Author Guidelines

Civic Sociology considers the following types of contribution. All items should be submitted via the online submission system (which is powered by Scholastica and will open in a new window). 

• Research Article: These should present original findings. All submitted and invited research articles are peer-reviewed. They typically range between 5,000-10,000 words in length, although shorter and longer contributions can be considered. They may include elements such as tables, graphs, images, illustrations as well as multimedia elements (audio and video files, maps, datasets, etc.). Any multimedia content will be reviewed for substance, and checked to ensure it can be technically supported.

• Research Notes: These should describe initial, original explorations into new data, methods or regions, and can contain all the elements of research articles.

• Essays, Comment/opinion: These should engage with normative issues or puzzles.

• Review Article: These should be comprehensive reviews of the literature to establish the state of the field in a given topic area.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE SUBMISSION PROCESS

Research Articles, Research Notes, and Review Articles: all submitted and invited manuscripts are peer-reviewed.  Associate Editors are responsible for the review process and decision, with oversight as needed from the Editor-in-Chief. The aim for the initial review process will be to not last longer than six to eight weeks.

Essays, Comment/opinion: these are read and reviewed by Editor-in-Chief and any relevant Associate Editors but not subject to formal peer review.

SUBMISSION COMPONENTS

Submissions to Civic Sociology consist of the below components:

• Cover letter (required)

• Manuscript (required)

• Figures — which are uploaded but also should be embedded in the manuscript to help with readability during the review process

• Supplemental Material — which is uploaded

COVER LETTER

Please write an approximately one-page cover letter that:

• briefly summarizes how your paper is a worthy contribution to the literature;

• specifies the type of article you are submitting;

• suggests appropriate or opposed reviewers (which information will be kept in confidence and used at the discretion of the editorial team);

• details any previous interactions with Civic Sociology regarding your submission

COPYRIGHT

Civic Sociology is an open access journal and authors retain copyright. If a manuscript is accepted for publication, the following copyright notice shall be affixed to the article when published: “© [date]  The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.”

MANUSCRIPT ORGANIZATION

We do not have arbitrary restrictions on manuscript length, but we have a guideline of 5,000-10,000 words. However, we do ask you to employ a clear and concise writing style—please note that a request to be more concise is legitimate feedback during the review process, despite no arbitrary word restrictions being in place.

All submissions should begin with the following sections:

• Title

• Authors (with corresponding author clearly indicated)

• Affiliations

• Abstract

All submissions should end with the following sections:

• References

• Contributions

• Acknowledgements (if applicable)

• Funding information (if applicable)

• Transparency statement (mandatory, even if to state that no competing interests exist)

• Supplemental material (if applicable)

• Data accessibility statement (mandatory)

• Figure titles and legends (if applicable)

Please note that even though figures and supplemental material should always be submitted separately as individual files, please also embed figures in your manuscript to help with readability during the review process.

We have no explicit requirements for section organization between the abstract and references section, but we generally recommend the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style or the Chicago Manual of Style Online.

COMPONENTS

Title

The full title must be 250 characters or fewer. It should be specific, descriptive, concise, and comprehensible to readers outside the subject field. Avoid abbreviations if possible.

Authors

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author must have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content, and a common standard for this is the one articulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Those who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgments.

When a large group or center has conducted the work, the author list should include the individuals whose contributions meet the criteria defined above, as well as the group name.

One author should be designated (with an asterisk) as the corresponding author, and his or her email address should be included on the manuscript cover page. This information will be published with the article, if accepted.

All author names should be listed in the following order:

• First names (or initials, if used),

• Middle names (or initials, if used), and

• Last names (surname, family name)

Affiliations

Each author should list an associated department, university, or organizational affiliation and its location, including city, state/province (if applicable), and country. If the article has been submitted on behalf of a consortium, all author names and affiliations should be listed.

Abstract

The abstract should provide a clear description of the main objective(s) of the submission, explain how the study was done (as applicable), and summarize the article’s most important conclusions and their significance. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and should not include sub-headings.

Please do not include citations in your abstract and avoid the use of abbreviations, if possible.

References

Published works, works accepted for publication, and citable datasets, code, and materials, should appear in the reference list. Mentions of unpublished work should be cited parenthetically within the main text of the article as personal communications.

For publication, the style of the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style or the Chicago Manual of Style Online., must be followed with respect to handling of references, using the Author-Date (AD) format.

Other author-date reference formats might be acceptable during peer review process - e.g. American Sociological Association, Harvard, etc. - so please submit drafts when you are ready and happy with content. Upon acceptance, references will need to be updated to Chicago style noted above.

Authorship Contributions

Please indicate author contributions as clearly as possible, according to the following criteria, again based on the common standards from the ICMJE:

• Substantial contributions to conception and design

• Acquisition of data

• Analysis and interpretation of data

• Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content

• Final approval of the version to be published

Example:

Contributed to conception and design: KDM, Y-LC
Contributed to acquisition of data: KDM
Contributed to analysis and interpretation of data: KDM, Y-LC
Drafted and/or revised the article: KDM, Y-LC
Approved the submitted version for publication: KDM, Y-LC

Acknowledgements

People who contributed to the work but do not fit our author criteria should be listed in the acknowledgments, along with their contributions. You must ensure that anyone named in the acknowledgments agrees to being so named.

Funding sources should not be included in the acknowledgments, but in the Funding Information section below.

Funding information

Please provide a list of the sources of funding, as well as the relevant grant numbers, where possible. List the authors associated with specific funding sources. You will also enter this information in a form during the submission process, but it must be repeated here.

Transparency statement

In order to provide readers of articles with information about interests and relationships that might influence, or might be perceived to influence, the interpretation of articles published in Civic Sociology (“competing interests”), all individuals involved with a submission (authors, editors, external reviewers) are required to declare all competing interests. Corresponding authors must provide a transparency statement on behalf of all authors.  If no competing interests exist, this should be stated specifically.

Authors who are also editors at Civic Sociology play no role during the review process of their specific paper, and this is ensured by the Editor in Chief and Publisher. However, authors who are also editors should still declare this as a competing interest (and corresponding authors should be aware of this on behalf of other authors who are also editors).

Erring on the side of full disclosure is best. For guidance, we encourage authors and editors to consult the thoughtful guidelines provided by Public Library of Science.

Supplemental material

Although we do not limit the number or type of supplemental material items authors may include, we do require that they provide a relevant and useful expansion of the article, and that they be as well described as are figures and tables included within the body of the article. We encourage authors to always consider clarity and ease of use for readers when presenting supplemental material: consider whether some supplementary files work best in a composite file (e.g. text, table, and figure in one downloadable document) or whether they are most useful downloaded separately as individual files. Please note, Editors are free to request changes in how supplemental files are presented to ensure clarity for readers. Good metadata of this material are key to discoverability and usefulness. All supplemental material should include the following:

• Type and number: Supplemental material can be named in almost any way, provided that the files are consistently named, and numbers are preceded by “S” and closed with a period. Examples:

  • Figure S1.

  • Table S1.

  • Text S1.

  • Video S1.

  • Alternative Language Abstract S1.

• Title: Supplemental material titles should be no more than 15 words, using sentence case ending with a period.

• Legend: Supplementary material figures and tables should follow the requirements for main-text figures and tables. Other types of supplementary material files should include a descriptive caption of no more than 300 words, describing the key message of the item.

• File Type: Please indicate the format of the file (e.g., DOC, PDF, CSV, AVI)

Data Accessibility Statement (DAS)

We require that authors include a “Data Accessibility Statement” (DAS) with their submission, when appropriate. This should list the database(s) and, if appropriate, the respective URLs/DOIs for all data and/or materials from the manuscript that has been made publicly available. If datasets have been provided as supplementary files to be published along with the article, the DAS should state this.

Example 1:

All the stimuli, presentation materials, participant data, and analysis scripts can be found on this paper’s project page on the Open Science Framework [and ensure you add the link].

Example 2:

The following datasets were generated:

• R scripts: uploaded as online supporting information

• Phylogenetic data: TreeBASE Study accession no. S9345  [Ensure link]

Figure Legends

Figures should be cited in ascending numeric order upon first appearance. Each embedded figure and figure caption should be inserted immediately after the first paragraph in which it is cited in the article file.

Files, figures, tables, and equations

File Types

You may submit your manuscript files in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx), Open Office, LaTeX (as .pdf), or RTF format. Only RTF and .doc/.docx files can be used during the production process. Word files must not be protected.

Submissions with Equations

Microsoft Word Submissions with Equations.  Editable versions of equations are required for production. If using a version older than Word 2010, please format equations using MathType. Do not insert your equations as Graphic Objects and do not use of Symbol font.

Figures

Figures should be included in the manuscript file, inserted immediately after the first paragraph in which it is cited in the article file, to help with readability during the review process. However, they must be also uploaded as separate files to our manuscript submission system.

Tables

Tables should be cited in ascending numeric order upon first appearance. Each table should be inserted immediately after the first paragraph in which it is cited in the article file. All tables should have a concise title. Table footnotes can be used to explain abbreviations. Citations should be indicated using the same style as outlined above. Tables occupying more than one printed page should be avoided, if possible. Larger tables can be published as supplemental material.

File Submission & Upload Order

• Write or paste your cover letter into the web form on the first page of the submission process, including all the required elements.

• Upload your article file first.

• Figures and supplemental material should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in the same order. For example, Figure 1 should be uploaded as the first figure file, Figure 2 the second, etc.; Video S1 should be uploaded as the first Supplemental Material file, Video S2 the second, etc.

• All figures, main and supplemental, should be uploaded in the desired display orientation.

• Multimedia files (.avi or .swf files) must be uploaded as supplementary material and not main figures.