Information For Authors

Author Guidelines

Instruction to authors

Manuscripts – submissions to the dossiers as well as the open topic section – undergo the same publishing process. Once submitted via our online system, they are immediately assessed by the Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Committee. They are judged by their conformity to the mission of the journal, the extent to which they meet the standards established by the Editorial Committee, and their originality. The manuscripts may be refused at this stage of the process.

If the manuscript meets all of the aforementioned requirements, it proceeds to the second stage of the process, a double-blinded system with two or more referees who decide whether the paper should be accepted or not, as well as suggest revisions. In this case, the authors should respond to the suggestions of the referees, who then re-evaluate the manuscript. The Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Committee then make the final decision. Since it is not possible for the journal to publish all of the manuscripts it receives, priority will be given to those that are innovative, with superior analytical quality, and greater refinement in their research into historiography of science. The final decision will be reported to the author no later than three months from the date the article was received.

Book reviews are also submitted through our online system and are subjected to the assessment of the Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Committee. They too may be accepted or refused at the first stage, as well as receive suggestions for revisions. In certain circumstances they will be subject to a double-blind review by one or two referees. The editors will make the final decision.

One of the requirements of Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science is that the manuscripts should be submitted by authors who have a PhD, with the exception of book reviews, which can be submitted by PhD candidates. The journal limits the number of publications by professors from the same university.

EDITING RULES

a) Articles

Carefully read the instructions below:

1. Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science only publishes original articles. The expectation is to receive articles that do not have substantial similarity to articles or chapters of books already published by the author and that have not been subject to any other publishing or editorial process. Once published in Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science the text can be published elsewhere with our authorization as long as the initial publication is noted.

2. The dossiers will be based on the contributions of distinguished scholars, but, as with open topic manuscripts, each original copy submitted will be subject to a double-blind review in accordance with the quality standards of international publications.

3. The Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Committee will decide on the appropriateness of each open topic manuscript submitted and whether or not it will be subject to review. It is a requirement that every author or co-author has a PhD degree. The original manuscript should not display the name of the author or the institution of origin, nor should there be any personal acknowledgements or self-references. If the submitted manuscript is accepted, the author will then be asked to include the information mentioned above.

4. The articles should be no more than 10.000 words including notes, keys, pictures, tables, illustrations, and bibliographic references. Use a word count for the whole article and take into account that each image, table, or diagram will correspond to 300 words.

5. It is also required that each article has a title, an abstract, and five key-words. The abstract should be a maximum of 150 words.

6. Numbers from one to ten should be written as word, as well as round tens and hundreds (twenty, three hundred), but we recommend the use of figures for ages (50 years) and time (3 months, 7 minutes, 80 years).

7. Extended quotes (more than five lines) must be separated out as one independent paragraph, indented on the left. No quotation marks should be used. Short quoted texts (up to five lines) should be inserted in the text between quotation marks.

8. Full references should be listed in alphabetical order at the end of the article.

9, Op. Cit., Ibid, Idem are not used. Long explanatory notes should be avoided. Whenever possible, limit footnotes to approximately one per paragraph. The primary sources or data (letters, rules, etc. archival items) should remain in footnotes and they are not expected to be included in the final list of references.

10. Images: charts, tables, figures, illustrations, graphs and drawings must be submitted in separate files from the text. Digital images should have high resolution (not interpolated), JPEG format, color RGB. Charts or tables must be in Word and the graphs or spreadsheets in Excel. They should include titles and sources. Please do not send images in Word because of the low quality resolution. All images must be numbered and have a key with a source citation. The author must present the rights for the use of each image or state that the image is in the public domain. The original color of the images will be preserved in the online version, but they will be in black and white in the printed version. Special cases will be analyzed by the Editorial Committee. Each image will correspond to 300 words with respect to the final word-count of the article (and will be considered as part of the limit of ten thousand words). The keys should be followed by the credits in full.

b) Book Review

• The book reviews should be between 1000 and 3.500 words. Books should have been published in the same year as the submission or in the year immediately before that.

• The authors are required to address the following issues: What are the main arguments and aims of the author? Does the book develop the arguments well enough to reach its aims? Where does the work stand in the contemporary debates on the theme? Is the book supported by sound documental work and is it pertinent to the theme? What is the

historiographical meaning of the book? Is the writing clear and correct? Which readers will be interested in the reviewed work: specialists, students, and the general public?

• It is recommended that the reviewers do not summarize chapter per chapter of the work in question, but discuss its general aspects. The book reviews will not have a title, just the complete bibliographic information of the work, including the number of pages.

• Quotations from the work being reviewed should include the page number. For example, “Not only this notion of revolution but also the beginnings of an idea of revolution in science date from the eighteenth-century writings of French Enlightenment philosophes who likes to portray themselves, and their disciplines, as radical subverters of ancient régime culture” (Shapin, 1998, 3).

• Book reviews should not have footnotes or a bibliography.

• Book review authors should be at least PhD candidates.

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All contributions should follow The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) using the author-date system.

“In this system, sources are briefly cited in the text, (…) in parentheses, by author’s last name and date of publication. The short citations are amplified in a list of references, where full bibliographic information is provided.” The Chicago Manual of Style

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Examples of reference:

Books

Shapin, Steven. 1998. The scientific revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

In-text citations:

(Shapin 1998)

(Shapin 1998, 56-58)

Kuhn, Thomas. 2000. The road since structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

In-text citations:

(Kuhn 2000)

(Kuhn 2000, 12-13)

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge: Zone Books.

In-text citations:

(Daston and Galison 2007)

(Daston and Galison 2007, 54)

Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, eds. 1970. Criticism and the growth of the knowledge. London: Cambridge University.

In-text citations:

(Lakatos and Musgrave 1970)

Chapter in an Edited Book:

Feyerabend, Paul. 1970. Consolation for the specialist. In Criticism and the growth of the knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 197-230. London: Cambridge University.

In-text citations:

(Feyerabend 1970)

(Feyerabend 1970, 207)

Journal article:

Shapin, Steven. 1988. Understanding the Merton’s thesis. Isis 79 (4): 594-605.

In-text citations:

(Shapin 1988)

(Shapin 1988, 595)

Internet publications:

Available in: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/ Consulted February 14, 2016.

 

 

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  2. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  3. Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  4. The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  5. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
  6. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

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