General Guidelines for Submissions
Manuscript Format
American Periodicals follows the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), and all manuscripts should therefore be in compliance with this style manual. Manuscripts should be submitted as a Microsoft Word email attachment, with 12-point font and double-spacing throughout, including notes, and with one-inch margins with left margin justification only.
Copyrighted Material
Authors are responsible for obtaining permissions from and paying any required fees to copyright holders to use material (e.g., long quotations, tables, figures, photographs) that has been published and copyrighted. Publishers generally hold the legal rights to previously published work. The manuscript cannot go to press without all signed permissions in hand, as well as a signed copy of the contributor’s agreement that will be issued by the Ohio State University Press. If copyright fees will impose significant hardship on the author, he or she may apply for matching subvention funds from the Research Society for American Periodicals for up to $250 per manuscript.
Images
Photocopies or scans of photocopies will not be accepted. Digital photographs submitted with the final draft must be of professional quality (300 dpi or above at full reproduction size). Images should be submitted as .tiff or .jpg files in grayscale. If there is any potential for doubt, notations regarding orientation (e.g., “top”) should appear on the image and included in the file. Please provide captions for the images in a separate file and indicate where the images should be placed in the text, with the following editing annotation to indicate preference for image placement: <Figure 1 here>.
Supplemental materials
After an essay has been accepted for publication, the author will be asked to submit a 2–3 sentence biographical statement to accompany the article, as well as a 150-word abstract and keywords to be used in indexing.
Style Guidelines
Quotations
Check all quotations against originals; such citation checking is the responsibility of the author. In all cases, ask whether quotations are necessary, paraphrasable, or able to be deleted. Quotations of fewer than eight lines are run into the text. Quotations of eight lines or more should be indented from the left margin and double-spaced; such quotations should be used only when absolutely necessary. No quotation marks are needed in block quotes or epigraphs, unless dialogue is included within the selection. Place parenthetical citations for block prose quotations after the closing punctuation.
For extracts of poetry, use a hard return at the end of each line. Type poetry extracts with line breaks and stanza indents exactly as they occur in the original poem. If special formatting is required, submit a photocopy or scan of the poem in published form for the compositor to consult. For short poetry quotations (2-3 lines) run into the text, use a slash with a space on either side to indicate line breaks. Place parenthetical citations for block poetry quotations one line below it.
Ellipses and brackets that are part of the original quotation should be retained to preserve the integrity of the original. In general, do not use ellipses before or after a run-in quotation; before a block quotation; or after a block quotation ending with a grammatically complete sentence. Three dots should be used to indicate an omission within a quoted sentence or part of a sentence. Four dots (a period and three ellipsis points) should be used within a quotation when the last part of a sentence is omitted and what remains is grammatically complete. Square brackets with ellipses should be avoided.
Italicize “sic” and use it only when necessary, as such: [sic]
Endnotes and Citations
American Periodicals uses endnotes (double-spaced) for all citations, using Microsoft Word’s endnote feature. Please do not submit notes separately. No “Works Cited” list should be included; all bibliographic information must be contained in endnotes. Reserve parenthetical citations for frequently cited references to a central text discussed in the essay; such texts should first be cited in a note with the stipulation that further citations will be given in the text. We do not use ibid for repeated references in endnotes; instead, use short title format for all endnotes after the first reference. Do not use abbreviations in lieu of the short title format. As a rule, superscript note numbers in the body of the essay should always be at the end of a sentence; avoid having multiple notes in the same sentence. American Periodicals discourages the use of discursive endnotes.
A first, unnumbered note, if desired, can be included in the manuscript as a normal text paragraph, a few lines below your concluding sentence, but before the start of numbered endnotes. Such a note can express gratitude to others for helpful discussion or provide other explanatory material concerning the article.
Typical Citations for Endnotes
Book
- Emery Franklin, Periodical Dreams (Boston: Serendipity Press, 1987), 63.
- Robert Shackleton, The Story of Harper’s Magazine 1850-1917 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1917).
- Robert Robertson, Periodical Magic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
Notes: “University” and “Press” are always spelled out. State abbreviations are not necessary unless readers would not readily recognize the place of publication, in which case utilize modern postal abbreviations (i.e., MA for Massachusetts, etc.). In publication information, cite only first city when multiple cities are listed on title page.
For nineteenth-century publications, represent publisher names with “& Co.” where appropriate. For modern, secondary publications, use only the company name, dropping, e.g., “and Company.” So, in the first case, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.; in the second, Houghton Mifflin.
Edited book
- Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
Author with editor or translator
- John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robinson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
Chapter of book or article in a collection of essays
- David Ogilvy, “The Creative Chef,” in The Creative Organization, ed. Gary A. Steiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 199–213.
Note: in page numbers over 109, drop the second hundreds digit if it is the same as the first, e.g., 122–32, but 184–202. However, 100–109, 200–209, etc. should appear in full.
Articles in periodical journals
- Cartright C. Bellworthy, “Reform of Congressional Renumeration,” Political Review 7, no. 6 (1990): 87-101.
- Patricia A. Cooper, “What Ever Happened to Adolph Strasser?” Labor History 20 (Summer 1979): 17-30.
- Samuel Johannsen, “The Great Migration and Periodical Ritual,” Periodical Philology 7 (1980): 1–22.
Notes: CMOS distinguishes popular and academic journals; American Periodicals applies this distinction only to twentieth-century and twenty-first-century periodicals. All eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals should be treated as journals. Do not use initials to replace authors’ first names unless authors published their works under initials rather than full first names. Include issue number, season, and/or month of publication only if journal begins pagination at number one with every issue. When including volume and issue numbers, separate volume and issue number with a period.
Articles in newspapers
- “The Pay of Authors,” New York Tribune, February 5, 1845.
Note: Cite the newspaper issue by a date separated by commas. Page number is not necessary.
Manuscript or archive collections
Manuscripts or other materials from archive collections should be cited according to the owning library’s guidelines.
Dissertations
- Jennifer Burek Pierce, “Women’s Rhetorical Activities After Suffrage: Advocacy for the Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999).
Websites
- “Modernist Journals Project,” last accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.modjourn.org/.
A citation to website content can often be limited to a mention in the text or in a note (“According to the Modernist Journals Project hosted by Brown University and the University of Tulsa …”). If a more formal citation is desired, it may be styled as in the example below. Because such content is subject to change, include an access date or, if available, a date that the site was last modified.
Stylistic & Formatting Preferences
Dates: All dates follow “American” style (i.e., “May 2, 1966”).
“Thus” should be used very sparingly.
“Etc.” and contractions should be avoided altogether.
Use the italics feature in Word; avoid using underline and do not use bold except for section titles (refer to CMOS 8.180.)
Do not underline or italicize “The” in the title of a periodical. An initial “the,” even if part of the official title, is not italicized and appears as lowercase unless it begins a sentence. For example: the Heathen Woman’s Friend.
Following CMOS style, proper names that are commonly recognized as initials (LBJ, JFK, FDR) can stand as such. “US” is acceptable in adjectival form; when used as a noun, spell it out: “United States.” In general, however, abbreviations should be avoided.
Spell out abbreviations for dates (nineteenth century) and money (five dollars), with the exception of uneven dollar amounts or amounts over ten dollars ($5.62 or $137).
Guidelines Specific To Languages Of Racialization, Ethnicity, Multilingual Periodicals
The journal capitalizes “Black” as an adjective to describe members of the African diaspora in America and otherwhere. As a general practice, the journal discourages the use of a capital letter for the racialized identity marker “white.” See also CMOS, most recent 17th edition, section 8.38
Wherever possible and desirable, writers or editors may deploy greater specificity with regard to identity markers. AP does not use a hyphen when referring to ethnicized collectives in the US (“Ethiopian American”).
When writing about Native and Indigenous communities, specificity about the relevant Nation or sovereign entity is requested in all possible and relevant examples. The American Periodicals Style Guide suggests consistent use of specific names and terms; feel free to note whether usage reflects an English-language or Indigenous-language spelling. We encourage the use of Indigenous (capital letter as adjective) and Native (capital letter as adjective) for more general discussions, with the former often denoting a more global or extra-national discussion and the latter more often referring to communities and traditions in what is now the United States or another nationalized settler entity.
Terms such as “Black” or “white” are used as adjectives with a relevant noun, not as identificatory nouns in and of themselves: “Black readers,” “white printers,” etc. Use of “white,” “Black,” or other adjectival identity markers as nouns will be subject to editorial revision (“whites were angry at this development”).
Use of the terms “slave” or “master” as nouns will be subject to editorial revision and are not supported usages for final manuscripts. Writers might use adjectives such as “enslaved,” “captive,” “stolen,” “self-liberated/emancipated,” or others, paired with an identificatory noun, to describe the lives and experiences of Black Americans during the era of chattel slavery. Terms such as “enslaving/enslaver,” “profiteering,” or others should be used to describe people who stole, traded, and exploited the bodies and labors of enslaved or endangered persons.
Terms used to describe racialized taxonomy are discouraged (“mulatto,” “quadroon,” etc) unless necessary parts of a citation/historical document. In the case that a citation includes historically anachronistic language to describe racialized or devalued communities, copyeditors are advised to maintain such terms only within the quotation; authors might choose to append “[sic].” In all cases, slurs and derogatory language in citation are discouraged and will be subject to editorial revision.
Following US ethnic studies conventions, writers might choose to use “Latinx” to describe members of Latino/a communities or “Chicanx” to indicate more specific, regionalized communities in the US. Writers might also use “Latine” (more common in non-English scholarship). As always, specificity is encouraged (“Cuban American”; “Mayan”; “Columbian”; etc).
Quotations and related content in languages other than English need not be italicized in the general body of manuscripts. Translation of non-English quotations or critical prose is handled in the manuscript at the discretion of writer and editor (i.e, where to footnote or include in body of the text).
Other suggestions and usage parameters to consider can be found here:
Foreman, P. Gabrielle. et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document. Accessed 02 Feb. 2020. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic
Younging, Gregory. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. Alberta: Brush Education Inc., 2018.
Proofs
Contributors will be sent a copy of the copyedited manuscript and will have until the deadline given to respond to changes and queries and communicate any final revisions to the corresponding editor. “Rewriting” or making any significant changes at the proof stage will not be acceptable. For this reason, great care must be taken in ensuring accuracy and felicity of style in the preparation of the manuscript prior to final submission. Two to three weeks are allotted for author review of editing and a similar amount of time for reviewing page proofs; adhering to this time limit is important to keeping the publication on schedule.
