Instructions to Authors
Submission guidelines for the International Journal of Transitional Justice –
The International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ) publishes high quality, peer reviewed articles in the rapidly growing field of transitional justice; that is the study of those mechanisms, judicial and non-judicial, employed by communities, states and the international community to deal with a legacy of systematic human rights abuses and authoritarianism in order to promote social reconstruction.
A central aim of the journal is to encourage debate and discussion across disciplines and geographic areas. Articles which bridge the academic-practitioner divide and represent a range of voices, including those of civil society and policy-makers, are encouraged.
Articles should be written in a manner which is accessible, free of unnecessary jargon and not overly referenced. Papers submitted for the ‘Notes from the Field’ section may include interviews, discussion papers, responses to earlier articles, practitioners’ reflections, creative writing and the presentation of new data.
Preparation of manuscript
- Articles should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words in length or 1,500 – 5000 words if submitted for the ‘Notes from the Field’ section.
- Book reviews are expected to be substantive reviews – where it is a review of only a single book the word count is 1500 – 2000 and references (limited in number, ie 3 – 5) to other literature or work are expected. Multiple or compound reviews of 2 – 3 books at a time should be 3000 – 5000 words in length.
- Pages should be numbered sequentially (excluding the title/ cover page) and submitted in Word format, 11 point font, and double-spaced with 1 ½ inch margins.
- An abstract of not more than 150 words should be included followed by five keywords at the beginning of the article.
- All manuscripts must be original and not under consideration with another publication or in another form, such as a chapter of a book. Authors of submitted papers are obligated not to submit their paper for publication elsewhere until an editorial decision is rendered on their submission. Further, authors of accepted papers are prohibited from publishing the results in other publications that appear before the paper is published in the Journal unless they receive approval for doing so from the managing editor.
- When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional OR national) and with the spirit of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. Please note that this includes all interviews, surveys, focus groups or any other interaction for the purposes of research with vulnerable population groups which would include those directly affected by conflict or violence.
The article should indicate approval by the appropriate committee for the protection of human subjects with name of body and date of approval. This can either be inserted in the text of the article or as a footnote.
For non-governmental organizations without access to such a committee (university, state, or other), please indicate how ethical questions about the research were addressed. - The article should indicate funding sources in the first footnote.
Alterations and Revisions: If the Editor is of the opinion that an article provisionally accepted for publication needs minor revisions - including minor shortening, correction of errors in punctuation, spelling and style - such proposed changes will be made by the Editors and will not be resubmitted to the author for approval prior to publication if they do not alter the meaning or sense of the original manuscript. Authors may be asked to resubmit articles in response to the peer review evaluation.
Language Editing Before submitting your manuscript to the International Journal of Transitional Justice you may wish to have it professionally edited, particularly if English is not your first 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: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/language_services.html. 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.
Style and format
Citations and References Authors should consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, for references. For the comprehensive style guide of the International Journal of Transitional Justice, click here
Footnotes, not endnotes are used. Footnotes should be used for both bibliographic as well as explanatory information and should be marked clearly in the text in numeric order after a point of punctuation, and listed as the bottom of the relevant page. • Avoid over-referencing. IJTJ aims to be a publication accessible to a range of audiences, academic and practitioner.
Submission of Manuscript: All submissions, including book reviews, should be submitted online on the journal’s submission website at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijtj.
Should an author not have access to the internet or have difficulties in submitting online, submissions may be forwarded to the managing editor at ijtj@csvr.org.za. Email submissions are strongly discouraged however and authors are requested where possible to submit online.
All correspondence relating to the journal can be sent to ijtj@csvr.org.za
Publishers wishing to submit books for review can send copies to:
Managing Editor International Journal of Transitional Justice Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation PO Box 30778 Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2017 South Africa
All articles are subjected to a double blind peer review before being accepted for publication and final decision on publication rests with the Editors-in-Chief.
Copyright:
It is a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to the journal, published by Oxford University Press. 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. In assigning the licence, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press is notified in writing and in advance. Please click here to download the licence form.
Offprints Authors will receive free url access to their paper. Additional prints can be ordered at a reasonable rate by authors by returning the offprint order form.
Advance Access IJTJ uses Advance Access which allows for papers to be published online soon after they have been accepted for publication – reducing the time between submission and publication. Articles posted for Advance Access have been copyedited and typeset but not yet paginated for inclusion in a specific issue of the journal.
New papers are put into Advance Access at regular intervals and are then taken off the Advance Access page once they have been paginated, at which point the issue into which they are incorporated will be posted online.