • The manuscript
  • Figures and tables, if applicable, as separate files
  • Supplementary materials, if applicable, as separate files
  • A title page containing: 
    • Full names, institutional affiliations and email address of all authors
    • A biographical statement of approximately 50 words for each author
    • Any acknowledgements
    • Statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies, which MUST include the following (more information via the links):

All communications will go via the corresponding author. For more information on Authorship, including the role of the corresponding author, see here.

Corresponding authors also need an ORCID ID, freely available here. ORCID IDs are optional for co-authors. For more information on why ORCID IDs are necessary and useful, see here.

When preparing your manuscript for submission, please note:

  • Manuscript length. Wordcounts include endnotes and all tables and figures, but exclude the abstract, references, any appendices, and all supplementary materials. Over-length manuscripts will be returned to authors. Wordcounts apply to revised manuscripts as well as to original submissions.
  • General presentation and style. The document must be set at the US letter standard size. The entire document (including notes and references) should be double-spaced with 1-inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides and no extra spaces between paragraphs. A 12-point standard font such as Times New Roman is required for all text, including headings, notes, and references. Any unusual characters or diacritics should be flagged by placing the entire word in red type.
  • Journal style. The Democratic Theory style guide is based on The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS, latest edition). Please be aware that the journal uses US punctuation and spelling, following Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Manuscripts accepted for publication that do not conform to the style guide may be rejected or returned to the author for amendment.
  • Referencing and endnotes. Democratic Theory follows the in-text author-date system, with full documentation in the reference list. Democratic Theory accepts submissions in any commonly used referencing style, if applied consistently. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we will ask you to change the referencing to the correct style. Any other notes should be endnotes (using Word’s automatic endnote function) and kept short and to a minimum.
  • File formats. We accept Microsoft Office, PDF and LaTeX files. Microsoft Office and PDF users: Please submit manuscript files, figures and tables, supplementary materials as separate files. Reviewers will receive supplementary materials in the format submitted. Not all reviewers use LaTeX, so please submit a separate supplemental file as PDF or Microsoft Word.
  • Abstract and keywords. Include an abstract of approximately 125 words, and 5-8 keywords. See our guidance on Abstract and Keyword Preparation.
  • Manuscript anonymisation. Democratic Theory uses double-anonymous peer review. Please remove references and citations that identify the authors. Please also remove thanks to colleagues, references to own websites or funded projects, etc. Keep self-citations to a minimum and avoid self-citations to works in progress. Please change the title of papers presented at seminars or conferences. See our general guidelines on anonymising your manuscript.
  • Figures, Tables and Artwork. Please refer to the following guidance. Colour images are permitted at no extra charge. Please submit figures and tables on separate pages. Indicate location of tabular material in your text. Figures and tables not crucial to your argument, or which are longer than one page, we will publish on the Journal website as supplementary material.
  • Permissions for copyrighted material. If your article contains material for which you do not own copyright, including figures, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission to use it from the copyright holder.
  • Use of English language. It is your responsibility to ensure your manuscript is in correct English. You may wish to get it checked by a native speaker if English is not your first language. Review and/or publication may be delayed if there are language problems. Cambridge University Press offers manuscript preparation services, including language editing. Find out more on our language services page. Use of these services (which are at the author’s expense) does not guarantee acceptance or publication of your manuscript.
  • Peer review process. Full details on the peer review process for Democratic Theory can be found here. 

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”. 

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

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 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.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

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 materials. Supplementary materials will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary materials may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will be published with the same metadata as your parent article, and are considered a formal part of the academic record, so cannot be retracted or modified other than via our article correction processes. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please make sure you are familiar with our detailed guidance on supplementary materials prior to submission.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

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 require all corresponding 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 will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

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. 

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 Funding statement above).

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)].

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

Publishing agreement

Before beginning work on the production of any accepted manuscript, Cambridge requires a signed ‘licence to publish’ (copyright) agreement. The process for creating, signing and submitting these agreements is now managed entirely online, which means that there is no need to print, scan, email, or mail anything. Once a manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal, the corresponding author will receive an email inviting them to complete an Information Request Form (IRF) via our digital contract management platform, Ironclad. The information submitted via this form (including information on copyright holder, open access status, etc.) will determine the terms and conditions under which the article will be published, and will be used to generate the licence to publish agreement. The corresponding author will be guided through the process to signature and submission. 

For more information on author publishing agreements, see here.