Author Guidelines
Formatting and length
Please submit your article in a standard format that can be opened with mainstream word-processing applications. We accept files in .docx or .odt format.
Articles should be between 6,000 and 7,000 words, including the bibliography. Please do not exceed the 7,000-word limit.
Each article should include an abstract of 200–250 words and a list of 4–5 keywords.
Please use a readable font, size 12, double-spaced, with justified margins.
Please limit the use of tables and graphs. Tables should be submitted in an editable format so that they can be adapted for publication. Graphs should be submitted in high resolution, preferably 300 dpi.
Submission requirements
Submissions must be original and must not be under consideration elsewhere.
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyrighted material, including images, tables, figures, and long quotations.
The journal uses double-blind peer review. Authors should ensure that the manuscript is anonymised before submission. This includes removing names, affiliations, acknowledgements, self-identifying references, and identifying information from the file metadata.
Authors should submit a separate title page including their name, institutional affiliation, email address, ORCID where available, acknowledgements, funding information, competing interests, and a short biographical note.
Authors should disclose any actual, potential, or perceived competing interests. They should also indicate whether the research involved human participants, interviews, sensitive data, or other material requiring ethical approval.
For non-English terms, names, titles, and quotations, authors should use a consistent transliteration system and provide translations where appropriate.
Citation and referencing
Please use in-text author-date citations, for example:
(Moisé and Sorbello 2022)
Where necessary, please include page numbers according to standard academic conventions, for example:
(Moisé and Sorbello 2022, 16)
Please note that there is no comma between the author’s name and the year of publication.
When quoting another work or person, please use double quotation marks: “ ”. When including a quotation within a quotation, please use single quotation marks for the internal quotation: ‘ ’.
If you wish to provide additional information that does not belong in the main body of the text, please use numbered footnotes. Footnotes should be numbered using Arabic numerals, such as 1, 2, 3, rather than Roman numerals or any other numbering system. Please use footnotes sparingly.
Please provide an alphabetised bibliography at the end of the article. Pay close attention to the position of commas and full stops. In bibliography entries for journal articles and book chapters, full stops and commas should be placed inside the quotation marks.
Spelling and writing style
Please ensure that your article has a clear introduction and conclusion.
Please use headings and subheadings throughout the article. Headings and subheadings should follow sentence-style capitalisation: only the first word and proper nouns should be capitalised.
Please follow British spelling conventions, including -ise endings. When in doubt, please consult the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary.
The journal follows standard publishing practice by lowercasing titles and general references to organisations when they are not used as part of a formal name. For example: “the Eighth Army”, but “the army”; “President Trump”, but “the president”.
Please place punctuation outside quotation marks unless the punctuation forms part of the original quotation. For example:
Secretary General Xi Jinping said that Kazakhstan would be a “comprehensive strategic partner”.
The bibliography does not follow this rule; please follow the bibliography examples provided below.
For dates, please use the following format:
12 March 1994
Please use Oxford commas, namely a comma before the final item in a list. For example:
China has developed strong relations with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Please spell out numbers from one to ninety-nine. Use numerals for numbers of 100 and above, for example, 103. One exception is numbers used with units of measurement, for example, 5 km. Please spell percent as written here.
When listing items within a sentence, please use the following format:
With the Belt and Road Initiative, China has developed educational collaborations with Central Asian countries, including: (1) financing mobility grants for Central Asian students to study in China; (2) establishing Confucius Institutes and affiliate centres; and (3) offering training programmes in China to Central Asian educators.
Bibliography examples
Book
Ferrari, Aldo. 2022. Storia della Crimea: Dall’Antichità a Oggi. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Edited book
Berkofsky, Axel and Giulia Sciorati, eds. 2022. China’s Foreign Policies Today. Who Is in Charge of What. Milan: Ledizioni.
Edited chapter
Artoni, Daniele. 2019. “Alone in the Steppes: Carla Serena in the Peripheries of the Russian Empire.” In Róisín Healy, ed., Mobility in the Russian, Central and East European Past, 46–56. London: Routledge.
Journal article
Comai, Giorgio. 2018. “Conceptualising Post-Soviet De Facto States as Small Dependent Jurisdictions.” Ethnopolitics 17, no. 2: 181–200.
Online source
Maracchione, Frank. 2023. “Licorice and Leather: Spotting Chinese Soft Power in Rural Uzbekistan.” Eurasianet, March 22, 2023. https://eurasianet.org/perspectives-licorice-and-leather-spotting-chinese-soft-power-in-rural-uzbekistan. Accessed on May 11, 2023.
Please note that access dates are not required for online sources unless the page is subject to updates.
If two or more works by the same author are listed in the bibliography, please arrange them in order of publication date, beginning with the earliest publication. If two or more works by the same author were published in the same year, distinguish them by adding a, b, c, and so on after the year.
Please do not divide the bibliography by type of source.
