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.
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.
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.
ORCID
We require all corresponding 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 will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
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.
Manuscript Preparation
For research articles, a document template and checklist are available for download here.
Articles must be in English. In principle, articles should be between 9,000 and 12,000 words in length, including footnotes. Inquiries about possible submissions may be sent to the Editors via ijas[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
The main document should include: The title of the manuscript, the abstract, a list of five to eight key words, a declaration of competing interests and a reference list. Articles based on extensive use of unpublished sources may include a ‘Primary sources’ section before the reference list.
Please submit papers anonymously. Pleases do NOT include in the main document: the author's name, institutional affiliation, address, country, email address, or any other identifiable information such as acknowledgements.
The title and abstract (maximum 200 words) should be included before the main text. Please do not put this in a separate file. The abstract should reflect the article contents as clearly and concisely as possible. Bear in mind that the abstract will be freely available for viewing online, and that readers will often decide whether or not to download the article on the basis of what they see in the abstract.
The key words (normally five to eight) should be included below the abstract. These should be subject terms that you think people interested in the topic might search for on the Internet.
Competing interest declaration: All authors must include a competing interests declaration at the top of the file. 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 A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare(s) none”.
Footnotes should be inserted using the Word footnote (not Endnote) function, consecutively numbered from beginning to end.
Funding acknowledgements and personal acknowledgements should be submitted in a separate document marked ‘not for review’.
All tables, graphs, figures and illustrations should be submitted as separate files. A descriptive heading, with a citation of the source and text placement advice, should be inserted inside the main text of the article after the paragraph in which the item is first referred to. If possible, create tables and graphs in Excel, so that they can be edited and reformatted before typesetting. Illustrations submitted as graphics files must be at a resolution of 300 dpi or more.
Style guidelines
Articles may be submitted using either British or American spelling and conventional punctuation. Consistency within the document should be maintained.
The main text should be double line-spaced, aligned left. Times New Roman should normally be used as the default font for Western-language text. If available, use the SimSun font for Chinese characters and the Mincho font for Japanese. If you use characters with diacritics (e.g. Vietnamese, or transcriptions from Arabic or Sanskrit) please provide a PDF version of the file so that we can check that all fonts are displaying correctly.
Headings within the article should be unnumbered. You may choose to apply Word styles to show the heading level.
For quotations, double quotation marks should normally be used, with single quotation marks for quotations within quotations, though single quotes may also be used for glosses and definitions if desired (e.g. dao 道, 'Way'). Quotations of more than 50 words should be broken off from the text without quotation marks, one blank line inserted above and below, left-indented 1 cm.
Words or phrases in languages other than English should be italicized, except for proper names and words which have been assimilated into English. The script of the original language should be supplied in the text after the transcription, at first mention only. A name or term which first appears in a footnote should also be provided with characters the first time it appears in the main text. Characters should also be provided for all author names and titles in the References list. Character forms (traditional, Chinese simplified, Japanese simplified) should normally follow the source texts or accord with the time and place of the subject matter (e.g. Zhongguo Renmin Yinhang 中国人民银行, Ming Shilu 明實錄), though jōyō kanji may also be used for pre-modern Japanese-language items if desired, in line with Japanese academic usage. Except for names, non-Roman phonetic scripts (such as hangul, kana, Arabic, Sanskrit) are only used when integral to the meaning of the text.
Romanization of Chinese should follow the Pinyin system (without tone marks, unless the tone is necessary for explanatory purposes), Japanese the modified Hepburn system, and Korean the McCune-Reischauer system. Transcription of other languages should follow a conventional transcription system. Where the convention is to use other spellings for certain names in English or where the person has published with alternate spellings, this should be followed (e.g. "Chiang Kai-Shek", "Yoshio Markino"). Direct quotes and bibliographical citations should follow the romanization system of the original.
Dates should be simplified to a day-month-year format: 15 May 1965 (UK English) or May 15, 1965 (USA English). Spans of dates should be given in full: 1869–1872 (not 1869–72). Dates based on traditional (non-Western) calendars should be set out with cardinal numbers: "2nd day of the 8th month 1196"; if many dates are mentioned within the article, the abbreviated format "1196.8.2" (year.month.day) may also be used.
The numerals 1 to 99 should be spelled out, except for dates, percentages and where numbers are mentioned several times within a few lines of text. Spell out people's ages ("seventy-two" rather than "72") and centuries ("the nineteenth century" rather than "the 19th century").
In all article types, brief bibliographic references should be given as in-text parenthetical citations, with the complete citation provided in a list with the heading ‘References’ located after the main text of the article. Where an author has more than one publication in the same year, use letters ("a", "b" etc.) to distinguish them (Xiao 2009a, Xiao 2009b). In some cases (pre-modern texts, for example), it may be appropriate to cite a work by title, which may be abbreviated if desired.
Use "ibid." to refer only to the immediately preceding reference or part of it. "Idem." and "op. cit." should not be used.
The reference list should include all the works cited, organized alphabetically according to the in-text citations. In general, each element in a reference entry is set off by periods / full stops. List the author's name in bold, surname first, followed by the year of publication in round brackets (parentheses). Articles based on extensive use of unpublished sources may include a ‘Primary sources’ sub-section before the reference list. In this case, secondary sources can be listed under a ‘secondary sources’ sub-section. Chinese and Japanese characters should be provided for all authors' names and for all titles, but not normally for publishers' names.
Examples
Author, Anne (Year). “Article title in sentence case”. International Journal of Asian Studies 11:1, 101–111.https://doi.org/10.017/ijas210
Author D.B., Author H.E. and Author F.N. (2018). Chapter title in sentence case in roman. In Author G. and Author H. (eds), Book Title in Initial Caps in Italics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–156.
Ashiwa, Yoshiko, & Wank, David (2005). The Globalization of Chinese Buddhism: Clergy and devotee networks in the twentieth century. International Journal of Asian Studies, 2(2), 217-237. doi:10.1017/S1479591405000100.
Author, Anne C. (Year) Name of book. Place: publisher.
Baubérot J. (2013). Histoire de la Laïcité en France [History of Laicity in France], 6th edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Cambridge University Press (2017) Instructions for authors. Available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-asian-studies/information/instructions-contributors. (Accessed 1st Jan 2019).
Tanaka, Ichiro (2019) Name of book, 2nd Edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nakane Chie 中根千枝 (1977) 家族を中心とした人間関係 Kazoku wo chūshin toshita ningenkankei [Family-centred relationships]. Kodansha Academic Press.
Author Services
Contributions written in English are welcomed from all countries. Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a professional copy editor experienced with academic style and complexity. This is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the editor and reviewers. Cambridge offers an editorial correction service which authors can learn about here. The Editors of IJAS also maintain a short list of freelance editorial service providers who have significant experience working with authors whose first language is not English. 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.