Aims and Scope
The Review of Middle East Studies (RoMES) is the Middle East Studies Association’s online journal of review. Published twice a year, each issue includes a selection of roundtables or research articles, essays, brief reports on emerging topics and issues, columns on pedagogy and the politics of representation, and reviews of books, films, music, software, and exhibitions relevant to Middle East studies. The focus of RoMES is the state of the craft in all fields of Middle East studies, including Islamic and cultural studies, history, geography, art and architecture, performance and political studies with an emphasis on new and evolving topics and issues in scholarship, including research methods, ethical concerns, and pedagogical practice. RoMES addresses evolving contemporary dynamics, but also publishes scholarship on premodern topics of interest to a wider audience of Middle East scholars. It seeks to bridge scholarship on the region with lives, experiences and events in the region.
Article Types Accepted
Articles*: scholarly articles describing original research
Special Focus Roundtable*: a proposed focused discussion with four to six contributors on a topic of historical or contemporary interest
Critical Essay*: informed commentary on a current topic or debate in MENA studies
Pedagogical Perspective*: reflections on the praxis and method of teaching within the varied disciplines of Middle East studies
Curator's Corner*: commentary dedicated to the representation and mis-representation of the region in scholarship, artistic performance, the built environment, and exhibition and cinematic venues
Field Retrospective*: contributions from senior scholars on changes in methodologies and theories of MENA studies or associated disciplines
Interim Report from the Field*: discussion of emerging or noteworthy research, methodologies, sources, or applications in Middle East studies. The emphasis is on timeliness, so reports may be preliminary or less resolved than a research article
Middle East Studies in Action: brief reports on MESA committees and projects
that bridge academic and public audiences
Reviews (book or film): critical evaluations of recently published scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and fiction, as well as films, music, software, exhibitions, and other media
Review Essays*: critical, comparative reviews of a few recently published works related by a common theme or topic
* These article types may be eligible for APC waivers or discounts under 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.
Article Length
Single-work reviews should be between 700 and 1,000 words. Reviews substantially longer or shorter than this will be returned to the authors for revision.
Review essays should be between 2,500 and 5,000 words. Essays, articles, and special focus contributions should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words.
Preparing your article for submission
Manuscripts should be compiled in the following order:
- Cover page, including:
- Authors, including Corresponding Author designation, full contact details and affiliations
- Abstract (150–200 words)
- Keywords (5–7)
- Main text
- Acknowledgements
- Footnoted references in Chicago style
- Appendices (as appropriate)
- Table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages)
- Figure caption(s) (as a list, with a credit line and an explanatory caption)
The Review of Middle East Studies (RoMES) house style is based on the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.; CMS) “Notes and Bibliography” system for citations, and we do not publish bibliographies for any submissions. For sample citations, see the online quick guide linked here. The in-text footnotes (superscripts) should be numbered consecutively in the text and go outside punctuation marks. After the first mention of a cited text, use only last name(s) and shorten the title for later entries.
For transliteration guidelines, consult the IJMES Transliteration Chart for in-person or in-text quotations and phrases. Only use the IJMES Chart for direct quotes, in all other cases, RoMES retains only the ʿayn (ʿ) and the hamza (ʾ). For the ʿayn (ʿ), one possible option is to use character code 02BF; for the hamza (ʾ), use character code 02BE.
If you have questions about the submissions process or publishing process, please contact the Managing Editor.
How to prepare your materials for blind peer review
Instructions for blinding your manuscript prior to peer review can be found here.
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 – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. 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.
Artwork, Figures, and Other Graphics
Tables, figures, and images must be cited in the text, for example (see Table 1). They should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, captioned, and tables should appear in an editable at the end of the article (in the case of figures, they should be submitted as separate figure files). They should not be interspersed in the text. For detailed information on figure preparation, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.
Reproduction of copyright material: Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. A copy of the paperwork granting permission should be provided to the Cambridge production editor. You may be asked to pay a permissions fee by the copyright holder; any permissions fees must be paid for by the author. For an example of a permissions request form please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.
Ethics and transparency policy requirements
Please review our ethics policies prior to submission.
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.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
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.