Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. Think
  4. Journal information
  5. Author instructions
  6. Preparing your materials
Journal Home
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. 

Info

Allow content?

This content requires cookies. To view content please update your cookie preferences.

Contributions should be below 4,000 words (unless otherwise agreed with the editor). Very short pieces are welcome.

Please include with your contribution full contact details (including postal), a short abstract, and a brief statement of your position and institution (where relevant). No pdf submissions, please. Use Word or similar.

Info

Allow content?

This content requires cookies. To view content please update your cookie preferences.

The use of jargon and logical notation, especially where unexplained, should be avoided. Please omit notes and references if at all possible.

Format and Style

The editor would be grateful if final submissions were in the Think house style. 

Please use single quotation marks (double when embedded). Please italicize rather than underline.

Where it is absolutely unavoidable that references be included, they should be incorporated into the text (preferably) or else appear as endnotes in the Think style. Examples:

Fred Author, Title of The Book (Place: Publisher, 2002), p. 23.

D. Academic, ‘Title of Paper’, A Journal, vol.1, no.1 (1990), pp. 34-56.

Proofs

Typographical or factual errors only may be changed at proof stage. The publisher reserves the right to charge authors for correction of non-typographical errors.

Offprints

Offprints are not supplied. The first-named author of an article (but not book reviews) receives a PDF file of their contribution free of charge.

Copyright

The policy of Think is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant the Royal Institute of Philosophy a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.

For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.

Copyrighted material

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript.

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, please see the seeking permission to use copyrighted material page for instruction.

Publishing ethics

Please refer to the publishing ethics page while preparing your materials for submission to ensure you comply with the relevant policies.

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. 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.

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.

Accessibility requirements

All articles published by Cambridge are required to meet the accessibility standards outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. To ensure that material published in Cambridge journals is accessible to and understandable by all, authors should carefully consider elements such as colour use, contrast, and text clarity when preparing images and tables. For detailed guidance on image and multimedia file preparation and preferred formats, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide. 

Image, table, and multimedia descriptions: Accessibility materials must be made available for all figures, tables, and multimedia content to be published within the article, including the provision of image descriptions or “alt-text” for all figures. Authors have the opportunity to prepare their own alt-text and video/audio descriptions for all of their relevant materials and submit this to Cambridge as part of the Accessibility Descriptions Submission Form. 

As the subject expert, authors are encouraged to provide their own accessibility materials. For detailed instructions on their preparation, please see our guide to Preparing Accessible Materials. If accessibility materials are required for the publication of your article and not provided with the accepted manuscript files, these will be machine generated for you and made available to review at proof stage. The accuracy of accessibility materials is the responsibility of the author; please ensure these are checked carefully.

Labelling: All illustrative materials should be referred to in your manuscript text as “Figures”. Tables and figures must be cited in the text, must be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and captions must be provided in all cases. Diagrams, graphs, maps, boxes, displayed equations, and code snippets must also be labelled and numbered. For further information, please see Preparing Accessible Materials.