Author Guidelines

We look forward to working with you in getting your article ready for publication. The following guidelines have been provided to ensure that the editorial/production process is as efficient, accurate and stress-free as possible. If any of the notes below are unclear, or you can foresee a problem in following them, please talk to your commissioning editor immediately.

The following topics have been covered:

  1. Presentation of Manuscript and Disc
  2. The Text
  3. Headings
  4. Figures and Photographs
  5. Tables
  6. Notes and Harvard-style References/Bibliography
  7. Copyright
  8. Procedure for article Production – Editorial and Typesetting  
  9. The Timescale for Publishing an article

Please familiarise yourself with the topics which are relevant to your manuscript, taking particular note of the copyright rules and the procedure for book production.

Presentation of Manuscript

  • We require an electronic copy, double-spaced and paginated. Please keep an identical copy, with the same pagination, to refer to at copy-editing stage.
  • The file should be saved as a Word document or as an RTF only. Other applications are incompatible with our system and will cause delays to the production of the book.
  • Ensure the manuscript you provide is double spaced throughout, including indented block quotes, extracts, chapter end notes, references and bibliography. The font should be 12pt.
  • Do not attempt to design your manuscript. This will be done by a professional typesetter and any formatting will be stripped out of the file in the conversion to Quark. This includes adding icons, inserting boxed text, adding shading, etc. If there are to be boxes or icons as a style feature within your article, please discuss this with your commissioning editor who will be able to send you formatting guidelines.
  • The whole manuscript should be paginated consecutively throughout using Arabic numbering.
  • Do not justify the right-hand margin as this creates awkward spacing and confusing word breaks.
  • Please include a contents page when you submit you manuscript. It is important that you make sure that the headings throughout the manuscript correlate exactly with the contents page.
  • Please also include your bibliography/references/further reading when submitting your manuscript.

 

The Text

  • Spelling should conform to the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.  
  • Note the spelling of the following words, which are the preferred forms:

 

focuses, focused, focusing (not focusses, etc.)
among, while (not amongst, whilst)
with regard to (not with regards to)
first, secondly, or first, second (but not firstly)
acknowledgement, judgement, abridgement
interpretative (not interpretive)
analyse (not analyze)
dependent (adj.), dependant (noun)

‘ize’ rather than ‘ise’ . Use ‘ize’ endings, e.g. organize, realize, but advertise, advise, apprise, chastise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, disenfranchise, disguise, enterprise, excise, exercise, improvise, supervise, surmise, surprise, etc. Please check in the dictionary if necessary.

  • Use single quotes, and double quotes within single quotes when necessary.
  • Dates:  as 29 September 1903
  • Titles:  Earl Richard; Richard, Earl of Kent; the Bishop of Gloucester. Specific titles upper-cased, general references, including king, lower case.
  • Hyphens:  In adjectives but not nouns: thirteenth-century justice but the thirteenth century; south-east England but the south east.
  • Quoted material of more than 40 words should be displayed as an indented block quote, with a line spacing above and below, and be double spaced. Quote marks are not necessary for block quotes. Spelling and punctuation of the original should be copied exactly. This includes any ‘ise’ endings that may differ from that main body of the book.
  • Use underline to indicate where text is to be set in italics, as italic formatting can drop out in the conversion to a Quark file (e.g. titles of books, journals, etc.).
  • For personal or geographic names that have several forms, decide on a preferred version and indicate this along with accents.  This is especially useful in edited works, where each contributor may use a different version.  Quotations should, however, retain the spelling of the original.

Headings

 

  • The typescript should be set out in such a way that the heading levels within chapters are immediately apparent. 'To indicate the different levels of heading and subheading in your manuscript, please use [A] in front of main headings, [B] in front of sub-headings and [C] in front of sub-subheadings if necessary

Figures and Photographs

 

  • All illustrations and pictures should be submitted as camera-ready copy (i.e. ready for reproduction). They should be high resolution electronic file (e.g. jpeg, tiff, eps) via email/ memory stick at 600dpi where possible, or at a minimum of 300dpi. If electronic files are not available then good quality print outs for scanning must be provided. Please note that images taken from websites are unlikely to be of a high enough quality.
  • A separate, numbered list of captions may be provided, but ensure that the captions remain in the text and each illustration is clearly marked with its figure or picture number. Captions should be within the text as well as supplied in list.

 

  • Present all illustrations separate from the text, along with an instruction in the text, e.g. [Insert Figure 1.1 here] as to where they should ideally be placed. 
  • Please do not leave line drawings done with Word or other PC software integrated with the text. These must be pulled out and provided as separate files. If drawings have been done with Quark, Illustrator or other similar design software, these can be provided electronically, saved as high resolution image files e.g. jpg or PDF.

 

Tables

  • Tables should be typed with the minimum of horizontal rules. Vertical rules should be avoided.
  • Tables should be referred to in the text as ‘in Table 2.3’ rather than ‘in the following table’.
  • All tables should have captions. Sources and notes are placed immediately below.

 

Notes and Harvard-style References/Bibliography

  • Notes should be placed at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book. Do not use footnotes, except where explicitly recommended in series style. 
  • Note numbers should appear as superscript numbers in the text and be numbered sequentially, starting from one.
  • Notes should always be double-spaced and the same point size (12pt) as the main text.
  • Some series give bibliographical information in the notes. Please refer to the series editor for preferred style.
  • Reference and bibliographical lists must always be arranged in alphabetical order by author. Titles of books and journals must be underlined for later conversion to italics.
  • Our preferred style for referencing is as follows, but variations are acceptable, depending on the conventions normally followed in your field, as long as the information is complete: author and initials, date of publication, title, place of publication, name of publisher. Whichever style is used, please ensure that it is consistent throughout the notes, references and bibliography.

 

Books

Pike, K. L. (1967), Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour (revised edn). The Hague: Mouton.

Makkai, A. and Lockwood, D. G. (1973), Stratificational Linguistics: A Reader. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Veltman, R. (1982), ‘Comparison and intensification: an ideal but problematic domain for systematic functional theory’, in J. Benson and W. Greaves (eds), Systematic Perspectives on Discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 15–32.

Journals

 

Halliday, M. A. K. (1961), ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’. Word, 17, 241–92.
(N.B. No ‘pp.’ required for journal articles)

Lamb, S. M. (1964), ‘The sememic approach to structural semantics’, American Anthropologist, 66, (3), Part 2, 57–78 (reprinted in Pike, 1967).

  • Every work quoted from or mentioned in the text must be included in the reference/bibliography. Please check that all references are present, and that dates in the text and in the references are identical.

 

  • Where there are two or more works by the same author in the same year, they should be distinguished by 1997a, 1997b, etc.
  • When quoting a work by two or more authors, use et al. in the text, but give all the authors’ names in the references/bibliography.

 

  • Works should be cited in the text by the name/date system: that is, give the author’s surname, year of publication and the page reference immediately after the quoted material, i.e. (Jones, 1998, p. 64).
  • Include page reference numbers for all direct citations.

 

Copyright

  • Permission must be obtained if you want to quote at length from another author’s work or use an illustration previously published. Please note that obtaining permissions can be a lengthy process, and should therefore be initiated well before the final manuscript is submitted to Continuum. Please refer to copyright holder’s website/information: they may have forms or templates for requesting permission. If they provide no specific information on submitting requests, a standard permission request letter is available from us and should be used when approaching the copyright holder.

 

  • Permission to use all copyright material must be cleared in advance of sending us the final typescript, and written evidence that such permission has been granted and any fee requested has been paid must be supplied.

3.   Please be aware that permission must also be sought for images, text etc that is sourced from the internet. Copyright may belong to the website owner, or to the original creator. Do not assume that just because an item is on a website it is in the public domain – it may be that the website owner does not have the permission to use it.

4.   Please also note that screenshots of websites and website logos will also require permission, and that this may be difficult or costly to obtain. For example, it is not advisable to include screenshots of facebook, ebay, amazon, hotmail etc. In addition, if you wish to use a screenshot of a webpage that contains adverts, you will need to remove the adverts from the image, or else obtain permission to reproduce them

5.   Items requiring permission are:

  • Ornamental quotes (ornamental quotes are quotations that are not directly criticised, e.g. to open a chapter, an epigraph). To fall within fair dealing guidelines, extracts must be used for the purpose of 'criticism and review' and be fully referenced.
  • Text (prose) extracts of more than 400 words, or a total of 800 words from the same volume if there are several shorter extracts (not more than 300 words each).
  • An article in a journal that comprises more than a third of the original
  • More than one line of poetry
  • More than one line of a song lyric, hymn or dramatic work, including film scripts
  • Pictures, diagrams or any other artwork, including line drawings, if taken from another source.
  • Use the following as a guide for when permission to reproduce must be obtained:

 

The Timescale for Publishing an article

The schedule for the printed work is split into the following stages:

  • Copy-editing
  • Typesetting
  • Proofreading
  • Revised proof stage
  • 2nd revises
  • Voucher proofs
  • Printing

 

Once the manuscript has been handed to production, the project managers will contact you with a firm schedule with dates for proceedings.

If you have any questions about the preparation of your article at any stage, please do not hesitate to ask.

Professor Martin Amin the Editor-in-Chief through earnia13@gmail.com.

 

Contact Us

  • Institute of Education
    University of Ibadan,
    Ibadan, Oyo State
    Nigeria

    +234 (0) 803 326 3534
    info@earnia.org