Guide for Authors

Table of Contents

• Aims and Scope
• Before Submitting
• Article Types
• Paper Organization
• First Submission
• Revision
• Accessibility of Data and Other Materials
• Editorial Process
• Publication Fees
• Indexing and Archiving
• Impact Measures

Aims and Scope
The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology is a fully open access, peer-reviewed journal published under the auspices of the European Sociological Association by the MIT Press.

The journal is a forum to explore the interplay between culture and politics, drawing upon a diverse array of theoretical and methodological approaches in sociology. The journal welcomes articles—from Europe and beyond—that consider cultural phenomena in relation to political contexts, work that situates political phenomena within a cultural framework, and all points between these poles.

Before Submitting
The following is a checklist of important issues to address before submitting to European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology:

• Be ready to certify that your article represents original work and that there is no significant overlap with any other articles by the authors that are under consideration or in press elsewhere. Closely related submissions at other journals should be brought to the attention of the Editors. Any use of AI tools in generating the text must be clearly explained within the text and in the submission cover letter.
• For details on research and publication ethics, see the MIT Press Ethics page.
• Prepare a cover letter, briefly presenting your paper and justifying the choice for this Journal.
• Prepare an abstract of 150 words.
• Prepare a list of up to 3-6 keywords.
• You may suggest up to three reviewers for your article. Be sure to avoid conflicts of interest (e.g., people at your institution or people you have co-authored or collaborated with in the last 5 years).
• You can use either American or British English, but please be consistent in your choice. Papers with significant amounts of grammatical or spelling errors are likely to be returned to you for further editing before we send the paper to reviewers.
• Please use inclusive language. Ensure that the use of “gender” vs “sex” is correct for the given context.
• Confirm that all co-authors approve the manuscript in its submitted form. Collect their names, affiliations, email addresses and funding information. Make sure it is clear who the corresponding author is, and include their email address. AI tools cannot be listed as authors.
• On first submission, articles can use any formatting the author chooses. The submission must include a cover page submitted as a separate file and an anonymized version of the main document. Both files are expected as Word documents. Please be sure to integrate all figures and tables into the body of the main text. Include page numbers.
• Be ready to declare any competing interests for all authors.
• Be sure all authors agree that your article will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows free and unlimited reuse of articles without permission or fees.
• Be sure all authors of reprinted figures or text agree that your article will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows free and unlimited reuse of articles without permission or fees.
• If you plan to publish data sets, please cite these materials in the text of your article and include entries for them in your references list. Either enclose them as supplementary material with your submission (if ≤100MB) or include a link to a public repository where the materials can be accessed. We strongly recommend that when materials are not to be hosted by the journal, you place them in a repository with a robust persistence policy that will register and supply you with a persistent identifier like a DOI. Include this persistent ID in your reference listing.

Article Types
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology publishes the following article types:

• Research article: The maximum length of original research articles is 8000 words (in total, including references).
• Short book reviews: On a single book, review length of between 800 and 2000 words.
• Long book reviews: On one or several books, review length of no more than 4000 words.

Paper Organization
Research articles in our journal usually contain the following elements:

• A separate cover page inclusive of title, authors, affiliations, corresponding author contact information, abstract, keywords.
• The main document that generally includes an introduction, discussion of prior literature and/or context, methods and data section, analysis, and conclusions. References and appendices (optional, and normally better to include such additional content as supplementary material).

First Submission
Please create an account and submit at the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology ScholarOne Manuscripts site. The submission must include a cover page submitted as a separate file and an anonymized version of the main document. Both files are expected as Word documents. Consider preparing a cover letter, briefly presenting your paper and justifying the choice for this Journal. 

Revision
Once an article reaches the stage of revision, we do require specific formatting:

• Word file with tables and figures in-line or at the end of the article
• Citations and references in APA 7 style
• Figure files (see requirements below)

Upon acceptance, the final version of the paper needs to include a title page with the following elements:

• Title
• Authors and their Affiliations,
• Corresponding author’s contact information,
• Abstract of 150 words
• 3-6 Keywords
• Declaration of Conflict of Interest
• A statement on Data and Code Availability. 
• An Ethics Statement (Please see https://direct.mit.edu/journals/pages/publication-ethics)
• For co-authored manuscripts, a declaration of contributions (detailing the distribution of labour)
• Funding information
• Acknowledgements

Figure requirements: Figures may appear inline in your main text files, but please also supply them as separate files. Appropriate formats include PDF, EPS, JPG, PNG, and TIFF. Individual figure files should ideally be no larger than 10MB, but this is not a hard limit. Please use Arial or Helvetica fonts within figures.

Table requirements: Tables should appear inline and be formatted as tables, not tab or comma delimited text. Please do not use shading or colored type in tables. These cannot be reproduced in an accessible manner in full-text html. If shading or colored type are required, the table will be reproduced as a figure in the full-text html.

Supplementary Materials: Supplements (additional tables, figures, etc.) should be supplied as PDF files or any file type that is suitable (e.g. excel files, txt files) and should not exceed 100MB. Supplementary figures and tables (etc.) be accompanied by explanatory text (such as titles and captions), and a PDF will generally be more suitable than a pure image file such as JPG. For larger or more complex supplements, including data packages, authors should upload to a public repository and reference these in the manuscript, including a persistent URL or identifier (DOI).

Accessibility of Data and Other Materials
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology encourages all authors to openly share all data, code, and other materials that are essential for reproducing the article’s findings and conclusions, and for building on the published work. Authors are encouraged to deposit the dataset(s) in a recognized data repository that can mint a persistent digital identifier, preferably a digital object identifier (DOI) and recognizes a long-term preservation plan. If you are uncertain about where to deposit your data, please visit FAIRsharing and re3data.org to search for a suitable repository – both provide a list of certified data repositories.

Where they will be shared, data and supplemental materials should be accessible to editors and reviewers at the time of first submission, for the purpose of evaluating the suitability and quality of the manuscript, and should be made freely and openly accessible to the public at the time of acceptance. If data was obtained from another source (e.g., public repository), the source and process of obtaining the data should be described.

Whether data/code will be shared or not, all papers must include a statement on Data and Code Availability. "Available upon request" is not acceptable without further detailed explanation, which might include: The need for a formal data sharing agreement; The need for approval from the requesting researcher's local ethics committee; The need to submit a formal project outline; Requirements for co-authorship or inclusion in the author byline.

Editorial Process
All manuscript submissions are subject to initial appraisal by the Editors, and, if found suitable for further consideration, to peer review by independent, anonymous expert referees. Peer review is double anonymized.

Publication Fees
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology is a diamond open access, online-only journal. There is no APC (Article Processing Charge).

Indexing and Archiving
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology will submit article metadata to the following discovery services: CNKI Scholar, EBSCO Discovery, Ex Libris Primo, IBZ, Naver Academic, OCLC Discovery, ProQuest Summon, and Scopus. In addition, articles will be visible immediately on Google Scholar. A full list of indexing services is available.

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology is a fully open access journal as of January 2025, with articles published under a CC BY-NC license. All archive material prior to this change will also be fully available under a CC BY-NC license.

Impact Measures
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology provides data on article access and impact for each published manuscript. Data provided include: download counts from the mitpressjournals.org site; citation counts provided by CrossRef; and attention scores provided by Altmetric, which tracks attention to the article by news outlets, blogs, social media, online reference managers, etc. Articles also receive a Dimensions badge that provides additional citation and impact data.