BJHS Formatting Guide:
It is the authors’ (and guest editors’ if applicable) responsibility to ensure that submissions are correctly formatted according to the following style guide. Submissions that have not been formatted appropriately may be returned to authors for correction.
Articles should be submitted with all text double-spaced with a margin, in Times New Roman Font, size 12 (this applies to the main text and endnotes).
We can only accept submissions in the format of Microsoft Word Files. Please do not submit PDFs or documents in other formats.
The author’s name/details, should be omitted until reviewing is completed. Once the paper is accepted for publication, please insert name at top of paper, institutional address(es), and email address. Acknowledgements should be placed at the end of the main paper.
Please include an abstract of 150–200 words after the title.
Long quotations should be inset. Short quotations should be given single quotation marks, but quotes within quotes have double quotation marks.
Spelling should follow the Oxford English Dictionary.
There should be no section heading for the introduction.
Dates should be in the order day, month, year, with no commas between. 12 April 1979.
Endnote reference numbers in the main text should always be at the end of sentences and come after a full stop – only one at the end of a sentence.
All papers should be rigorously documented. References to primary and secondary sources must be set as endnotes, not as footnotes, and typed in double spacing and numbered consecutively.
Cite as follows:
1 Boris Smetov and Dmitri Blogski, Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn (tr. Robert Roe), 5 vols., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1886–1914, vol. 3, p. iii, pp. 237–8.
Note: if a book title has a sub-title there should be a colon separating both.
2 John Doe, ‘Searching for gravity waves’, in Andrew Burn and Zigmund Trent (eds.), The History of Physics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 22–4.
Note: book titles have all words capitalized but for article titles only the first word is capitalized. The names of disciplines e.g. biology, are not capitalized in article titles. Note that publishing details are not in brackets.
3 Doe, op. cit. (2), pp. 114-17. Always use ‘op. cit.’ to refer to previously cited references. Do not use ‘ibid’.
4 Nicodemus Brown, ‘Developments of the cathode ray’, Journal of Physics (1972) 7 (2), pp. 20-31, 28.
Spell out journal titles. Give complete page run of articles cited and, where appropriate, the page number to which the citation refers.
5 John Herschel to George Peacock, 17 May 1836, Herschel Papers, Royal Astronomical Society, London (subsequently HP), Box 1234, 56.
Please add semi-colons between citations.
Two or more initials should not have a space between them. E.g. S.R.E. Werrett.
Citing websites:
Name of author, ‘Title’, Journal (date – day, month, year) issue number, http…, accessed [12 May 2019].
For manuscript sources please supply whatever information is necessary for the reference to be found. Subsequent references can be cited by name, date, abbreviated source, box, page or folio number.
Images:
All images accompanying the original paper should be low-resolution files, sent in a separate MS word file. The figure captions ONLY should be included in the main paper, near the preferred place for the picture to appear.
Please note – if your paper is accepted for publication in the BJHS – that images are included in the word count for each paper. These are currently 610 words for a full-page image, and 305 words for a half page, but it is CUP who decides which it will be, when they are typesetting the document.
Final submissions of high-resolution JPEG or TIF images should be sent to BJHS once the paper has been approved for publication and have all relevant copyright permissions cleared - by email if the files are small, or by a file transfer system i.e. Dropbox. These image files should be titled e.g. [First author surname] Fig 1.tif. Please note, they may appear as colour or black and white online but will only appear in black and white in any printed version. We normally state a maximum of 6 images.
Resolution: colour and black and white halftone images must be saved at 300 dpi (dots per inch). Cambridge University Press decide whether images appear as half or full page.
Line drawings should be submitted electronically, saved at 1000 dpi, or 1200 dpi if very fine line weights have been used. Combination figures must be saved at a minimum of 600 dpi.
Permission to reproduce material is entirely the author’s responsibility and should be cited where given. At proof stage authors will be asked by CUP to provide evidence of permissions, which may be provided in electronic form.
Further notes:
Please be aware that the Journal does NOT request urgent Article Processing Charge (APC) payment into non-CUP accounts. Any such request should be reported to [email protected].
If authors request Open Access, copies of articles will be made available subject to the terms of a choice of Creative Commons licences: CC-BY, CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND.
For more information on Open Access, copyright terms and submitting artwork please visit the Cambridge.org/core/journals website.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.