Style Sheet: Guide for Authors
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Journal of the History of Ideas
3440 Market Street Ste. 450
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2649
Phone: 215-746-7946
Email: jhi@history.upenn.edu
Please follow these guidelines when submitting your article to the Journal of the History of Ideas. The editors reserve the right to make editorial revisions in articles and reviews.
General
- Please submit all manuscripts for consideration through our web-based submission system, ScholarOne: mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/jhi. If you are unable to do so, please contact the editorial office.
- Submitted articles may not exceed 9,000 words, not including footnotes.
- The majority of articles published in the JHI sustain an argument for a minimum of 5,000 words. With rare exceptions, shorter submissions will not be considered.
- Normally, the JHI will not consider for publication articles previously published elsewhere, whether in print or online. Articles made available via university-sponsored open-access repositories are considered published.
- Please eliminate all references that would identify you, in order to facilitate anonymous peer review. To avoid compromising the review process, please do not use the first person in connection with references to your own published work, and use a title that would not be readily available to potential reviewers online, e.g. in a publicly available CV or repeating a conference paper you have given. (Please note that titles can be amended after the review, so you can return to a title of your original choice.)
- Please note that the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate content is not permitted by authors unless there is a clear scholarly purpose for doing so and that purpose is explicitly detailed in the article. Authors must explicitly acknowledge use of LLMs or similar tools (e.g., ChatGPT) by including a note within the manuscript.
- The JHI now offers authors the chance to communicate briefly to potential reviewers any considerations they think might be relevant to the evaluation of the article. If, for example, a specific decision has been taken to leave aside a scholarly engagement, and this might surprise the reviewer, then please signal the rationale. Such a note should not be a comment on the origins of the article, nor should it leave the Executive Editors with any concern that it might compromise the integrity of the review process, in which case the article will be returned to the author for re-submission without the note. You may upload the note as a supplemental file, designated “Author’s Note to Reviewers” in ScholarOne. Notes should not exceed 250 words.
Formatting your document:
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- Please submit your file as a Word document (.doc or .docx); it will be converted to a PDF when you submit it.
- Please be sure that your file does not have visible editorial markups; that is, if you have edited your file with “track changes” or have made comments, remove those markings before submitting your file.
- Please do not “lock” your file.
- The body of the text should be double-spaced, including quotations, using Times New Roman font in 12-point size.
- Left-align all pages (do not justify) and use 1-inch margins on top and bottom, as well as right and left.
- Place page numbers on each page in the top right corner.
- Notes should be numbered consecutively and formatted as footnotes, in Times New Roman font, 10-point size, single-spaced.
- Notes should be used for citation purposes only; please incorporate all discussion and argumentation into the body of the article.
- If you use a citation manager (Zotero, EndNote, RefWorks, etc.), please remove all field codes from your footnotes prior to submitting your manuscript. To do so, please follow the instructions provided by your citation manager. Most citation managers will allow this procedure: 1. Save a working version of your file. 2. In the file you plan to submit: select the text of all your footnotes and press CTRL+6 for Windows, or CMD+6 for Mac. This will change all footnotes to plain text.
- When using quotation marks, periods and commas should be placed inside the closing quotation mark.
- Block quotations should be free of external quotation marks and indented 0.5 inches, flush-left.
- Inclusive page numbers and dates should be typed according to the following examples: 3–17, 23–26, 100–103, 104–7, 124–28, 1002–6, 1115–20, 1496–1504.
- Please use BCE/CE in lieu of BC/AD.
- Spelling, punctuation, and other conventions should follow standard American usage.
Images
- Authors should obtain permission to reproduce any copyrighted materials (e.g., photographs) they wish to include with their articles. Please submit 300 dpi TIFF files. ScholarOne will accept all your files in series. Supply a list of figures and/or tables, including a caption for each, accompanied by a source line and such acknowledgments as are required. If you are unable to submit images in this format, please contact the editorial office.
Quotations in languages other than English
Please use these guidelines when quoting and citing non-English texts and their translations. These guidelines are designed to give readers access to the source in its original language, while also ensuring that JHI articles are immediately accessible to an Anglophone audience.
- All quotations should appear in the body of the article in English. Where essential to the argument, single words or short phrases in the original language may appear in the body of the article.
- If you quote a published English translation, the footnote should include references to both that translation and the relevant passage in the original-language edition.
- If there is no published English translation, please reproduce the quotation in its original language in the footnote and identify the translator, for example “Translation mine.”
- In some circumstances, when the original-language source is readily and widely available, it may be acceptable to omit the original-language text of quotations from the footnotes.
- In cases where standard scholarly translations of quoted texts are widely available, authors may rely upon them for both text and notes according to the professional standards of their discipline.
Citations
The JHI generally follows the current edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, “Documentation I: Notes and Bibliography” (not Author-Date format).
- Notes may be used for citation purposes only. That is, they should contain references to the sources, and may contain quotations in the original language. Notes may not include discursive comments or present additional information.
- The following basic citation examples apply for the first full reference; subsequent references should be shortened to author, short title, and page number. Use shortened citations instead of “ibid” (see CMOS 17th edition, chapter 14.34). See more guidelines regarding notes above.
Book:
Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 200–211.
Translated book:
Markus Fierz, Girolamo Cardano, 1501–1576: Physician, Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams, trans. Helga Niman (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1983), 109.
Article from a collection of essays:
Jelle Kingma, “Spinoza Editions in the Nineteenth Century,” in Spinoza to the Letter: Studies in Words, Texts, and Books, ed. Fokke Akkerman and Piet Steenbakkers (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 273–81.
Book (part of a multivolume work):
Pierre Jurieu, Histoire du Calvinisme et celle du Papisme mises en parallèle (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1683), 1:512–53.
Journal article:
J. H. M. Salmon, “The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism, or Constitutionalism?,” History of Political Thought 17 (1996): 500–522.
- For any author or text treated or discussed in a substantial manner, please use standard critical or scholarly editions, and standard English translations, when they exist.
- Please use full author names in citations, rather than a first initial and last name (except in those cases when the author formats his/her name thus).
- Following the Chicago Manual of Style, non-English titles should be formatted in “sentence style”: the first word of the title and subtitle are capitalized, and the rest of the title is in lower case, with the exception of proper nouns (or those nouns capitalized in the language in question).
Classical references
- The edition, as well as credit for translation, must be specified the first time a work is cited. Please use standard scholarly editions and translations when they exist, unless your argument requires otherwise.
- References to information supplied by a modern editor must include page numbers.
- References to the classical text must include the standard identification numbers for that text, such as book and chapter numbers or Stephanus numbers. Use Arabic numbers for all divisions. Standard abbreviations may be used.
- Plato Republic 360E–361B.
- Cicero De officiis 1.133.
Submission of final draft for publication
- If your article is accepted for publication, you will be asked to submit a finalized manuscript, with all images as needed. Delays at this stage may affect publication date. To avoid delays in production, copyedited drafts and typeset page proofs will be sent to contributors on a strict schedule, in electronic format. The editors will take responsibility for editing and proofreading if they have not received a contributor’s corrections in time to meet production deadlines. The journal reserves the right to charge authors for any excessive amendments to the material at the proof stage.
Copyright and permissions
- It is a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive license to the Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc. Authors will be provided with a copyright transfer agreement that must be signed and returned prior to the publication of any work in the journal. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain print and online permission to quote material from third-party sources and to cover any costs incurred in securing these rights. The editors should be alerted at the earliest opportunity as to any difficulty in securing these third-party rights.
- The JHI follows the guidelines of Penn Press regarding permissions. Please note that after publication in the JHI, you have the nonexclusive right to republish your journal article in any work of which you are the sole author, provided only that you credit the original publication. The credit should include the copyright notice exactly as it appears in the original JHI publication. There is no fee for such use. Further information and guidelines are available at http://journals.pennpress.org/archive-and-digital-repository-policy/.
- The publisher will supply the author of an article with 2 copies of the issue in which his or her work is published; additional copies may be ordered at a discounted rate. Offprints may be ordered through the Penn Press website.
Clusters
The JHI receives regular submissions for “clusters” of articles on a given topic and typically publishes one or two such symposia a year. Recent examples include the symposium “Translation in Action: Global Intellectual History and Early Modern Diplomacy” (82.3) and the symposium “Fascisms and their Afterli(v)es” (82.1).
- Before submitting a cluster of articles, please contact the managing editor for approval: jhi@history.upenn.edu.
- Clusters should reflect the JHI’s commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion among its authors.
- With the exception of article length and submission logistics, all of the instructions on this style guide apply to cluster articles. Authors should adhere to this guide when preparing articles for submission as part of a cluster.
- The total length of the entire cluster (including an introduction and all of the articles and footnotes) should not exceed roughly 30,000 words.
- Once approved, a complete collection of cluster articles should be submitted via e-mail (not ScholarOne) to the managing editor at jhi@history.upenn.edu. For each article, please also send a 100-word abstract, 5–10 keywords, and e-mail contact information for the author.
Review Essays
The Journal of the History of Ideas publishes long review essays. The journal does not publish one-page reviews of individual books in the manner that many journals do.
Review essays are substantial discussions of multiple recent works on a given topic. The word length typically ranges from 5,000 to 9,000 words. Review essays are designed to bring readers up to date on significant developments in the field. We imagine our ideal audience to be the graduate student embarking on dissertation research and trying to understand the lay of the land ahead. No portion of the review essay should have been previously published elsewhere.
Peer review
Depending on the needs of the author and the expertise of the editors, review essays may or may not be sent out for peer review.
Submitting a proposal
Prospective authors may submit proposals for potential review essays through our web-based submission manager, Scholar One. Proposals should be roughly 250 words, including a list of titles (books and/or articles) to be addressed in the proposed essay. (In the submission portal, please upload the proposal as a Word doc where you would upload a regular article; an abstract is not necessary for the proposal.) If the proposal is approved, the author is expected to submit a draft within about six months.
Recently published JHI review essays
Steven Nadler, “The Many Lives of René Descartes”
Sarah Johnson, “Farewell to The German Ideology”
Alisa Zhulina, “The Tyrant and the Martyr: Recent Research on Sovereignty and Theater”
Review Process
- All submissions are read carefully by the JHI’s executive editors; some are then sent out for external peer review. Please be advised that we do not provide evaluative reports on submissions that are not sent out for external review.
- The JHI encourages reviewers to consider the following questions when evaluating a manuscript:
- Does this piece make a significant contribution to scholarship; and if so, what is the nature of that contribution?
- With what scholarly debates does it engage? Does it engage sufficiently with current scholarship; if not, what is missing?
- Are the sources appropriate for the argument? Should additional (or different) sources be used? Are appropriate editions cited?
- Have significant systemically marginalized perspectives been overlooked?
- Does the author make the main argument successfully? Are there points that need fuller development?
- How might this article be improved? How substantial are your recommendations for revision? Might such revisions produce a version that would merit publication in the JHI?
Reviewers are prohibited from using Large Language Models or similar tools (e.g., ChatGPT) during any part of the peer review process as it may violate copyright protection of the author’s material as well as breach confidentiality. For example, reviewers may not upload a manuscript under review into a generative AI platform, nor may they use such tools in the process of writing and editing their reviews of an author’s manuscript, again to ensure confidentiality and privacy and protect copyright.
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