JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES (JES)

Editorial Policy, Guidelines for Contributions and Stylesheet

1. EDITORIAL POLICY
1.1. Journal description. JES is the journal of the English Studies Division at the
University of La Rioja. It accepts for publication, after favourable reports from two
anonymous referees, original scholarly contributions in all research areas within the domain
of English studies (linguistics, literature, literary theory, cultural studies, film studies, etc.).
Proposals for publication may fall under one of the following three categories:
A. Research papers involving empirical investigations and methodological or
theoretical studies within the field of English Studies (min. 15 and max. 30 double-
spaced pages).
B. State of the art reports of recent books covering issues relating to the area of interest
of the journal (max. 8 double-spaced pages).
C. Notes and squibs (max. 6 double-spaced pages).
Exceptionally, and with a positive report by the Editorial Board, contributions which
exceed these maximum lengths may be considered for publication on the grounds of their
scientific relevance.

1.2. Language. JES only accepts for publication contributions written in English.

1.3. Evaluation. Contributions for publication will be sent to two anonymous referees
proposed by the members of the Editorial Board and/or Advisory Board. In order to be
accepted for publication in JES, contributions should be informed positively in relation to the
following criteria:
— Originality and interest concerning the subject-matter, methodology, and
conclusions of the study.
— Relevance concerning current research in the field.
— Knowledge of previous research in the same field.
— Scientific rigour and depth of analysis.
— Accuracy in the use of concepts, methods, and terms.
— Relevance of the theoretical implications of the study.
— Use of updated bibliography.
— Correct use of language and correction in the organization of contents and other
formal aspects of the text.
— Clarity, elegance, and conciseness in the exposition.
— Suitability to the range of topics of interest for the journal
Evaluation reports will be carried out anonymously within three months from their
reception. Once the evaluation process is completed, authors will receive a statement of the
editorial decision together with an anonymous copy of the reports on which the decision is
based. The editorial decision will be considered final.
1.4. Revision and proof-reading. Should any formal or content aspect of the contributions
be improved and/or modified, it will be the authors’ responsibility to return the new version
within the deadline established by the Editor. Failing to do so will result in the non-
publication of the contribution.
Likewise, authors are responsible for proof-reading their contributions and returning the
revised versions by the deadline established by the Editor.

1.5. Copyright. Authors warrant that their contributions to JES are original and have neither
been submitted for publication, nor have been published elsewhere.
Once published, JES holds the copyright of any contribution. In order to re-publish any
part of a contribution in any other venue and/or format, authors must ask for written
permission to the Editor.

1.6. Exchange policy. JES welcomes exchanges with similar publications in the field of
English Studies and other related areas.

2. SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Proposals should be sent to:
Dr. Mª Pilar Agustín Llach
Secretary of JES
E-mail: [email protected]

For further information, contact the Editor of JES

Dr. Melania Terrazas Gallego
E-mail: [email protected]

In order to be sent off for evaluation, proposals must follow the guidelines below.

3. INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS

3.1. What to send. Authors should send their proposals via e-mail, indicating the title of the
proposal that is being submitted in order to be evaluated for publication in JES.
Attached to the message, authors should send two Word or RTF documents. In the first
document, authors should include the title of the proposal (in bold face), the name/s of the
author/s (in SMALL CAPITALS), their institutional affiliation (in italics) and any other relevant
information, such as e-mail and postal address and telephone and fax number.
In the case of multiple authorship, please state clearly which of the contributors will be
in charge of the ensuing correspondence with JES.
Authors should also include here a brief biographical note of about 100 words.
 The second document should include the full proposal to be sent off for evaluation.
Authors should be extremely careful to avoid any kind of information which might reveal
their identity.

3.2. Artwork, tables, figures and images. These should be included in the text file. Tone
art, or photographic images, should be saved as JPG or TIFF files with a resolution of 300
dpi at final size.

3.3. Copyright information. If a preliminary version of the proposal has been presented at
a conference, information about the name of the conference, the name of the sponsoring
organization, the exact date(s) of the conference or paper presentation and the city in which
the conference was held should be provided in a footnote in the first page of the document.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.

4. MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION
4.1. Formatting. Minimum formatting should be used. Indentation, underlining and
tabulation should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

4.2. Document. All margins in the document should be of 2.54 cms. Paragraphs should be
fully justified. The main text of the proposal should be written in 12-point Garamond.
Quotations will be in 11-point Garamond when they appear in an independent paragraph.
Abstracts, keywords, footnotes, superscript numbers, tables and figures will appear in 10-
point Garamond.

4.3. Title. The title of the proposal should be centred and written in 12-point Garamond bold.
Capitals should be used for both title and subtitle.
A Spanish translation of the title of the proposal should also be included. For those
contributors who do not handle Spanish, a translation will be provided by the Editor.

4.4. Abstract and keywords. Each title should be followed by a brief abstract (100-150
words each): the first one should be written in English, while the second one should be
written in Spanish. For those contributors who do not handle Spanish, a translation of the
abstract will be provided by the Editor. Abstracts should be single-spaced, typed in 10-point
Garamond italics (titles of books and keywords will appear in normal characters), justified on
both sides, and indented 1 cm. from the left-hand margin. Abstracts should have no footnotes.
The word ABSTRACT/RESUMEN (in normal characters and capital letters), followed by a
full-stop and a single space, will precede the text of the abstract.
Abstracts will be followed by a list of six keywords, written in normal characters in the
corresponding language, English or Spanish, so that contributions can be accurately classified
by international reference indexes. The word Keywords/Palabras clave (in italics), followed
by a semi-colon and a single space, will precede the keywords.
4.5. Paragraphs. Paragraphs in the main text should not be separated by a blank line. The
first line of each paragraph will be indented 1 cm. from the left-hand margin. Words will not
be divided at the end of a line either. There should be only one space between words and only
one space after any punctuation.

4.6. Italics. Words in a language other than English should be italicized; italics should also be
used in order to emphasize some key words. If the word that has to be emphasized is located
in a paragraph which is already in italics, the key word will appear in normal characters.

4.7. Figures, illustrations, and tables. They should be numbered consecutively with Arabic
numerals and referred to by their numbers within the text (e.g. as we see in
example/figure/table 1). They should be accompanied by an explanatory foot (in 10-point
Garamond italics, single-spaced).

4.8. Headings. Headings of sections should be typed in SMALL CAPITALS, and separated with
two blank spaces from the previous text and with one blank space from the following text.
They must be preceded by Arabic numerals separated by a full stop and a blank space (e.g. 1.
INTRODUCTION).
Headings of subsections should be typed in italics, and separated with one space from
both the previous and the following text. They must be numbered as in the example (e.g. 1.1.,
1.2., etc.).
Headings of inferior levels of subsections should be avoided as much as possible. If
they are included, they should also be numbered with Arabic numerals (e.g. 1.1.1., 1.1.2.,
etc.) and they will be typed in normal characters.

4.9. Asides. For asides other than parenthetical asides, dashes (and not hyphens) should be
used, preceded and followed by a blank space. For compounds use hyphens. Notice the
following example:
“Teaching in English – as many subjects as possible – seems to offer a
second-best solution insofar as it entails much more exposure of the foreign
language”.

4.10. Punctuation. Authors are requested to make their usage of punctuation as consistent as
possible. Commas, full stops, colons and semi-colons will be placed after inverted commas
(”;).
Capital letters will keep their natural punctuation such as accents, etc. (e.g.
PUNTUACIÓN, LINGÜÍSTICA, etc.).
Apostrophes (’), not accents (´), should be used for abbreviations and the saxon
genitive.

4.11. Footnotes. Footnotes should only be explanatory (references should be provided only in
the main text). Footnotes will appear at the end of the page. Superscript numbers will be
separated from the main text of the footnote by a blank space.
 References to footnotes should be marked in the text with consecutive superscript
Arabic numerals, which should be placed after all punctuation (including parenthesis and
quotation marks).

4.12. Quotations. Quotations should normally appear in the body of the text, enclosed in
double quotation marks. Single quotation marks will be used to locate a quotation within
another quotation (e.g. “toward a unified policy that ‘natural’ English was altogether
preferable”).
Quotations of four lines or longer should be set in a separate paragraph, without
quotation marks, typed in 11-point Garamond and indented 1,5 cms. from the left-hand
margin. They should be separated from both the previous and the following text with one
blank line.
Omissions within quoted text should be indicated by means of suspension points in
square brackets (e.g. […]).

4.13. In-text citations. References must be made in the text and placed within parentheses.
Parentheses should contain the author’s surname followed by a space before the date of
publication which, should, in turn, be followed by a colon and a space before the page
number(s). Example:
“Certainly, the conventional romance plot is a construction of the ideology of
patriarchy” (Brush 1994: 238).
If the sentence includes the author’s name (example 1) or if it includes the date of
publication (example 2), that information should not be repeated in the parentheses:
Example 1:
Johnson has drawn our attention to the fact that we are aware of our bodies as
three-dimensional containers (1987: 21).
Example 2:
In appearance and aspirations he is culturally androgynous like Frankie. He is
sexually ambivalent and “Light Skinned” (McCullers 1962: 155) and “could
talk like a white school-teacher” (48).
If the quotation includes several pages, numbers will be provided in full, as in the
example:
In the world she would create “there would be no separate coloured people […]
but all human beings would be light brown colour with blue eyes and black
hair. There would be no coloured people and no white people to make coloured
people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives” (McCullers 1962: 114-115).
If several authors are parenthetically cited at the same time, they should be arranged
chronologically and separated with a semi-colon:
(Richards 1971: 210; Arabski 1979: 43; Selinker 1991: 16)
If there are two or more works by the same author published in the same year, a lower-
case letter should be added to the year, as in the example:
(Montrose 1986a: 332) (Montrose 1986b: 9)
 Parenthetical citations should be placed immediately after each quotation, both when
the quoted passage is incorporated into the text and when the passage is longer than four lines
and needs to be set in a separate paragraph. Put this parenthetical citation after the quotation
marks but before the comma or period when the quotation is part of your text:
The readers being addressed are mainly white and anglophone, for, as Atwood
said “survival was part of the English-Canadian cultural nationalism that
peaked in about 1975” (1981: 387).
When the quotation is set off from the text in indented form, the parenthetical citation
follows all punctuation:
Even Cranny-Francis points to the subversive potential of the romance plot:
Romance is often written into texts dominated by other genres, such as SF, utopian
or detective fiction, where it may operate as one of the conventions of those genres.
Feminist revisions of these genres also use romance and, in dialogue with other
generic conventions, it has been used successfully to interrogate the construction of
masculinity and femininity and of interpersonal relationships. (1990: 190)

4.14. Bibliographical references. All (and only those) books and articles quoted or referred
to in the text (those quoted in the footnotes included) should appear in a final bibliographical
list of references, which completes the information provided by the in-text citations provided
in the text.
The heading for this list should be REFERENCES.
Hanging or reverse indentation (i.e. indentation of all lines of a paragraph except the
first one, which is a full line) of 1 cm. from the left-hand margin should be used.
This list should be arranged in alphabetical order and chronologically, when two or
more works by the same author are cited. The author’s full name should be repeated in all
cases. Example:
Langacker, R. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar 2: Descriptive application.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. 1988. The Semantics of Grammar. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Wierzbicka, A. 1992. Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human
Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Books. References to books will include: author’s surname and name; year of
publication (first edition in parentheses, if different); title (in italics); place of publication;
publisher’s name. If the book is a translation, the name of the translator should be indicated at
the end. Contributors are requested to pay special attention to punctuation in the following
examples:
Taylor, J. R. 1995 (1989). Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Kristeva, J. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. New York: Columbia University
Press. Trans. Jeanine Herman.
Articles. Titles of articles should be given in inverted commas. Titles of journals
should appear in italics. Volume, number (between parentheses) should follow. Then page
numbers, separated by a colon:
 Haiman, J. 1978. “Conditionals are topics”. Language 54 (2): 564-589.
Frye, N. 1940. “The Resurgent”. Canadian Forum 19: 357-61.
Books edited. Volumes edited by one or more authors should be referred to as follows
(notice the use of abbreviations ed. and eds.):
Miller, N. C., ed. 1986. The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia University Press.
Richards, J. C. and D. Nunan, eds. 1990. Second Language Teacher Education. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Articles in books. References to articles published in works edited by other authors or
in conference proceedings should be cited as in the example:
Fowler, R. 1983. “Polyphony and Problematic in Hard Times”. The Changing World of
Charles Dickens. Ed. R. Giddings. London: Vision Press. 91-108.
Traugott, E. C. 1988. “Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization”. Proceedings of
the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Eds. S.
Axmaker, A. Jaisser, and H. Singmaster. Berkeley, Ca.: Berkeley Linguistics
Society. 406-416.
Several authors. A journal article with three authors:
Golberg, H., Paradis, J. and M. Crago. 2008. “Lexical acquisition over time in minority
first language children learning English as a second language”. Applied
Psycholinguistics 29: 41-65.
Magazine article in a weekly or biweekly publication:
Allen, B. 1995. “Leaving Behind Daydreams for Nightmares”. Wall Street Journal, 11
October, A12.
A review in a journal:
Judie Newman. 2007. “Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire”, by P. Martín
Salván. Atlantis 31 (1): 165-170.
An unpublished dissertation:
Arús, J. 2003. Towards a Computational Specification of Transitivity in Spanish: A
Contrastive Study with English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Universidad
Complutense de Madrid: Spain.
An on-line publication:
Pierce, David. “Irish Studies round the world-2007: Introduction.”
<http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue3/Issue3InternationalReviews/PdfIStudies
RoundtheWorldbyDPierce.pdf>. (Accessed 7 May 2008)