Submissions

Author Guidelines

Last update: 10th May 2022

1. EDITORIAL POLICY

1.1. Journal description. JES is the journal of the English Studies Division at the University of La Rioja. It accepts for publication, after favourable reports from two anonymous referees, original scholarly contributions in all research areas within the domain of English studies (linguistics, literature, literary theory, cultural studies, film studies, etc.). Proposals for publication may fall under one of the following three categories:

A. Research papers involving empirical investigations and methodological or theoretical studies within the field of English Studies (min. 6,000 and max. 10,000 words in double-spaced pages).

B. State of the art reports of recent books covering issues relating to the area of interest of the journal (max. 3,000 words in double-spaced pages).

C. Notes and squibs (max. 1,500 words in double-spaced pages).

Exceptionally, and with a positive report by the Editorial Board, contributions which exceed these maximum lengths may be considered for publication on the grounds of their scientific relevance.

Authors must explicitly express in their manuscripts if their research data takes into account the sex factor in order to account for possible differences depending on sex and gender.

There are no author's submission fees nor any other publication-related fees.

This journal will be published exclusively online from volume 17 (2019) onwards.

1.2. Language. JES only accepts for publication contributions written in English. The language used in the manuscript must be an inclusive, non-sexist one.

1.3. Evaluation. Contributions for publication will be sent to two anonymous referees proposed by the members of the Editorial Board and/or Advisory Board. In order to be accepted for publication in JES, contributions should be informed positively in relation to the following criteria:

• Originality and interest concerning the subject-matter, methodology, and conclusions of the study.
• Relevance concerning current research in the field.
•  Knowledge of previous research in the same field.
• Scientific rigour and depth of analysis.
•  Accuracy in the use of concepts, methods, and terms.
• Relevance of the theoretical implications of the study.
• Use of updated bibliography.
• Correct use of language and correction in the organization of contents and other formal aspects of the text.
•  Clarity, elegance, and conciseness in the exposition.
• Suitability to the range of topics of interest for the journal.

Evaluation reports will be carried out anonymously within five months from their reception. Once the evaluation process is completed, authors will receive a statement of the editorial decision together with an anonymous copy of the reports on which the decision is based. The editorial decision will be considered final.

1.4. Revision and proof-reading. Should any formal or content aspect of the contributions be improved and/or modified, it will be the authors’ responsibility to return the new version within the deadline established by the Editor. Failing to do so will result in the non-publication of the contribution. Likewise, authors are responsible for proof-reading their contributions and returning the revised versions by the deadline established by the Editor.

1.5. Copyright. The authors guarantee that their contributions are original works which have not been published previously and are not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. All articles in which plagiarism or self-plagiarism is detected will be immediately rejected.

The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize JES the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.

Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or  institutional repositories.

2. SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Proposals should be sent online via http://publicaciones.unirioja.es/revistas/jes/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions.

In order to be sent off for evaluation, proposals must follow the guidelines below.

3. INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS

3.1. What to send. Authors should send their proposals online.

Attached to the message, authors should send two Word or RTF documents. In the first document, authors should include the title of the proposal (in bold face), the name/s of the author/s (in Small Capitals), their institutional affiliation (in italics) and any other relevant information, such as e-mail and postal address and telephone and fax number.

In the case of multiple authorship, please state clearly which of the contributors will be in charge of the ensuing correspondence with JES.

Authors should also include here a brief biographical note of about 100 words.

The second document should include the full proposal to be sent off for evaluation. Authors should be extremely careful to avoid any kind of information which might reveal their identity.

3.2. Artwork, tables, figures and images. These should be included in the text file. Tone art, or photographic images, should be saved as JPG or TIFF files with a resolution of 300 dpi at final size.

3.3. Copyright information. If a preliminary version of the proposal has been presented at a conference, information about the name of the conference, the name of the sponsoring organization, the exact date(s) of the conference or paper presentation and the city in which the conference was held should be provided in a footnote in the first page of the document. Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.

4. MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

4.1. Formatting. Minimum formatting should be used. Indentation, underlining and tabulation should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

4.2. Document. All margins in the document should be of 2.54 cms. Paragraphs should be fully justified. The main text of the proposal should be written in 12- point Garamond. Quotations will be in 11-point Garamond when they appear in an independent paragraph. Abstracts, keywords, footnotes, superscript numbers, tables and figures will appear in 10-point Garamond.

4.3. Title. The title of the proposal should be centred and written in 12-point Garamond bold. Capitals should be used for both title and subtitle.

A Spanish translation of the title of the proposal should also be included. For those contributors who do not handle Spanish, a translation will be provided by the Editor.

4.4. Abstract and keywords. Each title should be followed by a brief abstract (100-150 words each): the first one should be written in English, while the second one should be written in Spanish. For those contributors who do not handle Spanish, a translation of the abstract will be provided by the Editor. Abstracts should be single-spaced, typed in 10-point Garamond italics (titles of books and keywords will appear in normal characters), justified on both sides, and indented 1 cm. from the left-hand margin. Abstracts should have no footnotes. The word ABSTRACT/RESUMEN (in normal characters and capital letters), followed by a full-stop and a single space, will precede the text of the abstract.

Abstracts will be followed by a list of six keywords, written in normal characters in the corresponding language, English or Spanish, so that contributions can be accurately classified by international reference indexes. The word Keywords/Palabras clave (in italics), followed by a semi-colon and a single space, will precede the keywords.

4.5. Paragraphs. Paragraphs in the main text should not be separated by a blank line. The first line of each paragraph will be indented 1 cm. from the left-hand margin. Words will not be divided at the end of a line either. There should be only one space between words and only one space after any punctuation.

4.6. Italics. Words in a language other than English should be italicized; italics should also be used in order to emphasize some key words. If the word that has to be emphasized is located in a paragraph which is already in italics, the key word will appear in normal characters.

4.7. Figures, illustrations, and tables. They should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals and referred to by their numbers within the text (e.g. as we see in example/figure/table 1). They should be accompanied by an explanatory foot (in 10-point Garamond italics, single-spaced).

4.8. Headings. Headings of sections should be typed in Small Capitals, and separated with two blank spaces from the previous text and with one blank space from the following text. They must be preceded by Arabic numerals separated by a full stop and a blank space (e.g. 1. Introduction).

Headings of subsections should be typed in italics, and separated with one space from both the previous and the following text. They must be numbered as in the example (e.g. 1.1., 1.2., etc.).

Headings of inferior levels of subsections should be avoided as much as possible. If they are included, they should also be numbered with Arabic numerals (e.g. 1.1.1., 1.1.2., etc.) and they will be typed in normal characters.

4.9. Asides. For asides other than parenthetical asides, dashes (and not hyphens) should be used, preceded and followed by a blank space. For compounds use hyphens. Notice the following example:

“Teaching in English – as many subjects as possible – seems to offer a second-best solution insofar as it entails much more exposure of the foreign language”.

4.10. Punctuation. Authors are requested to make their usage of punctuation as consistent as possible. Commas, full stops, colons and semi-colons will be placed after inverted commas (”;).

Capital letters will keep their natural punctuation such as accents, etc. (e.g. PUNTUACIÓN, LINGÜÍSTICA, etc.).

Apostrophes (’), not accents (´), should be used for abbreviations and the saxon genitive.

4.11. Footnotes. Footnotes should only be explanatory (references should be provided only in the main text). Footnotes will appear at the end of the page. Superscript numbers will be separated from the main text of the footnote by a blank space.

References to footnotes should be marked in the text with consecutive superscript Arabic numerals, which should be placed after all punctuation (including parenthesis and quotation marks).

4.12. Quotations. Quotations should normally appear in the body of the text, enclosed in double quotation marks. Single quotation marks will be used to locate a quotation within another quotation (e.g. “toward a unified policy that ‘natural’ English was altogether preferable”).

Quotations of four lines or longer should be set in a separate paragraph, without quotation marks, typed in 11-point Garamond and indented 1,5 cms. from the left-hand margin. They should be separated from both the previous and the following text with one blank line.

Omissions within quoted text should be indicated by means of suspension points in square brackets (e.g. […]).

4.13. In-text citations. References must be made in the text and placed within parentheses. Parentheses should contain the author’s surname followed by a space before the date of publication which, should, in turn, be followed by a colon and a space before the page number(s). Example:

“Certainly, the conventional romance plot is a construction of the ideology of patriarchy” (Brush 1994: 238).

If the sentence includes the author’s name (example 1) or if it includes the date of publication (example 2), that information should not be repeated in the parentheses:

Example 1:

Johnson has drawn our attention to the fact that we are aware of our bodies as three-dimensional containers (1987: 21).

Example 2:

In appearance and aspirations he is culturally androgynous like Frankie. He is sexually ambivalent and “Light Skinned” (McCullers 1962: 155) and “could talk like a white school-teacher” (48).

If the quotation includes several pages, numbers will be provided in full, as in the example:

In the world she would create “there would be no separate coloured people [… ] but all human beings would be light brown colour with blue eyes and black hair. There would be no coloured people and no white people to make coloured people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives” (McCullers 1962: 114-115).

If several authors are parenthetically cited at the same time, they should be arranged chronologically and separated with a semi-colon:

(Richards 1971: 210; Arabski 1979: 43; Selinker 1991: 16)

 If there are two or more works by the same author published in the same year, a lower-case letter should be added to the year, as in the example:

(Montrose 1986a: 332) (Montrose 1986b: 9)

Parenthetical citations should be placed immediately after each quotation, both when the quoted passage is incorporated into the text and when the passage is longer than four lines and needs to be set in a separate paragraph. Put this parenthetical citation after the quotation marks but before the comma or period when the quotation is part of your text:

The readers being addressed are mainly white and anglophone, for, as Atwood said “survival was part of the English-Canadian cultural nationalism that peaked in about 1975” (1981: 387).

When the quotation is set off from the text in indented form, the parenthetical citation follows all punctuation:

Even Cranny-Francis points to the subversive potential of the romance plot:

Romance is often written into texts dominated by other genres, such as SF, utopian or detective fiction, where it may operate as one of the conventions of those genres. Feminist revisions of these genres also use romance and, in dialogue with other generic conventions, it has been used successfully to interrogate the construction of masculinity and femininity and of interpersonal relationships. (1990: 190)

4.14. Bibliographical references. All (and only those) books and articles quoted or referred to in the text (those quoted in the footnotes included) should appear in a final bibliographical list of references, which completes the information provided by the in-text citations provided in the text.

The heading for this list should be REFERENCES.

Hanging or reverse indentation (i.e. indentation of all lines of a paragraph except the first one, which is a full line) of 1 cm. from the left-hand margin should be used.

This list should be arranged in alphabetical order and chronologically, when two or more works by the same author are cited. The author’s full name should be repeated in all cases. Example:

Langacker, R. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar 2: Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wierzbicka, A. 1988. The Semantics of Grammar. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wierzbicka, A. 1992. Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.

Books. References to books will include: author’s surname and name; year of publication (first edition in parentheses, if different); title (in italics); place of publication; publisher’s name. If the book is a translation, the name of the translator should be indicated at the end. Contributors are requested to pay special attention to punctuation in the following examples:

Taylor, J. R. 1995 (1989). Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

Kristeva, J. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. New York: Columbia University Press. Trans. Jeanine Herman.

Articles. Titles of articles should be given in inverted commas. Titles of journals should appear in italics. Volume, number (between parentheses) should follow. Then page numbers, separated by a colon:

Haiman, J. 1978. “Conditionals are topics”. Language 54 (2): 564-589.

Frye, N. 1940. “The Resurgent”. Canadian Forum 19: 357-61.

Books edited. Volumes edited by one or more authors should be referred to as follows (notice the use of abbreviations ed. and eds.):

Miller, N. C., ed. 1986. The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia University Press.

Richards, J. C. and D. Nunan, eds. 1990. Second Language Teacher Education. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Articles in books. References to articles published in works edited by other authors or in conference proceedings should be cited as in the example:

Fowler, R. 1983. “Polyphony and Problematic in Hard Times”. The Changing World of Charles Dickens. Ed. R. Giddings. London: Vision Press. 91-108.

Traugott, E. C. 1988. “Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization”. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Eds. S. Axmaker, A. Jaisser, and H. Singmaster. Berkeley, Ca.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. 406-416.

Several authors. A journal article with three authors:

Golberg, H., Paradis, J. and M. Crago. 2008. “Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language”. Applied Psycholinguistics 29: 41-65.

Magazine article in a weekly or biweekly publication:

Allen, B. 1995. “Leaving Behind Daydreams for Nightmares”. Wall Street Journal, 11 October, A12.

A review in a journal:

Judie Newman. 2007. “Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire”, by P. Martín Salván. Atlantis 31 (1): 165-170.

An unpublished dissertation:

Arús, J. 2003. Towards a Computational Specification of Transitivity in Spanish: A Contrastive Study with English. Unpublished Ph. D. thesis. Universidad Complutense de Madrid: Spain.

An on-line publication:

Pierce, David. “Irish Studies round the world-2007: Introduction.” <http:// www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue3/Issue3InternationalReviews/PdfIStudies RoundtheWorldbyDPierce.pdf>. (Accessed 7 May 2008).

For films, just consider them as directed pieces of work, with “dir.” for “director” instead of “ed.” for “editor,”, giving the country/ies of production for the place and the name of the production company/ies instead of the publishing house, e.g.:

Kubrick, S., dir. 1980. The Shining. USA and UK: Hawk Films Ltd., Peregrine, Producers Circle and Warner Bros.