Aims and Scope

Review of International Studies (RIS) publishes high-quality research that makes significant contributions to conversations about global politics, broadly defined. We encourage submissions that are attentive to historical and contemporary dynamics of global politics and their effects. We welcome theoretically informed, empirically rich, and methodologically rigorous articles that significantly advance scholarship, including interdisciplinary research. RIS strives to be the place where a range of perspectives can flourish, where outstanding work is showcased and debated, and where the voices in those debates are drawn from a global community.

Why publish with Review of International Studies?

• RIS is a journal with an established global reputation for high quality scholarship.
• We welcome original research on global politics regardless of theoretical perspective of methodology.
• We consider all research on the basis of its contribution regardless of theoretical orientation or empirical focus.
• RIS aims to include underrepresented communities and research.
• We will promote your article widely across different platforms.

RIS is a British International Studies Association journal.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*: The Review of International Studies publishes full length original articles only. The maximum length required for main articles is 12,000 words. It is the author's responsibility to provide the editors with an accurate total word count for all articles on submission.
• Forum Article*
• Review Article*
• Special Issue Article*
• Comment and Response

The Review publishes Special Issues annually, following a formal call for proposals. Special Issues are the outcome of a competitive process; articles in Special Issues are subject to the same requirements as articles submitted independently.

* If publishing Gold Open Access, 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

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. In cases where an article has previously been published and disseminated as a working paper or report by an NGO or similar type of organisation, the author should disclose this information to the RIS editorial team and seek their guidance on its eligibility for review. While an article may engage material that is related to (or follows from) the author’s previously published work, the article should not “recycle” elements of that previous work. It must present novel research, argumentation, and writing.

Preparing your article for submission

Please note that initial submissions to the journal do not need to follow the formatting rules set out below. Authors are asked to format their papers according to these guidelines only at the point of acceptance.

Only electronic files conforming to the journal's guidelines will be accepted. Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word DOC, RTF, XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted. Please also refer to additional guidelines on submitting artwork below.

The text should be double-spaced throughout and with a minimum of 3cm for left and right hand margins and 5cm at head and foot. Text should be standard 10 or 12 point.

References and notes: RIS permits free-format submission of articles. So long as it is used accurately and consistently, authors may use any standard referencing style when submitting an article for review. Should the article subsequently be accepted for publication, the authors will be required at this stage to amend the referencing to conform with the RIS style. 

These should be amalgamated and signalled serially within each article by superscript numerals. References should give full biographical details, including publisher but not place of publication, at first mention. Thereafter, the author’s surname and a shortened version of the title should be used. For subsequent citations of a journal article or chaptered piece, the author’s surname and a shortened version of the article/chapter title should be used.

References and notes should be typed in the form of the following examples:

• Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (Macmillan, 1981), pp. 51–3.
• Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 152, emphasis added/emphasis in original.
• Tania Thomas, What Do We Do Now, trans. Eric Sherman (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 19.
• Bruce Cumings, ‘Japan and the Asian periphery’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (eds), Origins of the Cold War (Routledge, 1994), pp. 226–9.
• Cumings, ‘Japan and the Asian periphery’, p. 227.
• Leffler and Painter (eds), Origins of the Cold War.
• Simon Turner, ‘Hegemony and other US power strategies’, Time and Place, 2:6 (2019), pp. 195–8, fn. 23.
• Turner, ‘Hegemony’, p. 196.
• J. P. Cornford, ‘The illusion of decision’, British Journal of Political Science, 4:2 (1974), pp. 231–43 (p. 232).
• Alan Ford, ‘Numbers and symbols’, New York Times (13 May 1987).
• Maria Baker, ‘The evolution of cats and dogs’, BBC News, available at: {www.bbcnewsonline.co.uk/cats_dogs_baker} accessed 23 June 2007.
• CENTCOM, ‘Summary of the Airstrike on the MSF Trauma Center in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3, 2015’, available at: {http://fpp.cc/wp-content/uploads/01.-AR-15-6-Inv-Rpt-Doctors-Without-Borders-3-Oct-15_CLEAR.pdf}, accessed 25 June 2018.
• George W. Bush, ‘Speech to the United Nations’, Geneva, 11 November 2007.
• The National Archives (hereafter TNA) HO 195/13/350, B. Delisle Burns and S. Zuckerman, ‘The Wounding Power of Small Bomb and Shell Fragments’, RC350, October 1942.

Subheadings: Contributors are encouraged to include up to two levels of subheading in articles to provide ‘signposts’ for readers.

Corresponding Author Contact details: Full contact details will be required on submission of the article, please do not include author or contact details on the article itself.

Acknowledgements: Any acknowledgements should appear first at the end of your article prior to your Declaration of Competing Interests (if applicable), any notes and your Author Biographical information.

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.

Tables and Artwork

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

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. 

We urge all authors to read the BISA policy on Research Transparency and Data Access, available here.

It should be possible for data to be made accessible to article reviewers, should they wish to see it. All authors of quantitative empirical articles are encouraged to make the data available for data replication purposes. RIS can host such data on the journal's website, and authors wishing to avail themselves of this facility should supply all files electronically once an article has been accepted for publication.

Required materials typically include all data used for the analysis, specialized computer programs or the source code of these algorithms, program recodes and a file which details what is included in the data set and how the results can be reproduced. Confidential material such as the names of survey respondents must be removed. All material will be published on the website of the journal together with the online version of the article. Authors will be responsible for responding to enquiries about data replication.

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”.

Other types of supplemental material including, but not limited to, images, videos, podcasts and slideshows can be hosted on the RIS website.

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)].

Complaints procedure

If you have a complaint about the editorial process at the Review, you can find the procedure to follow to make a complaint on the Publishing ethics page.