NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Submission of Articles

Contributions should be sent by email to:

Articles are reviewed on the understanding that they are submitted solely to this journal. If accepted, they may not be published elsewhere in full or in part without the Editor-in-Chief’s permission.

Please save your manuscript into the following separate files – Title; Abstract; Manuscript; Appendix. To ensure anonymity in the review process, do not include the names of authors or institution in the abstract or body of the manuscript.

TITLE

This file should include the title of the manuscript, full names of the authors, the name and address of the institution from which the work originates, the telephone number, fax number and e-mail address of the corresponding author. It must also include an exact word count of the article.

ABSTRACT

This file should contain a short abstract of no more than 120 words. Please also include between 3-6 keywords.

MANUSCRIPT

This file should contain the main body of the manuscript. Articles should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length, and should include only such reviews of the literature as are relevant to the argument. An exact word count must be given on the title page. Articles longer than 10,000 words (including abstract, appendices and references) will not be considered for publication. Undue length will lead to delay in publication. Authors are reminded that Journal readership is broad and international, and articles should be drafted with this in mind.

Funding information. Details of all funding sources for the work in question should be given in a separate section entitled 'Funding'. This should appear before the 'Acknowledgements' section.

The following rules should be followed:

• The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
• The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘National Institutes of Health’, not ‘NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies) Grant numbers should be given in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number xxxx]’
• Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]’
• Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
• Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.

An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [AA123456 to C.S., BB765432 to M.H.]; and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [hfygr667789].’

LANGUAGE EDITING

Particularly if English is not your first language, before submitting your manuscript you may wish to have it edited for language. This is not a mandatory step, but may help to ensure that the academic content of your paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. If you would like information about one such service please click here. There are other specialist language editing companies that offer similar services and you can also use any of these. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services.

REFERENCES

References should be listed alphabetically at the end of the paper, giving the names of journals in full. Titles and subtitles of articles, books, and journals should have main words capitalized. Titles of books and journals will be printed in italics and should therefore be underlined

Examples:

• Ashworth, A. (1983), Sentencing and Penal Policy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Blumstein, A., and Cohen, J. (1973), `A Theory of the Stability of Punishment', Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 64/1: 198--207.
• Richardson, G. (1985), `Judicial Intervention in Prison Life', in M. Maguire , J. Vagg, and R. Morgan, eds., Accountability and Prisons, 113--54. London: Tavistock.

In the text, the name of the author and date of publication should be cited as in the Harvard system (e.g. Garland 1981: 41-2; Robertson and Taylor 1973: ii. 357-9). If there are more than three authors, the first name followed by et al. is permissible in the text but the names should be spelt out in full in the References

DIAGRAMS AND TABLES

Diagrams and tables are expensive of space and should be used sparingly. All diagrams, figures and tables should be in black and white, numbered and should be referred to in the text. They should be placed at the end of the manuscript with their preferred location indication in the manuscript (e.g. Figure 1 here).

APPENDIX

Autors that employ mathematical modeling or complex statistics should place the mathematics in a technical appendix.

COPYRIGHT

It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. As part of the licence agreement, Authors may use their own material in other publications provided that The British Journal of Criminology is acknowledged as the original place of publication and Oxford University Press as the Publisher. The form can be downloaded as a PDF here.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books for review should be sent to:

AUTHOR SELF-ARCHIVING/PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY

For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

VAT

‘Orders from UK will be subject to a 17.5% VAT charge. For orders from the rest of the EU, we will assume that the service is provided for business purposes, please provide a VAT number for yourself or your institution and ensure you account for your own local VAT correctly.’

REVIEWING POLICY

1.Submissions are reviewed anonymously and separately by at least two reviewers from the Journal’s Editorial Board or International Editorial Board. When there is an insufficiency of relevant editorial expertise to review specific submissions, guest reviewers with the appropriate expertise are invited to review.

2. Acceptance of an invitation to review is taken as signifying that the reviewers consider themselves qualified to assess the submission and know of no reason why it would be inappropriate for them to comment on its quality and make a recommendation as to whether or not it should be published in the BJC.

3. If, as reviewers read a submission, they realise that for any reason it is inappropriate for them to review that article, they are asked to return it to the Editor-in-Chief forthwith and another reviewer will be assigned.

4. It is considered to be inappropriate for reviewers to assess submissions which they know to be:

i. written by a family member
ii. written by a staff or student member of their present Department
iii. based upon a PHD which they themselves have supervised or examined
iv. based upon a project upon which they themselves have worked or for which they have been a grant-holder

5. There will be other situations in which a reviewer may feel it inappropriate to review a particular article, but as these situations will vary according to personal circumstances, reviewers are advised to use their own judgement in relation to circumstances (see 6 below) where they may feel that a conflict of interests is involved. When in doubt, they should always inform, and seek advice from, the Editor-in-Chief.

6. If reviewers, for any reason, know, or can guess, who has written an anonymous submission which they have been asked to review, they are expected to consider whether a conflict of interest is involved if they know the author to be a close friend or a previous departmental or research colleague; or where they know themselves to be prejudiced either in favour of, or against, specific perspectives, topics or authors.