Guidelines for Contributors
Please supply one email version of your paper, attached as a Word document.
Eras accepts articles of 6,000 to 8,000 words in length (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and book reviews of up to 1,000 words. Extended articles and book reviews will be considered. Please contact the editors before submitting. It is an expectation that supervisors of honours and postgraduate students will have read the work prior to submission.
Articles should be accompanied by a brief abstract of approximately 250 words, and up to 10 keywords.
Authors are encouraged to make full use of the advantages of online publication. Please use subheadings and try to include maps, figures or photographs to enhance your text. Refer to copyright regulations below before submitting images.
Consider the international and interdisciplinary nature of Eras. Avoid jargon where possible and define your terms. Use non-discriminatory language at all times.
Manuscripts submitted to Eras should be done so on an exclusive basis and should not be under consideration by any other journal or publication at the time of submission or at any time thereafter until the completion of the editorial process.
Style
Authors should be careful to ensure that their manuscripts adhere to the Chicago (notes) style guide – the editors reserve the right to return papers (without further editing etc.) that do not adhere sufficiently to these guidelines.
References
Please use footnotes. Be economical in your use of these and where possible, avoid lengthy subsidiary arguments. Where relevant, be specific to the page number you cite from, unless citing a general argument spread over a number of pages.
Bibliography
Eras requires a full bibliography of sources for each of the articles submitted.
Font
Arial 12 point, justified and double-spaced.
Formatting
- Page size is A4.
- Set all margins at 2.54 cm (“normal” Word setting).
- Separate paragraphs with a hard return, not an indent.
- Indent block quotations on the left only, Arial 11 point font, justified, no quotation marks, with one spaced line above and below.
- In accordance with Chicago style, all quotations should appear in double inverted commas (quotations within quotations should appear in single marks – i.e. “Quotation from source ‘quoting another source’ is done like this”). Place punctuation outside of quotations unless the punctuation is included in the original.
- Use italics for uncommon foreign words.
- Do not use double spacing after full-stops (periods).
Spelling
Standard English as per the Oxford English Dictionary.
Maps, illustrations and photographs
Please supply a separate copy of all the images you intend to use in the article – this can usually be achieved via attachments to email. Images should be in jpeg or gif format, preferably no larger than 100k per image. Please be sure to label each image clearly (see below for additional information).
Dating Conventions
Common Era and Before Common Era dates should follow the form 1 May 1890, or 1290 BCE. Note that there is no apostrophe in 1890s, 1930s. Centuries, decades and months should be spelled out in full: ‘nineteenth-century’ not 19th C., ‘nineties’ not 90s.
Calibrated dates should be expressed in BP, CE or BCE e.g. 250 cal. BCE. Try to avoid uncalibrated dates produced by subtracting 1950 from uncalibrated BP determination.
Radiocarbon dates should be cited along with the reference number of the laboratory, e.g. OxA-6479 or UBA-326. Tables of radiocarbon determinations are conveniently published as follows: site/context; material; laboratory reference number; uncalibrated determination; and, calibrated date.
Dates obtained by other methods than radiocarbon dating, e.g. TL, Uranium series, or Fission Track, are best referred to in years “before present” or “years ago”, rather than by radiocarbon conventions. Old dates may be abbreviated as follows: ma. for “millions of years", and ka. “thousands of years”.
Copyright
Copyright in a work published by Eras is retained by the author. Authors should read their Contributor Agreement carefully and ensure they understand and can comply with the agreement.
Through the Contributor Agreement, authors provide Eras with a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish and distribute their articles, as accepted by Eras for publication. In the agreement, authors also grant Eras the right to grant permissions to others for reuse of the Eras version of their works.
Apart from this, authors may exercise all the normal rights of a copyright holder in their work and are therefore free to republish their works elsewhere or reuse their work, whether for purely educational or commercial purposes.
As part of the Contributor Agreement, authors are expected to:
- Provide appropriate source acknowledgement for any third-party copyright materials included in their work
- Secure all copyright permissions for third-party works (illustrations, maps, photos, interview transcripts, large quotations of text, etc) included in their articles; authors are also responsible for the payment of any permissions fees in relation to illustrations, photographs and/or other third party material used in their work as published by Eras.
- Ensure generally that their work does not infringe any copyright or other rights held by third parties and does not breach any confidentiality or privacy obligations nor contain any material which is defamatory, obscene or otherwise of an unlawful nature.
Authors’ works are made freely available for readers to access and download from the Eras website (via the ‘Current Edition’ and ‘Editions’ webpages).
Eras informs readers that they may save an electronic copy (download) and print copies of the works on the site only for their own personal research and study, and provided the Eras copyright notice is retained on the copies.
(Updated October 2019)