Instructions to Authors
Submission policy
The Review of Finance welcomes submissions of high-quality papers in all areas of financial economics. In addition to the normal review process, the Review of Finance offers a special review process to authors seeking a very fast editorial decision at a considerably higher submission fee. This “Fast-Track” process guarantees an editorial decision in 14 days, starting from the date on which valid payment information is received from the submitting author. Unless otherwise indicated, the following instructions apply to all submitted manuscripts, whether submitted via the normal or the Fast-Track process.
Papers for publication should be submitted through a web-submission form. To start the submission process, please type https://zeus.econ.umd.edu/rof/ in your browser and follow the instructions. Manuscripts must be in PDF or Word format without password-protection. To ensure anonymity in refereeing, the front page of manuscripts must not contain the authors’ names and acknowledgements. There should be no reference to the authors also in the “Document Properties” of the file. In exceptional cases, for example if the authors experience technical problems with the web-submission process, manuscripts may be submitted via email to the address rof@univie.ac.at for normal submissions, and to the address fast-track@revfin.org for Fast-Track submissions. In the latter case the subject line of the e-mail message must contain the words: “FAST-TRACK SUBMISSION”. For all submissions sent by e-mail, the submitted manuscript must contain two title pages. Authors’ names and acknowledgements should appear only on the first title page. The second title page should contain only title and abstract of the paper.
For normal submissions, members of the European Finance Association (EFA) pay a reduced submission fee of EUR 60.00. (The EFA membership application form is available at http://www.efa-online.org). All other submissions should be accompanied by a submission fee of EUR 120.00. No fee is due if the editorial decision is rendered after more than 100 days. There is no submission fee for resubmitted papers and for solicited papers (whether solicited for a special issue or by an editorial board member).
For Fast-Track submissions, the fee for the initial submission is EUR 800. For re-submissions, the Fast-Track submission fee is EUR 400. If revisions were minor, a fee of EUR 150 applies. (U.S.-based authors will pay equivalent U.S. dollar amounts.) No fee is charged for Fast-Track submissions if the editorial decision is rendered more than 14 days after the date on which payment information was received. The availability of the Fast-Track procedure is subject to capacity constraints. The editors can refuse Fast-Track submissions if the journal has already received many such submissions within a short period.
Fees can be paid in any of the following ways:
1) by Visa or Mastercard directly during the web-submission process or alternatively by sending a fax containing (i) the credit card number and expiration date, (ii) the amount of the payment, (iii) the cardholder's name and (iv) the cardholder's signature, to Professor Josef Zechner, Review of Finance (Editor), Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, fax: +43 1 31336-906301
2) by sending a check payable to Josef Zechner - Review of Finance, and addressed to Prof. Josef Zechner, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna, Austria
OPEN ACCESS OPTION FOR AUTHORS
Review of Finance authors have the option, at an additional charge, to make their paper freely available online immediately upon publication, under the Oxford Open Initiative. After your manuscript is accepted, as part of the mandatory licence form required of all corresponding authors, you will be asked to indicate whether or not you wish to pay to have your paper made freely available immediately. If you do not select the Open Access option, your paper will be published with standard subscription-based access and you will not be charged.
For those selecting the Open Access option, the charges for Brain vary depending on the institution at which the Corresponding author is based:
Optional Oxford Open Charges
For a Corresponding author based at an institution with an online subscription to Review of Finance:
Regular charge - £900 / $1800 / €1350
List B developing country charge** - £450 / $900 / €675
List A developing country charge** - £0 / $0 / €0
For a Corresponding author based at an institution that does not subscribe to the online journal:
Regular charge - £1500 / $3000 / €2250
List B developing country charge** - £750 / $1500 / €1125
List A developing country charge** - £0 /$0 / €0
*Visit http://www.oxfordjournals.org/jnls/devel/ for list of qualifying countries.
The above Open Access charges are in addition to any page charges and colour charges that might apply. 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.
If you choose the Open Access option you will also be asked to complete an Open Access charge form online. You will be automatically directed to the appropriate version of the form depending on whether you are based at an institution with an online subscription to Brain. Therefore please make sure that you are using an institutional computer when accessing the form. To check whether you are based at a subscribing institution please use the Subscriber Test link for Review of Finance.
1. Papers must be in English, preferably written in the present tense (e.g., “Black and Scholes find…”, not “Black and Scholes found…”). Use of the active voice greatly improves the readability of a paper (e.g., “the tests show” or “we show,” not “it is shown”), but avoid excessive use of “we” or “I”. Italics, quotation marks, and capital letters should be kept to a minimum (a priori, etc., i.e., e.g., et al., ex ante, and ex post are not italicized). Acronyms are spelled out at the first occurrence with the acronym in capital letters in parentheses immediately following, as in “Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP).” Some exceptions are NYSE, Nasdaq, and Amex.
2. Manuscripts should be typewritten on A4 or US Letter bond paper, one side only, double-spaced, with wide margins, and printed on one side of the paper only. All pages should be numbered consecutively. The first page of the manuscript should contain: (i) the title; (ii) an abstract of not more than 100 words; (iii) at least one classification code according to the Classification System for Journal Abstracts as used by the Journal of Economic Literature, (iv) up to five keywords.
3. Section headings should be identified by Arabic numbers followed by a dot. All main words should be capitalized. Subheadings should be identified by Arabic numbers followed by a dot, e.g. 2.1, 2.2, etc., and written in capital letters only. Subsubheadings should be identified by Arabic numbers followed by a dot, should be italicized and the main words capitalized.
4. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum and indicated by consecutive superscript numbers. They should be double-spaced and if at all possible not include displayed formulae or tables.
5. Displayed formulae should be numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript as (1), (2), etc. against the right-hand margin of the page. In cases where the derivation of formula has been abbreviated, it is of great help to the referees if the full derivation can be presented on a separate sheet (not to be published). When referring to an equation with its number in text please use "Equation (1)", with a capital "E".
6. Please use the cross-referencing features of your software package. Do not cross-reference page numbers. Cross-references should refer to section numbers of headings, numbers of displayed equations, or numbers of tables and figures.
7. Supplementary technical material (e.g. mathematical proofs) should be collected in an Appendix that comes before the References section.
8. References to publications should be as follows: “Brennan (1992) finds that…” or “This issue has been analyzed previously (e.g., Brennan et al., 1989; Stulz, 1990)”. All publications by more than two authors are to be referred to by the surname of the first author followed by “et al.”: “Brennan et al. (1989)”. Instead, publications with two authors should be referred to by the surnames of both authors: “Morris and Shin (2004)”. There must be a strict one-to-one correspondence between the names and years in the text and those in the list of references. The list of references should appear at the end of the main text (after any appendices, but before tables and legends for figures). It should be double-spaced and listed in alphabetical order by author's name. References should appear as follows:
For monographs:
Allen, F. and Gale, D. (2000) Comparing Financial Systems, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For contributions to collective works:
Daniel, K. and Titman, S. (1995). Financing investment under asymmetric information, in: R. A. Jarrow, V. Maksimovic and W.T. Ziemba (eds.), Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, Finance, Vol. 9. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 721-766.
For periodicals:
Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S. (2003) Pyramids, Journal of the European Economic Association 1, 478-483.
For unpublished working papers
Basak, S., Pavlova, A. and Shapiro, A. (2003), Offsetting the incentives: risk shifting and benefits of benchmarking in money management, unpublished working paper, London Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University.
Note that journal titles should not be abbreviated.
9. Oxford University Press accepts electronic submissions of figures. Preferred file formats are TIFF and EPS (resolution between 300 and 600 dpi), but figures in other electronic formats may also be used. File names should not be longer than 8 characters. A printout of all figures should be supplied with the hardcopy manuscript.
Illustrations will be reproduced photographically from originals supplied by the author; the typesetter or publisher will not redraw them. Please provide all illustrations in quadruplicate (one high-contrast original and three photocopies). Care should be taken that lettering and symbols are of a comparable size. The illustrations should not be inserted in the text, and should be marked on the back with figure number, title of paper, and author’s name. All graphs and diagrams should be mentioned in the text, referred to as figures (e.g., Figure 1), numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals.
10. Tables should be numbered consecutively in the text in Roman numerals and printed on separate sheets. Tables must be self-contained, in the sense that the reader must be able to understand them without going back to the text of the paper. Each table must have a title followed by a descriptive legend. Authors must check tables to be sure that the title, column headings, captions, etc. are clear and to the point. Groupings in tables should be indicated with single horizontal lines and vertical spacing (no vertical lines). No colors should be used.
The legends and captions for tables or figures should be complete enough that the table or figure can stand on its own. However, authors should consider the size of a journal page (which is approximately four and one-half inches by seven inches) and how a table or figure will look when it is reproduced in the Review of Finance before packing in too much information.
11. Style for Theorems, Lemmas, and the like:
THEOREM 1. Text of Theorem 1.
Equation for Theorem 1. (1)
Remainder of text of Theorem 1. Proof. Proof of Theorem.
12. Any manuscript that does not conform to the above instructions may be returned for necessary revision before publication.
13. Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author. Proofs should be corrected carefully. The responsibility for detecting errors lies with the author. Corrections should be restricted to instances in which the proof is at variance with the manuscript. No deviations from the version accepted by the Editors are permissible without the prior and explicit approval by the Editors; these alterations will be charged.
14. Oxford University Press will provide to the authors of each article free access to the electronic version of the published article.
15. 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].
16. 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
