Aims and Scope

The European Political Science Review (EPSR) publishes high quality scholarly research in political science, focusing on the most important debates in the discipline and demonstrating the highest possible standards in conceptualisation, theorisation and methodology. Submissions should emphasise why they are of interest to a broad readership across sub-disciplines and should engage with central theoretical debates in political science.

EPSR welcomes empirical papers based on either qualitative or quantitative methodologies. These papers should be placed in the context of larger (theoretical) debates in the discipline. EPSR also welcomes conceptual and theoretical papers as well as contributions from the field of normative political theory.

EPSR is not concerned solely with European political issues nor is it conceived as exclusively for European scholars. Submissions dealing with global issues and non-European topics are very much welcome.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• State-of-the-Field Review*
• Research Note*

* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver. 

Research Articles: EPSR welcomes empirical papers based on either qualitative or quantitative methodologies. These papers should be placed in the context of larger (theoretical) debates in the discipline. EPSR also welcomes conceptual and theoretical papers as well as contributions from the field of normative political theory. Research articles should not exceed 10,000 words, including references, figures and tables. 

State-of-the-field Reviews: State-of-the-field reviews should provide both a comprehensive summary and also address the future challenges which the field faces. They are expected to critically assess the extant research, put forward stimulating new research questions, and develop specific proposals for advancing any field of political science. State-of-the-field reviews should not exceed 8,000 words, including references.

Research Notes: Research notes should be more focused than articles, and serve to demonstrate a novel perspective on existing research, thus encouraging scholarly debate. They should serve to increase discussion across political science subfields and across disciplines, and be able to reach a broad readership. Research notes should not exceed 5,000 words including references.

EPSR is not concerned solely with European political issues nor is it conceived as exclusively for European scholars. Submissions dealing with global issues and non-European topics are very much welcome. State-of-the-field reviews are often initiated by the editors of the journal, but interested authors are welcome to submit a state-of the-field review following the regular submission procedure and selecting the category ‘state-of-the-field review’. Both the state-of-the-field reviews, research notes and articles follow exactly the same evaluation procedure, and henceforth are referred to as manuscripts.

Preparing your article for submission

We wish the journal’s readership to be as wide and diverse as possible, including both scholars and practitioners. Therefore manuscripts should be written in an accessible manner with a minimum of jargon and insider language.

In addition to our primary concern with the quality of the manuscripts to be published in EPSR, there are several additional considerations for prospective authors:

• In line with the ECPR Statement on Data Access and Research Transparency, authors wishing to submit their research results for publication must consider making public their data except in valid situations for ethical reasons. For authors of quantitative empirical articles, including simulations and experimental work, this comprises the data, code book or description of the variables included in the dataset, and specific code used to generate their results upon acceptance of the manuscript. For authors of qualitative empirical work – such as research based on interviews, participant observations or archival work – the same recommendation holds. However, we acknowledge that: (1) there are no clear standards of how qualitative data should be made public; and (2) some types of research do not lend themselves easily to data archiving and/or involve complex legal and ethical relationships with human subjects. In such cases, authors are requested to inform the editors at the time of submission whether they plan to submit primary material. If they do not, they should explain the rationale for their decision.

• The manuscript should be double-spaced throughout, including references, and be no smaller than 12pt type.

• Referencing should be in accordance with the Modern Language Association (MLA) system. References to works in the text should be in the form of (last name, year). The reference list should be presented alphabetically using the author’s full name (author’s last name, then first name) and chronologically by author at the end of the text. Substantive footnotes are allowed but should be kept to a minimum. For details about EPSR's incorrect referencing policy, see Policy on submissions with incorrect referencing below.




Recent studies have highlighted the under-representation of female and minority scholars in article citations. EPSR is committed to ensuring that scholars are cited regardless of their gender, ethnicity, geographical location, class or other attributes. Authors should properly acknowledge the intellectual contributions of women and scholars from minority groups to the article's field of research.


Research has also shown that, in many disciplines, women cite their own research less than men, and it might be true for other social and ethnic attributes. Please make sure that your work is appropriately cited in your manuscripts.


• The referencing system that EPSR uses has changed in light of an experiment we are conducting around gender and citations. For more details about the new referencing system guidelines, see EPSR Citation Experiment below.

• EPSR uses the conventional double-anonymous process of peer review. Therefore, we request that you remove all references and citations that would identify the authors. If this is not done adequately we will return the manuscript to you for amendments. In addition to obvious mentions of previous publications by the authors, anonymity should be ensured by removing thanks to colleagues, references to own websites, etc.




• When a manuscript is submitted it should be done in two parts. One will consist of the manuscript, including abstract and keywords, made anonymous as set out above. The second will be a title page with the full names and institutional affiliations all authors, acknowledgments, a funding statement, a competing interest declaration, as well as any data availability or ethical statements. All material should be sent as individual, editable files (e.g., .doc, .jpg), and NOT as a PDF document. In the case of multiple authors, the authors should also identify the corresponding author for the Editors and channel all communications through that individual. For more information on Authorship, including the role of the corresponding author, see here. 

  
  

  For more information see How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review below.

  
  

• All submissions should include an abstract (maximum of 150 words) and up to five key words. See below for guidance on Abstract and Keyword Preparation.


• For authors whose first language is not English, the primary responsibility for having the manuscript in proper English will reside with the author. Review and/or publication may be delayed if there are problems with language. Either British or American spellings are acceptable so long either the one or the other is employed consistently within the article. For more information, please consult our general guidance on English language editing services below, or refer to the Chicago Manual of Style on English usage.

EPSR Citation Experiment

Publishing a journal article is becoming increasingly important for embarking on and consolidating an academic career. Yet, we know there is a gender gap in political science journals; since 2015 ECPR has been monitoring and reporting on this gap in both submitted and published articles in its own journals (including EPSR) in its Gender Study. We also know, that, ceteris paribus, women are less cited than men and that bibliographies do not represent fairly the proportion of women and minorities working in the field. 

Over the next three years we will be running an experiment at EPSR, with the objectives of encouraging authors to consider whether their bibliography correctly represents the proportion of women and minorities working in their field; and ultimately reducing gender and possible other gaps in citations. If this experiment is successful, ECPR will consider rolling these changes outlined below, to its other journals too.

From the beginning of 2023 we will introduce two new initiatives. First, authors will be asked to tick a box confirming that their bibliography fairly represents the women and minorities working in their field, thus encouraging them to actively consider this pre-submission, and to revisit the literature if necessary. Second, EPSR will be adopting a reference style which includes the authors' first names, to raise awareness to readers of gender representation in the bibliography.

We will evaluate the success of this initiative after three years by comparing the number of women being cited in the journal before and after these nudges were introduced, alongside the other journal data published by ECPR each year. 

We acknowledge, and fully respect the fact that, for different reasons, it is not possible to accurately deduce gender from the authors' name; and that gender is not binary, so all data will be presented and considered with this caveat. However, we believe that the names of the authors in the bibliography gives us a reasonable idea of the average gender representation and hope that these measures will encourage our community to think more carefully about this issue.

Policy on submissions with incorrect referencing

Articles can be submitted to EPSR in any style – whether that be our new MLA style with (Last Name, Year) citations, or the old Harvard style, without being penalised. However, if an article is accepted for publication, authors will be required to change their referencing if it is not in accordance with the journal’s reference style.

For any article undergoing revisions, it is recommended that authors change their referencing style in accordance with the journal’s reference style before their revisions are uploaded. This way if their resubmission is accepted then it can proceed straight to publication.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Figures, Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Each full-page figure or table should counted as the equivalent of 650 words; each half-page figure or table as the equivalent of 325 words. Figures and tables should be submitted on separate pages, with the suggested location of the tabular material indicated in the text. Any figures and tables that are not crucial to the argument can be put on the website of the Journal as supplementary material and are not included in the word count. Data tables that are likely to take up more than a single printed page should also be submitted separately as supplementary material and referred to in the text of the article. 

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

• to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s).
• to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
• to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript.
• must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see Funding statement above).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].