Submitting an Article Online

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Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript:

Length

• Research articles must be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, including all notes but not including the reference list/bibliography. Under special circumstances, articles up to 10,000 words may be accepted for publication. Authors are encouraged to keep notes to an absolute minimum, such as in cases where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.
• Practice notes must be between 2,000 and 4,000 words, including all notes but not including the reference list/bibliography. As with articles, please keep notes to the bare minimum.
• Commentaries should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words. In most circumstances, notes and reference lists/bibliographies should not be included. Please note that commentaries are welcome from distinguished specialists and that readers interested in submitting a commentary piece should discuss the content with the editors before submitting a manuscript.
• Reviews should be around 1,000 words and should focus upon a single book, edited volume or seminal report. However, book reviews should also attempt to place the work being reviewed within the broader literature on a particular subject and may include references. Somewhat different from traditional book reviews, a review for Stability should carefully consider the potential accessibility and utility of reviewed works to policy-makers and practitioners.

Capitalisation of titles

• Capitalise all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and subordinate conjunctions (i.e. as, because, although).
• Use lowercase for all articles, coordinate conjunctions and prepositions.

Examples:

• Slip-Sliding on a Yellow Brock Road: Stabilization Efforts in Afghanistan
• Globalisation with a Twist:  Stability, Volatility and Fragility All in One

NOTE: Tier 1 subheads should follow the same rule as the titles. For lower-level subheads, only capitalise first letter (plus proper nouns).

Language
Articles must be submitted in English. Authors are welcome to use American or British spellings and grammar as long as they are used consistently. Some of the key differences between English and American English include the following:

• Programme (UK) vs. Program (US)
• Labour (UK) vs. Labor (US)
• Centre (UK) vs. Center (US)
• Demobilise (UK) vs. Demobilize (US)
• 13 January 2011 (UK) vs. January 13, 2011 (US)

Please note that when referring to proper nouns and normal institutional titles, you should always use the official, original spelling. For instance, it is World Health Organization, not World Health Organisation.

Grammar
As with language, American or English spelling and grammar rules may be used as long as they are used consistently. For instance, you may use a serial comma (red, white, and blue) or not (red, white and blue).

Numbers
We are happy for authors to use either words or figures to represent large figures (i.e. one million or 1,000,000) as long as the usage is consistent within an article. For numbers between zero and twelve we would recommend using words rather than figures, except for when it is a part of a dataset or presented in a table.  

When referring to a percentage, please use the words ‘per cent’ rather than the symbol %, again except for when it is a part of a dataset or presented in a table.

Currencies

• Use £ for British Pound Sterling, € for Euro, e.g. £50, €100.
• Use US$, C$, NZ$, A$ to distinguish between the different dollar currencies.

Quotation marks
Please use single quotation marks except for quotes within another speech, in which case double quotation marks are used.

Acronyms & Abbreviations
With abbreviations, the crucial goal is to ensure that the reader – particularly one who may not be fully familiar with the topic or context being addressed – is able to follow along. Spell out almost all acronyms on first use, indicating the acronym in parentheses immediately thereafter. Use the acronym for all subsequent references. You do not need to spell out abbreviations for US, UK, EU, UN and DC, as in Washington, DC.

Images & Figures
Unless it provides key information related to your submission, do not include photographs/pictures. Such images may ultimately be removed from your piece at the editors’ discretion. Figures, including graphs and diagrams, are, however, acceptable if they are professionally and clearly presented. If a figure is not easy to understand or does not appear to be of a suitable quality, you will be asked to re-render or omit it.

NOTE: Place your images, figures and tables (see below) exactly where you would like them to appear in the article. Do not place figures at the end of the article or in a separate document. if possible submit figure files in colour and at a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi preferred), and the file size should not be more than 20MB per file.

Tables
The same principles which apply to figures apply to tables. They should be necessary and should not repeat significant pieces of information already included in the text.

Use of footnotes/endnotes
Please use endnotes rather than footnotes (which we will refer to as ‘Notes’ at the end of the article, before ‘References’). All notes should be kept to the bare minimum and only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed. Avoid using endnotes for purposes of referencing; use in-text citations instead.  

In-text citations
Authors are strongly encouraged to use parenthetical citations according to the Chicago style (Adam 1984: 120ff.) For publications authored and published by organisations, use the short form of the organisation’s name or its acronym in lieu of the full name. For instance, do NOT do the following (International Committee of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2000); instead, you should write (ICRC 2000). Also, please do not include URLs (web addresses) in parenthetical citations.

References
References containing works cited within an article will be listed at the end of the article, in alphabetical order of authors’ surnames). All reading materials should be included in ‘References’ – even works which may not have been cited within an article but which the author wishes to share with the reader (for these, the author should provide additional information in endnotes explaining the relevance of the work).

References

This journal uses the Harvard (author-date) system – see below for examples of how to format:

Books:

Adam, D J 1984 Stakeholder analysis. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Silverman, D F and Propp, K K (eds.) 1990 The active interview. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Achebe, C 1995 Colonialist Criticism. In: Ashcroft, B et al The Post Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 57–61.

NOTE: If multiple works by the same author are being listed, please re-type the author’s name out for each entry, rather than using a long dash.

Journal articles:

Martin, L 2010 Bombs, bodies and biopolitics: Securitizing the subject at airport security. Social and Cultural Geography, 11(1): 17-34. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360903414585

NOTE: Please include DOIs for journal articles where possible.

Newspaper articles:

Tate, P 2007 Illicit organ trade increasing. The Jordan Times, 6 June, p. 3.

Conference papers:

Lynch, M 2003 Dialogue in an age of terror. In: The Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA on 18 August 2003, pp. 4-7.

Organisational publications/Grey literature:

World Health Organization 2010 The world health report – Health systems financing: the path to universal coverage. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO.

Theses and dissertations:

Yudis, A 2004 Failed responsibility of the media in the war on Iraq. Unpublished thesis (PhD), University of Manchester.

Webpages / PDFs:

Pascual, Amb. C 2005 Stabilization and Reconstruction: Building peace in a hostile environment. Prepared statement to Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 16 June 2005. Available at http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/crs/rls/rm/48644.htm [Last accessed 14 August 2012].

However, if following this particular system presents real difficulties then please contact the editors at info@stabilityjournal.org so that we can consider your particular circumstances.

Author contact details

Whilst there will not be a space for full author biographies in the article itself, it is our practice to insert the affiliations and contact details in the space (ideally between 3-6 lines) on the bottom left hand corner of the first page of each article. Please include full postal and email addresses.

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for both the print and the online editions of the journal.
3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
4. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. Where available, URLs and DOIs for the references have been provided.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, this includes following the instructions to ensure blind peer review.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Publication Fees

Stability’s open access model is funded by grants, paid special collections, and the collection of Article Processing Charges from authors. We ask that those authors who have access to funds earmarked for APCs (via a research grant or through their institution) use those funds to cover the £250 APCs of their publication in Stability. Authors without access to such funds should indicate so during the initial submission process.

The APC covers all publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc) and ensures that all of the content is fully open access. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and allows the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators and institution library, as funds may be available to you.

After submitting your paper, you will receive an email from the publisher giving you the option to either make payment arrangements or apply for a waiver of the Article Processing Charge. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the Editor-in-Chief at gburt@secgovcentre.org.