Authors' Guide

Submitting Papers and Books for Review

Articles for Publication

Contributions should be submitted by email as attached files (saved in Word, or in Rich Text Format, or as PDF). Any figures/tables should be included in the file itself and not sent separately. Anonymised submissions are now mandatory so please fully blind your papers before submitting by email. A short 150 word summary should accompany each submission (placed at the beginning of the paper), along with confirmation that the work complies with our AI policy (see below; this should be included within the paper). Articles should not exceed 9,000 words (including abstract, footnotes, references, etc.). Please note that JCS does not publish very short research notes or ‘letters to the editor’. The vast majority of the papers published in the journal fall between 5,000 and 9,000 words (9,000 being the upper limit). Please carefully consider whether your paper meets the requirements for a stand-alone academic paper – very brief contributions will not usually be considered. Please note that authors are only allowed to have one paper under consideration at a time – multiple submissions are not permitted.

Please include a short CV/bio paragraph for the ‘about authors’ section.

They should be submitted to the Managing Editor:
Graham Horswell graham@imprint.co.uk or graham.jcs@gmail.com
(Please whitelist both addresses in order to ensure you receive our correspondence.)

If a paper is accepted for publication following external peer review, we offer a standard ‘subcription only’ route with no charge to authors, or a ‘gold open access’ option which requires the payment of a fee. Please see the following page for details: Open Access Information

Please note: By submitting to JCS you consent to being added to the JCS email newsletter. If you wish to opt out please state this when submitting your article to the journal.

Style Sheet and Guide to Authors

A Multidisciplinary Journal

The Journal of Consciousness Studies is a refereed journal aimed at an educated multidisciplinary readership. Authors should not assume prior knowledge in a subject speciality and should provide background information for their research. The use of technical terms should be avoided or made explicit. Where technical details are essential (for example in laboratory experiments), try and include them in footnotes or appendices, leaving the text accessible to the non-specialist reader. The same principle should also apply to mathematics, unless essential to an argument.

Quotations, Footnotes, References and Bibliographies

Please follow the Harvard referencing system. See our examples page: JCS Referencing (you must also include DOI numbers where available).

Quotations of more than six lines should be indented. For shorter quotations use single inverted commas. All references should appear in the bibliography. Use square brackets for interpolations; use three dots to indicate the omission of material within a quotation. Original spelling and punctuation should be retained unless otherwise stated.

Images, Graphs, and Tables

Images, graphs, and tables should be included in the submission file itself. Should a paper be accepted for publication, the author should provide alternative description, also known as alt text, (and/or a summary for complex graphs and tables), provided the image/graph/table is not sufficiently described by the surrounding text and/or caption or is purely decorative.

How to Write Alt Text

Alt text should be as objective as possible. Generally, alt text should be concise, clear, targeted, and formatted properly.

What this means in practice:

• Most images/graphs/tables only need a short description of the salient features. Alt text should, therefore, be between 25 to 30 words in length, but no longer than 100 words.
• All contractions, numbers, and non-Latin letters should be spelled out.
• Information must be presened within a logical and consistent order.
• Alt text should reflect the context an dintent of the image/graphic/table wihtin the article.
• Alt text should not e formatted (no bullet points, italics etc.) and be concluded with a full stop.

Publishing Ethics Guidelines

Please see the following page for details regarding publication ethics, including declarations of interest, authorship issues, data sharing, etc. Publishing Ethics

AI Content

Please see our policy statement here: AI Policy. All submissions should now come with a declaration that our AI policy has been complied with.

Books for Review

These should be sent to the Book Reviews Editor:
David R. Gruber
GUA Bld., 4th Floor
4505 S. Maryland Pkwy.
University of Nevada
Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA

David.Gruber@unlv.edu(opens in new tab)

Advertising and Subscription Enquiries

These should be sent to the publishers:

Imprint Academic
PO Box 200
Exeter
EX5 5YX
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1392 851550. Fax: +44 (0)1392 851178
ellie@imprint.co.uk