Classical Quarterly: Guidance for Contributors (before submission) | Supplementary materials | Policy on prior publication | ORCID | Authorship and contributorship | Author affiliations | Competing interests | Author Hub | English language editing services
Classical Quarterly: Guidance for Contributors (before submission)
1) Scope
a) Classical Quarterly publishes articles on the literature, language, philosophy and history of ancient Greece and Rome (broadly conceived) down to approximately the end of the sixth century A.D.
b) The journal does not publish articles whose primary focus is on pedagogical topics or on post-classical receptions of antiquity.
c) The journal publishes articles relating to the history of scholarship after the end of classical antiquity only when they provide new insights into the ancient evidence under discussion.
2) Manuscript Preparation
a) Submissions to Classical Quarterly should be
- Anonymized.
- No longer than 12,000 words (inclusive of footnotes and abstract), though please note that this is a maximum, not a target. Classical Quarterly welcomes shorter pieces, including very short ones (less than 1,000 words). Referees are asked to comment on whether the length of an article is proportional to its significance, especially in the case of long articles (c. 9,000 words and over).
- Exclusive to Classical Quarterly (i.e. not already published, including online self-publication, and not being reviewed for publication elsewhere).
- Written in accurate English in the journal’s style, as detailed below.
- Accompanied by an abstract and keywords, as detailed below.
3) Style
a) If your piece is accepted for publication, you will be responsible for putting it into the journal’s style, which is detailed in the separate document 'CQ Guidance for Contributors (detailed house style)'. (You may of course choose to adopt the journal’s style in full from the beginning, and if your piece is accepted, this will save you time in the long run; but there is no requirement to do this.)
b) However, these stylistic points must be followed before submission (your piece will not be sent out to referees until they are):
- Use Times New Roman for languages written in the Roman alphabet.
- Use New Athena Unicode for Greek.
- Use some other Unicode font for languages written in other alphabets.
- Use 12 pt font throughout (including footnotes).
- Double-space your article throughout (including footnotes).
- Number footnotes consecutively; do not use endnotes.
- Put brief references in the main text.
- Put lists of references and bibliographical details in the footnotes, not as a bibliography at the end of the article.
- List works repeatedly cited in a footnote at the beginning of the article.
- Cited references in full on the first occasion, and then in the form ‘Vlastos (n. 9), 245–6’. Note the space after ‘n.’, and the comma+space after the closing parenthesis.
4) Abstract and keywords
a) Your article should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 250 words, and between six and eight keywords.
b) Your abstract should be written in the third person (‘This article argues...’), not the first person.
c) Your abstract should make clear your article’s argument, methodology (where appropriate) and conclusions, providing an overview and indicating the key points at stake, but without going into detail.
d) As far as possible, your abstract should be comprehensible to non-specialists within and beyond the discipline of classical studies.
e) 250 words is an upper limit, not a target; your abstract may be much briefer, especially in cases of very short articles.
5) Copyright and permissions
a) Submissions will be expected to contain original work and should not have been published in abridged or other form elsewhere.
b) It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors grant an exclusive licence for subscription articles, or a non-exclusive licence for open access articles, to The Classical Association.
c) Any requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled on behalf of The Classical Association by Cambridge University Press. This will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible and will protect the rights of the author and the Press.
d) In granting an exclusive licence for subscription articles, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that The Classical Association is acknowledged as the original authority for publication, and Cambridge University Press is notified in writing and in advance. Authors reusing material from their open access articles should acknowledge original publication in CQ.
e) Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the relevant authorities for the reproduction of any illustration or an extract, for both print and online formats. Authors are responsible for any reproduction costs or permission fees incurred. Authors must ensure that all permission enquiries and copyright forms are completed before sending a submission to the Journal.
f) The following is provided as a guide. If there is any doubt, please contact the Editors for advice.
- For a copyright prose work, it is recommended that permission is
obtained for the use of
- extracts longer than 400 words
- a series of extracts totalling more than 800 words, of which any one extract is more than 300 words
- an extract or series of extracts comprising one-quarter of the work or more.
- For poetry:
- an extract of more than 40 lines
- series of extracts totalling more than 40 lines
- an extract comprising one-quarter or more of a complete poem.
6) Data protection
a) The details of authors submitting to Classical Quarterly will be securely held by the editorial office as part of the record of the peer-review process.
b) If your manuscript is accepted your personal details (name, contact information, affiliation) will be shared with CUP and any third-party vendors they work with as part of the publication process.
c) Under the GDPR, you have the right to request a copy of the data we hold about you, to ask for corrections to the data or to ask to be forgotten.
d) For more information please see the ICO guidelines or contact [email protected].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
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.