Please note that our requirements for Final (i.e. accepted) submissions differ from those for Initial submissions. If your article has been accepted for publication in the Historical Journal, please proceed to the below section PREPARING YOUR MATERIALS FOR FINAL SUBMISSION (AFTER ACCEPTANCE). Accepted articles must follow our formatting requirements as outlined in our STYLE GUIDE.
Preparing your materials for initial submission
1. Submissions must:
a. be the original work of the author;
b. not be under consideration for publication elsewhere;
c. not have been published before, even in part, in print or electronically.
2. Aside from the main text, you will need to provide with your submission:
a. an abstract of not more than 200 words;
b. a single title which clarifies the subject matter of your paper and is no more than 20 words long. Colons and sub-titles are only allowed at the discretion of the co-editors;
c. a word count, including notes.
3. Texts must be completely anonymous to allow double-anonymous refereeing; referees are sent PDF versions of texts by ScholarOne. Revisions and any accompanying material must also be anonymous. Acknowledgements and the like can be added later to submissions which are accepted for publication. Please ensure that the text and footnotes of the article contain no material which might inadvertently deanonymise it: for instance, reference to funders or projects of which the research is a part, footnoted thanks to other scholars etc. Acknowledgements can be included, but only in the Final Accepted Version (see below).
4. Initial submissions should be presented to a high scholarly standard. You must double space the text, paginate, and use arabic (not roman) numerals to indicate footnotes, which should also be double spaced at the bottom of the page. Divide submissions into sections, marked by roman numerals (articles in the Historical Journal do not use subheadings). Introductory sections can be left unnumbered. On acceptance, authors will be asked to bring their piece into line with the journal's conventions, details of which can be found below in PREPARING YOUR MATERIALS FOR FINAL SUBMISSION (AFTER ACCEPTANCE).
5. Please try to keep the length of articles to 10,000 words, communications to 5,000 words, historiographical reviews to 8,000 words, and review articles to a maximum of 5,000 words with 700-1,000 words given to each book reviewed - all inclusive of footnotes. We sometimes publish longer contributions, but authors must raise this possibility with the editors at the earliest stage, ideally before submission, via hjhist@cambridge.org.
6. We will consider submissions in languages other than English. In the first instance, send a 300-word summary in English of your proposal to hjhist@cambridge.org. When a non-English submission is accepted, a small fund exists to support the author in providing a high-quality English translation. All authors should ensure that submissions have been carefully proofread prior to initial submission.
7. Competing interests declaration: Authors should include a competing interests declaration at the end of their manuscripts. However, if a declaration contains identifiable information, authors should email their declaration to the relevant editor instead of including it within their manuscript – to preserve the anonymity of their manuscript. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article. Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
8. We encourage the use of illustrations, graphs, and tables where they present essential material or aid understanding. Authors are responsible for obtaining necessary permissions for illustrations before publication. At submission stage, simple scanned images of illustrations are acceptable, but high quality images are required for accepted submissions - for further details please see the Journals artwork guide. Figures may, if appropriate, appear in colour in the digital version of the published article but will be printed in black and white.
9. While much of the content we publish rests on original research and specialist knowledge, contributions should be accessible and stimulating to the non-specialist. It is vital that you provide sufficient historiographical context and make clear the wider significance of your submission.
General notes
Typescripts must be double spaced, paginated, not right-justified (i.e. with a ragged right margin), with margins of at least one inch. Paragraph breaks should be indicated by indents and not line breaks. The first paragraph of an article, and of numbered sub-sections, should not be indented.
Notes must be double spaced, and placed at the end of the article, not at the bottom of the page; but they will be printed in the journal at the bottom of the page and are thus referred to as footnotes below.
If you are including tables, graphs, or illustrations: a) fine copy must be provided; b) number in sequence throughout the article; c) references to sources and descriptive headings must be attached; d) indicate clearly where the material is to appear in the text; e) ensure that there is a reference to it in the text.
For detailed instructions on how to supply illustrations, please see the Journals artwork guide: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/journals/journals-artwork-guide
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary materials. Supplementary materials will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary materials may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will be published with the same metadata as your parent article, and are considered a formal part of the academic record, so cannot be retracted or modified other than via our article correction processes. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please make sure you are familiar with our detailed guidance on supplementary materials prior to submission.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s).
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript.
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.
Preparing your materials for final submission (after acceptance)
After acceptance, authors must ensure that their manuscripts follow our STYLE GUIDE in preparing their FINAL submission.
Acknowledgements
Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see here).
We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:
- “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
- “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].
Copyright and permissions
Before beginning work on the production of any accepted manuscript, Cambridge requires a signed ‘licence to publish’ (copyright) agreement. The process for creating, signing and submitting these agreements is now managed entirely online, which means that there is no need to print, scan, email, or mail anything. Once a manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal, the corresponding author will receive an email inviting them to complete an Information Request Form (IRF) via our digital contract management platform, Ironclad. The information submitted via this form (including information on copyright holder, open access status, etc.) will determine the terms and conditions under which the article will be published and will be used to generate the licence to publish agreement. The corresponding author will be guided through the process to signature and submission.
For more information on author publishing agreements, see here.
Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material, including illustrations, in which they do not hold the copyright and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in the typescript. In quoting from copyright material, contributors should keep in mind that the rule of thumb for ‘fair use’ confines direct quotation to a maximum of 200 words. In obtaining permissions, authors must seek permission to reproduce material not within the author’s copyright for dissemination worldwide in all forms and media, including electronic publication. It should be possible in most cases to obtain permissions for use of copyright material in the context of an academic journal article, but authors in need of advice are encouraged to consult the editors.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.