Journal of Disaster Studies

Business inquiries

University of Pennsylvania Press
Journals Division
3905 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-4112
Phone: 215-898-6261
journals@pobox.upenn.edu 

The Journal of Disaster Studies is now accepting submissions.

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Here is a link to our Call for Papers.

Submission Guidelines

JOURNAL OF DISASTER STUDIES

University of Pennsylvania Press

Submission Guidelines

I. About the Journal

Journal of Disaster Studies is an open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes the work of disaster researchers around the world. The journal foregrounds historically and theoretically framed analyses of both slow and abrupt disaster, questioning how disasters have been designated, conceptualized, and politicized. The journal seeks to define and foster disaster justice as a key concern and theme. The aim of the journal is to advance interpretive theory, methods, and empirical research that supports disaster prevention and response.

The journal publishes articles that examine how disasters are anticipated, experienced, governed, and understood, conceptualizing “disaster” expansively to guide analysis of a wide array of hazards, risks, and disruptions. The journal also publishes articles that critically examine methods and concepts used in disaster research, literature reviews, and book reviews.

Journal of Disaster Studies is platinum open access: it is free for both authors and readers. We do not have article publishing charges. All content is published under a Creative Commons license.

II. Types of Articles

While you may always contact a member of the Editorial Collective before submitting a manuscript, you are welcome to submit research essays, research notes, commentaries, profiles and visualizations without pre-announcing them. For other types of manuscripts, please contact a member of the Editorial Collective before submitting. As an online journal, we are open to innovative forms of scholarship that do not fall under any of the categories listed above; please speak to a member of the Editorial Collective if you have an idea for one.

We also encourage contributions from early career scholars, authors from less affluent countries, and non-native English speakers. All abstracts of published papers will be available in Korean, Spanish, and English. Abstracts in additional languages will also be published when available.

The journal is open to submissions in all languages so long as a member of the editorial collective or editorial board is available to steward the manuscript through our review process. When an article in a language other than English is published in the journal, abstracts in English will accompany the article. Please contact a member of the Editorial Collective for more details on submitting articles in languages other than English.

III.  Manuscript Guidelines

All manuscripts must be submitted via Scholastica, our journal management system, at https://jds.scholasticahq.com. When uploading to Scholastica, you will be asked to include an abstract (200 to300 words), up to 5 keywords, and contact details. We will use the abstract and keywords to find peer reviewers. Scholastica accepts .doc, .docx., and .pdf files.

Abstracts should answer the following questions: 1. What is the empirical, methodological or conceptual focus of the article? From what discipline(s) or intellectual tradition(s) does it emerge? 2. What frameworks are used or advanced in this article? 3. What sources, evidence, or data does the article use? 4. What region(s) and time period(s) does the article address? What is the scope of the article? 5. What are the main findings and the implications for research, practice, or society?

The journal’s audience is international and interdisciplinary, and therefore we are not prescriptive about a specific format of a submission. However, in accordance with best practices in the field of disaster studies, the misnomer “natural disaster” should not occur except in quotations or when critiqued.

Any manuscript submitted to this journal should be original: it should not have been published before in its current, or similar, form, and it should not be under consideration elsewhere. Exceptions to this rule are Dialogues that may have been previously published in a different audio-visual format (e.g. as a podcast or a livestream). Your work must not infringe any copyright.

We use a double-anonymous peer review system, meaning that both reviewers and authors are anonymous to each other. Manuscripts that pass the initial editorial screening are reviewed by two experts. Please be sure that your manuscript does not include your name or make you otherwise identifiable. In particular, if you cite your own previously-published work, please remove any first-person references to it. If you have a conflict of interest, you must declare it upon submission; this allows the editor to decide how they would like to proceed.

We encourage authors to engage with and cite sources historically excluded from the academy. Where relevant and appropriate, we expect authors to engage with the work of scholars based in the countries about which they are writing.

The Journal of Disaster Studies encourages authors to publish source and supplemental data related to their articles, contributing to a research commons and open science. Such data can include audio, video, image, text, and tabular files. Data will be published on https://disaster-sts-network.org/. Authors will retain copyright through a Creative Commons license.

If the submission is an output of a funded project, the article must reference all sources of external research funding in the acknowledgements section. For articles that result from human subjects research, the institution(s) that approved the research and the protocol number(s) should be included in the manuscript.

Journal of Disaster Studies is an open-access journal, and all content is published under a Creative Commons license. Authors of all accepted articles will be required to grant such a license and certify that they have the authority to do so.

IV. Style

The Journal of Disaster Studies uses the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style; when in doubt about a question of style, please refer to CMOS.

As an interdisciplinary journal, we permit either in-text (author-date) citations or footnotes, depending on the author’s preference. Articles should consistently and accurately use either of Chicago’s citation styles, but not both. Articles using footnotes do not need a bibliography, and they should use shortened citations on second reference. A quick citation guide is available at https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.

When submitting a manuscript, please make the entire file, including notes and works’ cited list, is double-spaced.

While articles do not need to use headings and subheadings, if yours does, please number them hierarchically as 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc.

Please ensure that all images, tables, etc., are included with your submitted manuscript and include a number and a caption. Captions should include a credit including who made the image and/or where it is archived. Note that authors will be responsible for ensuring that we have copyright permission to print any images.

Figures and tables should be included in the main body of the article. All figures (charts, diagrams, line drawings, screenshots, and photographs) should also be submitted in high resolution electronically. Both color and black and white files are accepted. All figures should be supplied at the highest resolution/quality possible with numbers and text clearly legible. Please submit images in .jpeg or .tiff formats.

Block quotes (usually quoted material five lines or more in length, sans quotation marks) should be as usual double-spaced but indented a half-inch, with an extra line above and below. Use the ruler function to indent the text, instead of using the tab key.

For English-language articles, we do not prefer any form of standard English, and as long as they are consistent, authors may choose to write in American English or British English. Accents and any other special characters must be in place throughout the manuscript. Please alert the editor if your manuscript contains special characters or languages other than English.

Editorial Board and Advisory Committee

Join Our Roster of Book Reviewers

Journal of Disaster Studies aims to be the central venue across disciplines for discussion and debate of books about disaster. To avoid conflicts of interest, in general we assign book reviews, rather than having reviewers volunteer to write specific reviews. If you are interested in joining our roster of book reviewers, please fill out the form below.

If you are the author of a new book that you would like to be reviewed in the journal, please have your publisher contact Jacob Remes and/or Ksenia Chmutina.

If you are interested in reviewing something that is not a book, for instance an exhibition, film, or event, please contact any member of the Editorial Collective to discuss your idea.