Aims and Scope

International Organization (IO) seeks to publish the best and most innovative scholarly manuscripts on international relations. IO features articles that propose generalizable theories, improve social scientific knowledge, and/or offer new empirical insights. A study that does not emphasize any international (or cross-border) phenomenon as a major cause or effect falls outside the journal’s domain. Although we may publish a manuscript that proposes a solution to a current world problem, we prefer to publish those that also apply or generate theoretical ideas, provide broader empirical analyses, or contribute to scholarly debates. Given IO’s scope and readership, manuscripts that have a single country (including the United States) as their focus should address how the work speaks to broader themes. In some cases, the role of a particular country in the global system may justify a single country focus. In other cases, authors could discuss how the manuscript’s theoretical argument or empirical evidence may or may not generalize to other countries.

If a manuscript meets these general guidelines regarding the scope of IO, but it addresses a topic that has not been featured in the journal in the past, we welcome its submission. Our editorial team only can review – and potentially publish – what authors submit. We welcome work that fits IO’s remit, whether the topic is “old” or “new.”

One or more members of the editorial team evaluates each submission to decide whether the manuscript is appropriate for external review. Approximately sixty percent of submissions are sent to reviewers. IO’s reviewers have high standards: approximately five percent of manuscripts submitted to IO are ultimately published by the journal. We therefore encourage authors to seek comments and feedback from colleagues before submitting their work to IO.

Types of Submissions

The journal accepts the following types of submissions:

• Research Article*
• Research Note*
• Review Essay* (Please note that IO will stop accepting Review Essay submissions on June 30, 2024)
• Essay*

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

Research Article: Research articles (maximum 14,000 words) present new theoretical arguments and/or empirical evidence that constitute a substantial advance of knowledge.

Research Note: Research notes (maximum 8,000 words) also advance our collective knowledge, but often within a narrower range. For example, research notes can present new empirical evaluations of important existing theoretical propositions. Alternatively, research notes could focus on theoretical contributions without providing new empirical evidence.  While shorter than research articles, IO research notes are nonetheless substantial in length, and our expectations are commensurate with that length. If a note introduces a new dataset, for example, we expect the note also will provide some theoretically-driven analysis of the dataset.

Review Essay: Review essays (maximum 14,000 words) survey recent research and broader themes in a particular area of study, bring important new insights to scholarly understanding, and offer suggestions for future research priorities. Review essays may be based on a set of books but also could draw on scholarship published in article form. Please note that IO will stop accepting Review Essay submissions on June 30, 2024.

Essay: Essays (maximum 10,000 words) propose innovative ideas that will be of interest to a broad audience of international relations scholars.  They may offer new theoretical frameworks, elucidate new phenomena, identify overlooked problems, introduce new concepts, and/or discuss how important events relate to and drive improvements in existing theories.  Essays are intended to allow space for thought and reflection on the key areas of research that concern scholars of international relations.  The goal of an essay is to move our field forward analytically.

Examples of essays might include, but are not limited to:

a. A state of the field essay, which synthesizes existing work to structure future research.

b. An application essay, which discusses how a particular theory or set of theories help us to understand specific events or phenomena, and conversely how those events and phenomena may suggest revisions to existing theory.

c. An agenda-setting essay, which might introduce a new concept or idea, bring together existing concepts and ideas in new ways, or identify previously overlooked phenomena that might drive future research.

d. An expository essay, which provides careful descriptive evidence of a theoretically important concept or phenomenon.

Special Issue Proposals

IO invites innovative proposals for special issues on focused topics. Special issues are designed and edited by guest editors and include an introductory or concluding essay written by the guest editors. Special issues should focus attention on promising ideas and important subjects in international relations and advance the development of international relations theory.

Proposals for special issues are submitted to the editors (via the Editorial Manager system). They should include:

• A preliminary draft of the introductory or concluding essay by the guest editor or editors. This essay, ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 words in length, should present the main argument, ideas, or debate to be developed by the special issue. The most convincing essays will emphasize the original contributions of the project as a whole and its potential to influence theory and other scholarship. The planned volume should be differentiated briefly from the closest rival works already available or in preparation. The essay also should identify each contributor and preliminary paper title, and explain in a paragraph or two how each paper is expected to contribute to the issue’s purposes.
• A list of proposed papers, including titles, authors, and abstracts.
• A curriculum vitae for each editor, and optionally for other contributors.

Please contact the editorial office for more information on special issues.

Preparing your article for submission

Manuscript Preparation

Offer your readers vigorous, concise prose in the active voice. Choose vivid verbs and expressions that clearly communicate your meaning. Avoid using academic, “insider” jargon. Use the full name of a person, organization, program, or agency when mentioning it for the first time in your manuscript, and provide titles and explanatory phrases when appropriate. To enhance accessibility, avoid overusing abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms. Use gender-neutral language whenever possible. Double-check the spelling of non-English words, and include special characters such as accents and umlauts.

Weak or extraneous prose detracts from the strength of your argument. Scrutinize your draft for potential deletions, such as expressions, sentences, and paragraphs whose absence would not harm the argument. Avoid complex constructions where simpler phrasing would do, distractions from the main line of argument, and excessive repetition. Most manuscripts can be improved with tightening. For concrete advice, consider: On Writing Well by William Zinsser, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, and The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein.

Manuscripts submitted to IO must conform to the following guidelines:

1. Omit self-references after the title page that reveal your identity. When referring to your own past work, use the third person (e.g. “Matthews 2022” rather than “Author,” and “they” rather than “I/we”) so as to not reveal your identity.

2. Include figures and tables as part of the main manuscript.

3. Include a complete reference list.

4. Number the pages consecutively.

5. Submit an abstract, word count, and acknowledgments separately from the manuscript. Do not include any identifying information in the abstract.

6.  Make sure you have adhered to the journal's policies on publishing ethics and research transparency.  

Any paper accepted for publication will be required to use short author-date footnotes rather than parenthetical references. We do not require IO-style citations at the submission stage, as long as the citations conform to a generally accepted standard. The reference list should contain the complete facts of publication or availability for each source cited. Include only those sources directly cited in the text. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we will provide further guidance regarding preparation for copy-editing.

Recent research has shown that articles and books published by female authors are cited less frequently than articles and books written by male authors. We expect there also may be citation biases associated with race, ethnicity, and the geographic location of scholars. We ask you to be mindful of these biases when preparing your submission and inclusive in your citation practices.

For Overleaf users, an International Organization article template is available. 

Originality

IO does not evaluate works already published elsewhere (in journals or books), or currently under review elsewhere.  A manuscript is not sufficiently original to enter the IO review process if half or more of the ideas and/or evidence have been published, or is under review, elsewhere. As a partial exception, a study that is promised to a future edited volume normally can be published by IO if the volume will appear at least six months after the article’s publication in IO and the author has arranged for the IO editor’s agreement at the time of manuscript submission.

We also do not evaluate revised versions of works previously submitted to IO. Again, if more than half of the material in a manuscript has been previously submitted to IO, we do not consider it sufficiently original to merit review. We require corresponding authors to affirm the originality of submissions. If a question of overlap with other work arises during the review process, the managing editor will ask authors to provide a copy of the other work.

Length

The word count limit for research articles is 14,000 words; for research notes, the limit is 8,000 words. These limits include tables, figures and notes; they do not include the bibliography/reference list. Supplementary material intended for separate online publication only also does not count toward the word limit. We ask authors to provide a word count as part of the submission process. If you are working in Overleaf, please note that the platform’s word counts are often inaccurate; for more accurate word counts of .pdf documents, we recommend the Monterey Language Institute's tool.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

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. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Conflicts of Interest

Should any author submitting a paper to IO believe they or their co-authors have a conflict of interest (COI) with any editor that they, the author, fear may compromise the objectivity of the review process, the author has the right to disclose this conflict and to request that the submission be handled under the alternative review process. The procedures for this process are laid out in the Policy on Conflicts of Interest for IO Editorial Team.

A mechanism for reporting a potential COI is built into the Editorial Manager submission process; only the IO managing editor will have access to this information; they will forward it to the IO Ethics Committee. Under rules of strict confidentiality, the Ethics Committee may request additional information about the potential COI from any editor or from the submitting author. The corresponding author may request that the editor not be informed about the alternative review process request. After reviewing the information provided, the Ethics Committee will determine whether a COI exists and recommend appropriate action to the IO Executive Committee.

IO Ethics Committee: Professor Judith Kelley (Chair), Professor Joshua Kertzer, Professor Edward Mansfield. Contact the committee at coi@iojournal.org.

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.

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 evaluating a manuscript’s main arguments and findings, but which may nonetheless be relevant, may be submitted alongside the manuscript as supplementary material. Supplementary material should be limited to analyses, claims, or supporting information referenced in the text or footnotes of the main article. We strongly encourage authors to limit supplementary material, especially upon initial submission; supplementary material should rarely exceed twenty pages.

While the editors will provide supplementary material to reviewers, the editors also instruct reviewers that they are not required to evaluate supplementary material.

Supplementary material is published online alongside accepted articles, but it is not published in the print edition of the journal. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited; authors should supply them exactly as they are to appear online. Please see Cambridge’s general guidance on supplementary materials for further 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)].