Guide for Authors

Table of Contents

• Aims and Scope
• Before Submitting
• Article Types
• Paper Organization
• First Submission
• Final Submission (after conditional acceptance)
• Accessibility of Data and Other Materials
• Editorial Process
• Proposing Special Issues
• Publication Fees
• Indexing and Archiving
• Impact Measures

Aims and Scope
European Societies is the flagship journal of the European Sociological Association and is published with the MIT Press. The journal includes peer-reviewed research from or about Europe. European Societies welcomes all sociological methods and approaches in sociological theory, as well as contributions from other disciplines that substantially advance sociological knowledge.

Before Submitting
The following is a checklist of important issues to address before submitting to European Societies:

• 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 or conferences should be brought to the attention of the Editor. Publication of preprints on servers such as SocArXiv (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv) is acceptable and encouraged. Any use of AI tools in generating the text must be clearly explained in a backmatter section under the subhead AI Use Disclosure .
• For details on research and publication ethics, see the MIT Press Ethics page.
• Prepare a list of up to 3-6 keywords/phrases.
• All submissions are screened via plagiarism detection software. If your methods are similar to those of another paper and you wish to re-use the same text, this should be clearly stated.
• 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.
• Be ready to enter author contributions (CRediT statement).
• On first submission, articles can use any formatting the author chooses and should be submitted as a single PDF file. Please be sure to integrate all figures and tables into the body of the main text. Include page numbers and ideally line numbering.
• 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.
• Any data sets used must be cited in the text and included in the References, with a  link to the public repository where the materials can be accessed. We strongly recommend you place them in a repository such as Open Science Framework, the Harvard Dataverse, or Zenodo, 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 Societies publishes the following article types:

Research Article

• Should be written with the following elements in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; ethical approval; references; appendices (as appropriate). Tables and figures should be integrated into the manuscript. Supplementary Materials that are on-line appendices should be provided as a separate file in PDF format.
• Should contain an unstructured abstract of 200 words.
• Should contain between 3 and 6 keywords.
• European Societies does not have a set word limit, yet shorter contributions (i.e. 7,000 words or less) are very much preferred.

Paper Organization
Research articles should generally be arranged as follows:

• Title, Authors, Affiliations, Corresponding author information, Abstract, Keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and Methods
• Results
• Discussion and/or Conclusions
• Ending sections:
• Acknowledgements (optional)
• AI Use Disclosure (mandatory)
• Author Contributions (optional)
• Data and Code Availability (mandatory unless there is no data or code used)
• Declaration of Interest Statement (mandatory)
• Ethical Approval (mandatory; see MIT Press Journal Publication Ethics. )
• Funding (optional)
• Supplementary Material (created during production as a web link to online material)
• References (formatted in APA style)
• Appendices (optional, and normally better to include such additional content as Supplementary Material)

First Submission
Please create an account and submit at the European Societies ScholarOne Manuscripts site. On first submission, European Societies does not require any specific formatting. All manuscripts are uploaded as a single PDF document with all elements of the article fully integrated (including figures, tables, and references). We encourage providing figures and tables (and their captions) at the intended position within the main document to facilitate the reading process. Where possible please also include all supplementary material in the same main PDF.

Final Submission (after conditional acceptance)
Once an article reaches the conditional acceptance stage of revision, we do require specific formatting. Final manuscripts must be provided in Word or LaTeX and in PDF and include all the following elements: article title, author name(s), author affiliation(s) and email address, abstract, main text, ending sections, references (APA7 for citations and references), and any tables and figures.

Word submissions:

• Word file (doc or docx) with all required text elements and figures and tables in place or at the end of the manuscript file. See notes below for figures and tables.
• PDF of the Word file including all required elements.

LaTeX submissions:

• Complete LaTeX package. Include all required text elements and figures and tables. See notes below for figures and tables.
• A compiled PDF including all required elements.

Citations and References: Use APA7 citation and reference style.

Figure requirements:

• Please include figures in your manuscript file (as noted above) and as separate source files.
• Vector formats are strongly preferred (e.g., SVG, WMF, EPS, PDF, CDR).
• Raster formats are acceptable (JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF) at high resolution (900-1200 dpi for graphs with text and 300 dpi for grayscale or color images) with a width of 12 cm.
• For each multipart figure, please provide a single aggregated source file.

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.) should 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.
• Larger or more complex supplements, including replication packages, authors should upload to a public repository and reference in the manuscript, including a persistent URL or identifier (DOI).

Data availability requirement: Manuscripts that fully or partially (mixed methods) rely on quantitative data analyses are not required to provide a replication package upon first submission.  Only in the revision stage we require a replication package.

Data availability requirement: Manuscripts that fully or partially (mixed methods) rely on quantitative data analyses are required to provide a replication package that includes all data and code necessary for data preparation and analysis to reproduce all results shown in the manuscript.  Data that is available in public data repositories does not have to be included in replication packages, neither does data that cannot be shared for legal or ethical reasons.

Accessibility of Data and Other Materials
For submissions that fully or partially (mixed methods) rely on quantitative data analysis, European Societies requires authors to openly share all data, code, and other materials that are necessary for data preparation and reproducing a manuscript’s findings. 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.

Replication packages should be accessible to editors and reviewers at the time of resubmission 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.

All manuscripts must include a statement on Data and Code Availability. “Available upon request” is not acceptable without further detailed explanation.

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.

Proposing Special Issues

Special issue information

Guidelines for Special Issue Proposals

European Societies receives a high number of proposals for special issues. Our policy is to consider only the most promising proposals. Our main criteria for selecting special issue proposals are:

• (Expected) quality of the articles.
• Originality of the theme and/or the methodology of the research.
• Involvement of under-represented academic communities.

The proposal should include at least the following parts:

• A brief introduction to the topic of the special issue, its motivation, and an outline of the intended contributions of the special issue.
• A draft call for Contributors, and/or a list of likely Contributors.
• A list of proposed Reviewers who must not be linked to the Contributors.
• A timetable for the final submission.

We ask that each article be reviewed by three Reviewers in a doubly-anonymized fashion, that is, anonymous to both Authors and Reviewers. Contributors to the special issue cannot be Reviewers.

We also oppose all “Matthew effects.” Special Issue Editors should be aware that manuscripts by all contributors must receive exactly the same type of treatment.

Special Issue Editors can contribute as (Co-)Authors of an introduction and one more article. Other Contributors can be (co-)authors of no more than two articles. Any proposed exception to this rule should be soundly justified.

All final decisions on publication remains with the journal, not with the Special Issue Editors.

On this basis, Special Issue Editors may receive an initial agreement to proceed with composing the issue. After that agreement, the special issue will be handled by the Special Issue Editors and the manuscripts will flow from Special Issue Editors to the Reviewers and back via our electronic platform. Once decisions about manuscripts have to be made, the Editors of the journal will consult with you.

Finally, Special Issue Editors will need to ensure that the proposed articles are original, rather than (partially) recycled material that has already been published.

Publication Fees
European Societies is a diamond open access, online-only journal. There is no APC (Article Processing Charge).

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

European Societies 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 Societies 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.