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:

1. contain mathematics that is innovative or original in the context of the problem or problem area being addressed.
2. represent a genuine application of interesting mathematics to a real problem supported by at least one example drawn from practice--notional examples used to illustrate particular points might be included, but they would not normally be the only examples;
3. review the development or application of a mathematical technique or concept.

Editors:

Books for review should be sent to:

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted through the website http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/imaman

Authors must submit either an MS Word file or Latex source files. Authors should not upload a .pdf version of the manuscript--the ScholarOne Manuscripts system must be used to create this document. This process is made explicit during the manuscript submission process. Instructions for authors using Latex is provided below.

The Editors will correspond directly with the authors on the acceptability of their papers. Authors may not submit manuscripts that are under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Form of manuscript

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 algorithms referred to or used in articles.

References

References must 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].’

Preparation of Figures and Tables

Figures must be submitted in the best possible quality and should allow for editing during the typesetting phase. Figures should be set within the document at their most appropriate location and not collected at the end of the document. Figure titles must be provided as text, must be separate from the figure object itself, and should immediately follow the figure. For figures produced using MS Excel, the "Chart Title" box should be empty. The use of "Gridlines" should be avoided. The use of a figure border and grey or coloured background areas should be avoided.

All figures submitted to the journal in colour will be published in colour online at no cost (unless the author specifically requests that their figures be in black and white online). Authors may choose to also publish their figures in colour in the print journal for £350 per figure: you will be asked to approve this cost in an e-mail after your article is accepted for publication. Colour figures must have a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch at their final size. Authors, who opt to publish black and white in print, should submit just one figure legend that works for both colour and grayscale. You will be issued an invoice at the time of publication.

Tables should again be positioned within the document at their most appropriate location and not collected at the end of the document. A table title should immediately proceed the table. The use of vertical dividing lines in tables should be kept to a minimum.

Table and figure titles should, within reason, be sufficiently detailed to allow the reader to understand and interpret the quantities represented therein without recourse to the main text of the manuscript.

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.

Submission of LATEX files to the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics

In preparing the paper, please use the standard article.cls file. When uploading the source file for submission onto ScholarOne Manuscripts, please ensure that all the macros used to write your manuscript 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

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