Revista d'Estudis Autonòmics i Federals -- Journal of Self-Government

1. Objectives and content

The Revista d’Estudis Autonòmics i Federals – Journal of Self-Government (REAF–JSG) is a biannual publication, with one issue in June and another in December. It publishes pluridisciplinary papers on all the fields of research related to self-government subjects: political science, law, economy, linguistics, communication, culture, etc., both from an analytical perspective of a theoretical and comparative politics and as applied research related to specific cases of contemporary democracies.

2. Submission of manuscripts:

This is a free-to-submit and free-to-publish-in journal.
The articles published in the REAF–JSG should be unpublished originals. Manuscripts that are currently under review by another journal will not be accepted.
Original manuscripts will be accepted, and published, in the following languages: Catalan, Spanish and English.
All manuscripts must be submitted in Word format or similar through the academic journal management platform Scholastica.
Submitted manuscripts are firstly considered for evaluation by the members of the Editorial Board. Articles accepted to be evaluated undergo a double-peer anonymous evaluation process based upon an evaluation form. The editorial board may request further evaluations in case of doubts and of discrepancy between reviewers.

3. Manuscript selection and review

The manuscripts received will be reviewed anonymously, applying a double-blind procedure, by specialists in the subject matter. These specialists will either be independent reviewers or members of its editorial and scientific boards. Therefore, the manuscript may not include any reference (in the text, notes or references) that could enable identification of the author or authors. If the reviewers advise making changes to the original manuscript, final acceptance of the article will be conditional upon the author’s acceptance of the changes that must be made.
Among other factors, the reviewers’ reports will take into account:
◦ methodological soundness and consistency
◦ originality and novel ideas contributed by the article to its field
◦ consistency and structure of the article
◦ justification of the theses defended
◦ suitability and scope of the sources used

4. Formal criteria for submission

Once an article has been reviewed and accepted, the IEA reserves the right to modify any part of the paper to give overall consistency to the journal, aligning the text with the general editorial criteria that have been established. The author may also be asked to correct the page proofs. This correction will be limited to identifying errors with respect to the accepted manuscript and must be returned to the IEA within three working days.
As a general rule, the formal criteria applied to the articles published in the REAF–JSG are those recommended by The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers. Therefore, the manuscripts must comply with these criteria.

5. Length and format

The manuscript must have a length between 11,000 and 15,000 words, including notes and references. It must be submitted in Word, in Arial or Times New Roman size 12 and 1.5 line spacing for the main text and size 10 for the notes.
The following items must be submitted together with the article:
◦ A CV between 100 and 110 words, with professional address, telephone number and email.
◦ An abstract of the paper between 170 and 200 words. The abstract must include the paper’s specific purpose, the structure of this purpose’s development and the main conclusions.
◦ A list of between four and eight keywords. The ICPSR Thesaurus should be used to ensure that these words belong to a controlled lexical system.

6. Title and structure of the text

The title must concisely outline the manuscript’s content; a subtitle can be added with complementary information.
The text can be structured in sections, which will have a maximum of two levels.
Acronyms and highlighting resources
When writing an acronym for the first time (always without full stops), its full meaning should be written in brackets.
The resources for highlighting words or expressions are italics and inverted commas; consequently, the use of upper case, small capitals and bold type for this purpose should be avoided. Italics give a purely visual emphasis, semantically neutral to the highlighted text. Inverted commas, on the other hand, are the instrument of connotation par excellence and will be used in all cases in textual citations and for translations of words or phrases.

7. Tables and figures

Tables and figures should be designed as simply as possible, with title, separate numbering and explanatory caption, source and whether they are compiled by the author(s).

8. Citations

Literal citations within the text will be written between inverted commas, and never in italics (even if they are written in a language different from that used in the paper). As a general rule, citations with more than five lines must be written in a separate paragraph, indented and without inverted commas. Any change made to an original citation should be put in square brackets.

9. Footnotes

Notes should be used sparingly; they will all be written at the foot of the page and numbered correlatively with Arabic numerals. Superscript numbers (in the text) will always come after any punctuation marks.
When these notes contain a bibliographical reference, this reference must be given in abbreviated format, according to the “notes and bibliography” system for source citation of The Chicago Manual of Style, as illustrated below:
a) Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 23.
b) Schwartz, “Nationals and Nationalism”, 138.
c) Belizzi et al., “Consumer Perceptions”, 57-60.
d) Kurland & Lerner, Founders’ Constitution.
To refer to a work cited in the immediately preceding note, “ibid.” (“in the same place”) will be used.

10. Cited references

All cited sources (not general reading lists) will be listed together (books, articles, legislation, websites, etc.) at the end of the manuscript, ordered alphabetically by the authors’ surnames, using the format given in the following examples:
Bellizzi, Joseph A., Harry F. Krueckeberg, John R. Hamilton, and Warren S. Martin. “Consumer Perceptions of National, Private, and Generic Brands”. Journal of Retailing 57, no. 4 (1981): 56-70.
Doniger, Wendy. Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Kurland, Philip B., and Ralph Lerner, eds. The Founders’ Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.
Schwartz, Regina M. “Nationals and Nationalism: Adultery in the House of David”. Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (1992): 131-32.

11. Permissions

The author is responsible for requesting and obtaining all the permissions to reproduce the material used for citations of copyrighted works (when necessary) such as illustrations, photographs, tables, etc. that are not of own elaboration.

12. Copyright

All papers will be published in the REAF–JSG under a Creative Commons licence of the type “Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works” (cc by-nc-nd). Publishing in the REAF–JSG implies accepting this licence type. For the full text of the terms, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

13. Privacy statement

The names and email addresses appearing in the REAF–JSG will be used solely for the purposes declared by this journal and will not be made available to third parties.

14. Plagiarism

If any plagiarism is detected at any stage before publication (by editors, peer-reviewers, publication staff…), the Editorial Board can take several actions, being the most severe the rejection of the article, the banning of the author from the journal and the communication of such a dishonest practice to her/his institution.
So far, screening for plagiarism has been done on all submitted texts by editors, peer-reviewers and staff journal on the basis of their own knowledge of the academic field. We are currently considering whether to use systematic tools, such as CrossCheck.