General submission guidelines

The following are some basic guidelines to use as you prepare your electronic manuscript for our biannual publication, International Affairs Forum. Please keep it simple —if you spend a lot of time using your software to format your manuscript and customize the way it looks, we, in turn, must spend time paring your manuscript back down to its basic elements to ensure that the whole process goes smoothly.

Use the following guidelines to ensure that the electronic manuscript you submit to us will be ready to edit without further ado:

Length.

• Student Award Competition: 2500-3000 words (without footnotes)
• Non-Student Submission: 2000-5000 words (without footnotes)

Format.  All pieces should be in a Word (.doc) format. All submissions need to include the date of submission and the name and contact information (in particular e-mail) of the author in the heading area of the document.

Your manuscript should be double-spaced throughout.

Do not use the space bar to achieve tabs or indents or to align text.

Use the same typeface, or font, throughout the entire manuscript.

If an article has more than one level of subheads, differentiate them visually. An example would be bolding all A-heads, centering all B-heads, and italicizing all C-heads. Although this is only an example, your headings must be consistently styled throughout your article.

Format prose extracts (block quotations) and verse extracts with your word processor's feature for indenting paragraphs. Insert a hard return only at the end of a paragraph or a line of verse. Do not "line up" text using the space bar—adjust the indent level instead.

Do not “manually” create hanging indents for your bibliography by using hard returns and tabs in the middle of an entry. Instead, use the hanging indent feature in your word processing program. If you are unsure how to do this, simply indent the first line of each entry (i.e., format them like the paragraphs in the rest of the book).

No two pages of your manuscript should have the same number and no page should be submitted unnumbered. Number the pages consecutively throughout the manuscript.

Style Guides

Each organization or publisher prefers different methods of style. When preparing manuscripts for the Center for International Relations, please refer to the following texts:

Use the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (CMOS), as the basic tool for manuscript preparation and editing. However, the CIR style sheet (on the Web site) and the following style guides overrule CMOS on specific matters:

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition (Webster’s 11th), overrules CMOS on spelling and hyphenation.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition (APA), overrules CMOS on citation and reference style.

Figures

It is in the author's interest to provide the highest quality figure format possible. Please be sure that all imported scanned material is scanned at the appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for color.

Figures must be saved separate to text. Please do not embed figures in the paper file.

Files should be saved as one of the following formats: TIFF (tagged image file format), PostScript or EPS (encapsulated PostScript), and should contain all the necessary font information and the source file of the application (e.g. CorelDraw/Mac, CorelDraw/PC).

All figures must be numbered in the order in which they appear in the paper (e.g. Figure 1, Figure 2). In multi-part figures, each part should be labeled (e.g. Figure 1(a), Figure 1(b)).

Figure captions must be saved separately, as part of the file containing the complete text of the paper, and numbered correspondingly.

The filename for a graphic should be descriptive of the graphic, e.g. Figure1, Figure2a.

A Word About References…

These cause more trouble than any other element of a manuscript because authors do not record complete information either when taking notes or when preparing the manuscript. Please use APA citation style in the text and in the reference list at the end of the chapter.  Variant spellings of names, missing initials, missing page numbers, missing dates, missing cities, missing volume numbers, etc., lead to publishing delays.

Do not overuse citations. This is an article and most likely presents a lot of information commonly held by experienced teachers and practitioners. This is your article. You can define terms. You should not be citing five other persons for definitions of common knowledge.

What We're Looking For - EXAMPLES: 

Listed below are several essays that provide a general sense of style and substance we're looking for:

Universal Abolition of Capital Punishment is Drawing Nearer

Monetary Policy in the United States and the ECB: The Institutional Context and Recent Policy Issues

International Anti-Death Penalty Advocacy and China’s Recent Capital Punishment Reform

The Future of CFSP, CSDP, NATO, and Transatlantic Cooperation

If you have questions, contact us at EDITOR@IA-Forum.org

A Word About Copyright Law…

Charts, Tables, Graphs, and Maps

Charts, tables, graphs, and maps taken from copyrighted sources must be covered by permission in the same manner as quoted text matter. Photographs require a different approach and are discussed separately.

Permission to use charts, tables, graphs, and maps should be secured even in cases where they are brought up to date or otherwise adapted to our purposes and even if our art department later redraws them for better reproduction results. In such cases, permission to adapt should be secured.

If the essay has been previously published (online or print) or is under consideration for publication, you must notify the editor about this.

Please note that International Affairs Forum uses CrossCheck™ software to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to International Affairs Forum you are agreeing to any necessary originality checks your paper may have to undergo during the review and production processes.

A Word About Fair Use…

The law permits short direct quotations to be used, provided proper credit is given to the author and source, without the need to obtain written permission from the holder of the copyright. This is considered “fair use” and, although the law is not specific, can generally be assumed to apply to excerpts totaling 300 or so words from any given work.

Judgment must be used in deciding if even a short quotation is “fair use.” If an author should write “The essential Dart of this entire work is, etc., etc., etc.” using that quotation without permission might well be considered violation of his copyright. Consideration must be given also to the effect your use of an excerpt will have on the sale of the original work. If you are quoting from a personal letter, the permission of the writer must be obtained. Permission to quote from a thesis or lecture must be secured. You might find it necessary to get permission to quote from yourself if another publisher holds the copyright to that work.

Fair use does not apply to illustrations, cartoons, poems, lyrics, dictionary definitions, and other such matter. These are fully protected by copyright.