Information for Authors
The IMA Journal of Management Mathematics publishes papers in which mathematics and mathematical modelling plays a central role in addressing problems of industry, commerce, business or government.
Papers are welcome which:
- Contain mathematics that is innovative or original in the context of the problem or problem area being addressed. The mathematics may relate either to theoretical proportion or methodological.
- Represents a genuine application of interesting mathematics to a real problem supported by at least one example drawn from practice. Notional example used to illustrate particular points might be included, but they would not normally be the only examples.
- Quality review papers on the development or application of a mathematical technique or concept.
Editors:
Professor K. Darby-Dowman
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK
Dr P. Scarf
School of Accounting, Economics & Management Science, Salford University, Greater Manchester M5 4WT, UK
Books for review should be sent to:
Journals Production Department
Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK
Submission of manuscripts
Manuscripts should be submitted through the website http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/imaman
Papers must be submitted as .pdf files. On acceptance of a paper, the authors may send their final version as either an MS Word file or the corresponding Latex source files.
The Editors will correspond directly with the authors on the acceptability of their papers, and if the Editors deem a submitted paper to be more appropriate for publication in one of the other IMA journals, they will forward it to the Editors of that journal for consideration. Authors may not submit manuscripts that are under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Form of manuscript
Manuscripts should be double spaced throughout. Each page of the manuscript should be numbered. The front page should contain the article title, author's name and affiliation, and an abstract. The abstract should not exceed 300 words and should be intelligible to general readers without recourse to the main text. Authors should provide up to six keywords. Footnotes and a list of notation should be avoided.
For specific information regarding style, please refer to the IMA style guide.
Articles should, in general, begin with an introduction which adequately covers the literature and scope of the paper. Each section in the paper should be numbered and each equation should be numbered sequentially. Each article should have a conclusion or discussion section. Any appendices should precede the Reference section. Equations should be typed wherever possible and punctuated to conform to their place in the syntax of the sentence. When appropriate, authors are expected to make available electronically by web reference data and algorithm referred to or used in articles.
References
References should preferably be indicated in the text by the Harvard system, citing the authors' names and date of publication. References should be listed at the end to the manuscript in alphabetical order of lead name. References by the same author should be in chronological order. The normal form of listed reference is author's surname, initials, years of full publication, article title, journal name (abbreviated in accordance with the World List of Scientific Periodicals 4th Edition), volume number (underlined), inclusive page numbers.
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.
Funding
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].’
Copyright/Offprints
It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. 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 licencing agreement, authors may use their own material in publications provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press as the publisher. The publisher will supply free electronic access to the corresponding author of an article. Offprints may be ordered at extra cost at the proof stage. Orders from the UK will be subject to a 17.5% VAT charge. For orders from elsewhere in the EU you or your institution should account for VAT by way of a reverse charge. Please provide us with your or your institution’s VAT number.
Acceptance of LATEX by the IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics
Authors of accepted papers will be asked to provide the LATEX source files of the paper. In preparing the paper, please use the standard article.cls file and when sending the source file for submission, please ensure that all the macros used to write your paper accompany the manuscript.
Please follow all the usual instructions to authors as detailed above, however, text width should be set to 30 picas (126 mm) and the page depth to 46 picas (195 mm). It is very important to follow the correct referencing system - see point 3 in the instructions to authors. For class files please click here