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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

  • Research articles appearing in JREP should be from 9,000 to 11,000 words in length (approximately 35-45 pages), including tables and figures, references, and appendices; only under unusual conditions will the editors allow longer manuscripts to appear. Appendices may be placed on a website for publication to conform to the page limits but must be included for review.
  • Research notes should be 3,000 to 5,000 words in length (approximately 12-15 pages) and are meant to communicate single findings, expansions on or replications of existing research, new methodological approaches, or other contributions that do not merit a longer research article. While these are shorter pieces, they should be prepared in a similar fashion to research articles and will be subject to the same peer review process.
  • Book reviews should be 500 to 1200 words in length (approximately 2-5 pages) and should be on a recently released book (published no more than 1 year prior to the review) relevant to the journal’s content. If there is a book you would like to review for JREP, please email jrepbooks@gmail.com.
  • The entire manuscript (including notes and references) must be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and 12-point font (preferably Times New Roman or Garamond).
  • The author must attach a separate file containing a title page, with his or her full contact information (including email address, telephone number and institutional affiliation) and an abstract of 200 words or less. More information on how to prepare your abstract can be found here.
  • The separate manuscript file with all identifying information removed should begin with the text of the paper, not with a title and abstract. Identifying information includes acknowledgments of funding, student assistance, or other institutional or personal identifications that could identify the author(s). More information on anonymising your manuscript can be found here.
  • Placement of tables or figures should be cited in the text after the paragraph of first mention as follows:


                       [table 1 about here]


  • The publisher will be responsible for placing artwork, tables or figures, as well as converting endnotes to footnotes. Information about preparing artwork and graphics for submission can be found here.
  • Appendices, tables, and figures should be numbered consecutively within each category throughout the article and be included on separate pages appearing after the reference section in listed order. Figures should be ready for photographic reproduction; they cannot be redrawn by the publisher. Charts, graphs, or other artwork should be professionally rendered or computer generated. Photographs should be clearly printed and should remain legible after a 50% reduction.
  • Appendices should be no longer than 20 pages. Exceptions to the 20-page limit may be given at the discretion of the editor if the material is deemed necessary for the article or the peer review process. Requests for exceptions should be made during the original manuscript submission.
  • There is no charge for including color figures in the online version of the Journal but it must be clear that color is needed to enhance the meaning of the figure, rather than simply being for aesthetic purposes.
  • Parenthetical references and notes should conform to the APSA Style Manual. Authors should include full volume, issue, and page numbers for article references and page numbers for book chapters. Author’s acknowledgments or other personal notes will appear as an unnumbered note at the foot of the first page. Notes should be numbered consecutively throughout the article.
  • Endnotes for content (not references) should be used rather than footnotes and should be employed sparingly.
  • Originality and copyright: Papers with multiple authors are reviewed with the assumption that all authors concur with its submission. A Copyright Transfer Agreement, with certain specified rights reserved by the author, must be signed and returned to the Editor by senior authors of accepted manuscripts, prior to publication.
  • For general guidelines for preparing a manuscript for submission, please refer to the APSA Style Manual for Political Science for citation, footnotes, references, and other style issues.


Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For further 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.

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. 

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.

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

This journal requires all authors to include a statement of funding in their manuscript. 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. Author not in receipt of funding should include the following statement: ‘This research did not receive any specific financial support.'

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

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

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

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. 

Author Hub

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