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Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record. 

Manuscript Preparation

Text 

State the total number of words — both inclusive and exclusive of your endnotes — below your title.

An abstract of 200-300 words should precede your text.

The text should have double line spacing and margins wide enough to allow for comment from the referees and editors, and single (not double) spaces between sentences. Insert line gaps between paragraphs.

Use endnotes rather than footnotes, likewise double-spaced.

Subheadings should not be in capitals or in bold or underlined.

Please supply all illustration (and table) captions, again double-spaced, in a separate file. 

For spelling, refer to the OED, but with ‘-ise’ not ‘-ize’ where both are permissible. Compound adjectives should be hyphenated: ‘seven-bay façade’, ‘double-pile houses’. Regarding apostrophes, James’s is preferred to James’. 

English usage and punctuation for anything not covered here should accord with the MHRA Style Guide.

Titles and ranks are capitalised when they accompany a personal name rather than merely referring to an official title, so ‘King Henry I’, ‘Prince Charles’, ‘Bishop Gilbert’, but ‘the duke’, ‘the bishop’, etc. 

Dates take the forms ‘October 1992’, ‘11 May 1994’, ‘1711–14’, ‘1933–39’ (with dashes rather than hyphens), ‘the seventeenth century’ (not ‘the 17th Century’); note the use of the hyphen in ‘late seventeenth-century architecture’ (where ‘seventeenth-century’ is used adjectivally). In general, spell out numbers one to a hundred, unless they appear in lists or measurements. Quotations embedded in the text should have single quotation marks and should normally respect the punctuation of the original. A quotation within a quotation, however, should have double quotation marks, and final punctuation marks should be omitted if the quotation is less than a complete sentence. Omissions from the middles of quotations (but not from the beginnings or ends) within the same sentence are indicated by an ellipsis in square brackets: ‘[...]’. Quotations longer than about thirty words should begin on a fresh line, and the text following should recommence on a fresh line (the quotation being indented in the eventual publication). 

References to illustrations need to be indicated in parentheses in the text with bold numbers (Fig. 1, Figs 2 and 3, Figs 2–5). The bold numbers serve as ‘flags’ for the printer before being finally converted to normal font. 

Citations in endnotes should follow the journal’s conventions and be in accordance with the following examples. Note that the author’s name is normally as it appears in the cited publication (ie, given in full and not reduced to initials, except where this is the author’s own style, eg, A. J. P. Taylor, Judith A. Green). Note the use of ‘p.’ for page (plural ‘pp.’) and ‘fol.’ for folio (plural ‘fols’); and also note the conventions for contracting page numbers and for using dashes rather than hyphens (pp. 4–6, 24–26, 104– 06, 197–202, 324–26). Always give the final page reference rather than using ‘ff’ to indicate following pages (pp. 24-26, not p. 24 ff).

  • Single-volume book: Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 86–88, 138, 221–27.
  • Multi-volume book: John Bernard Burke, A Visitation of the Seats and Arms of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn/Hurst and Blackett, 1853), II, p. 92. 
  • Multi-edition book: Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Welltempered Environment, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 74–75. 
  • Book in a series: Ian Campbell, Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture: The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, ser. A, n. 9, 3 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 2004), I, pp. 45–46.
  • Article in an academic journal: Elizabeth McKellar, ‘Peripheral Visions: Alternative Aspects and Rural Presences in Mid-Eighteenth Century London’, Art History, 22, no. 4 (1999), pp. 495– 513 (pp. 504–05). Note that on first citation the first and last page numbers are given, as well as (if required) those of a particular reference.
  • Article in a professional journal: Eleanor Young, ‘Design Factory’, RIBA Journal, 129, no. 3 (March 2018), pp. 16–20 (p. 19). 
  • Article in a book/edited work: Frank Arneil Walker, ‘The Glasgow Grid’, in Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and its Context in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. by Thomas A. Markus (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1982), pp. 155–99 (p. 188).
  • Article in a multi-volume book: Waltraud Ernst, ‘Asylums in Alien Places: The Treatment of the European Insane in British India’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. by W. F. Bynum and others, 3 vols (London, 1985–88), III, The Asylum and its Psychiatry (1988), pp. 48–70. 
  • Exhibition catalogues: Tim Benton, ‘Villa Savoye’, in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, ed. by Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery (London, 1987), pp. 63–64.
  • Citations from the Bible and ancient authorities: II Kings, 6. 1–4; Vitruvius, De architectura, I, 1, 5; Plato, Republic, X, 602.
  • Websites: Graham Parry, ‘John Talman’, Oxford New Dictionary of National Biography [accessed 30 May 2007].
  • Archives: Cite the city and name of the archive first. If cited on several subsequent occasions, an abbreviation may be used, and this should be indicated in square brackets following the first reference. Note that the catalogue mark comes next, then a description: eg, Sheffield, City Archives [hereafter SCA], LD 2341, Sheffield Playhouse board minutes, minute of meeting held on 30 July 1969, p. 6. Give dates in full, in the format shown here.
  • Unpublished theses and dissertations: Christopher Paul Philo, ‘The Space Reserved for Insanity: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Mad-Business in England and Wales’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992), p. 15.
  • Newspapers and magazines: Give the author, title of the article, name of the newspaper, date, section (where relevant) and page: Lucy Kellaway, ‘The water-cooler century’, Financial Times, 16/17 May 2020, Life & Arts, pp. 1–2. The initial ‘The’ or ‘A’ is normally omitted when citing English-language newspapers and magazines, with the exception of The Times. If the article has been accessed via a website, give the full webpage address and date accessed.
  • Foreign-language titles: Most languages other than English capitalise only the nouns in titles that would be capitalised in ordinary prose in that language, which in German means every noun; Italian capitalises only the first word, but French capitalises the first noun of the title plus all preceding words: Giuseppe Marchini, ‘Della costruzione di S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato’, Archivio storico pratese, 14 (1936), pp. 1–14 (p. 12); La Leçon de Charcot: voyage dans une toile, ed. by Nadine SimonDhouailly, exhibition catalogue, Musée de l’Assistance Publique de Paris (Paris, 1986), p. 49, no. 91.
  • Repeated citations: When a source is cited in a later endnote, it should usually take a shortened form comprising the author’s surname and a shortened title (with no date), and this same formula should then be followed for all subsequent citations. Ernst, ‘Asylums’, p. 5; Burke, Visitation, II, pp. 18–19. Please note that ‘Ibid.’ is not to be used.

Notes 

Endnotes should be kept to a minimum. The endnote number should appear only after the full stop. Two or more consecutive references to the same source should where possible be grouped in the same note. The reader should be able to follow the article without referring to the notes. The notes may be used to discuss minor problems of interpretation which, if incorporated in the text, would disrupt its flow, but they should not be used to provide substantive new information or to sustain a running commentary on the work of other historians. 

Illustrations

Illustrations should be included only if they are necessary and contribute to the text. They should always be discussed directly in the text. Some articles may require only a few illustrations, and the maximum for any article is normally around 20. The number, in the final event, will be decided by the Editor.

Illustrations are not to be embedded in the electronic version of the text. If your article is accepted for publication, you will be asked to submit your finalised images in the form of high-quality digital files along with your revised text. Authors should then discuss their images without delay with their editor, so that improvements can be made if necessary. If you are purchasing digital images from archives or museums, please allow sufficient time for your request to be processed. File format should be either Tiff or Jpeg. If you have prepared illustrations using CAD, Illustrator, or other vector graphics software, save them as Tiffs before submitting them.

The finalised images must be of sufficiently high quality for satisfactory reproduction. Images that may look OK on a computer screen may not be suitable in reality. To this end:

  • The resolution of digital images should be at least 120 pixels per cm (300 pixels per inch) at reproduction size. The number of pixels can easily be checked in ‘file properties’ or using software such as Photoshop, or by selecting ‘Get Info’ (Mac) or ‘Properties’ (PC) in your computer’s ‘File’ menu. The following minimum resolutions apply:
  • A full-page illustration (portrait) should be 2250 pixels (height) x 1600 pixels (width).
  • A half-page illustration (landscape) should be 1120 pixels (height) x 1600 pixels (width).
  •  A quarter-page illustration (portrait) should be 1120 pixels (height) x 800 pixels (width).
  • Do not forget to make an allowance for any extraneous parts of an image as, once removed, this will reduce the pixel count pro rata. Images that have been resized for use in PowerPoint or Word documents are unlikely to be of suitable quality for reproduction.
  • If in doubt, scan or photograph at the highest resolution possible. If you are offered a choice of resolutions by an archive (with a different cost), then consult the editors for advice.
  • Please do not compress images unnecessarily (eg, by saving them as .JPG format if they are already in another acceptable format). Likewise do not ‘de-screen’ images at scanning stage.
  • Scans should not normally be made of photographic images from books, journals or any other printed document: seek out the original from the relevant archive or photo library.
  • If producing your own drawings, please keep in mind the scale of reduction in reproduction with regard to line width and the sizes of applied lettering. For example: a 0.5 mm line drawn at 500 per cent enlargement, either on paper or on screen, will be 0.1 mm at 20 per cent reduction and may break up when printed — a probability that is increased if the line is a tint of grey or coloured.
  • Do not add labels to historical images such as architects’ drawings or early published plans.


If you have any preference as to the scale at which particular illustrations are shown, or any specific juxtapositions desired, this should be indicated (although it may not be possible to accommodate all requests).

Illustrations File Naming

It is the responsibility of the author to submit their illustrations with file names in the format shown below. There must not be any full stops or spaces in the file name.

The file name should normally include five main parts, separated by hyphens, in the following sequence:

  • Author's surname
  • Figure number
  • Building name 
  • Part of building 
  • Type of image

For example: 

Swenarton-16-AlexandraRoad-southfront-photo 

Swenarton-17-AlexandraRoad-plan-groundfloor 

If further information is needed to identify the image, this should be added towards the end of the name, eg Swenarton-18-AlexandraRoad-southfront-balcony-photo

Illustration Captions

Illustrations should be numbered and captioned individually and sequentially. Do not use suffixes (a), (b) etc; and do not assemble two or more photographic images into a single figure. Avoid unnecessary ‘referring ahead’ to images that are discussed in detail later.

Illustration captions should be listed separately and formatted as indicated below (although it may be that variations are desirable or unavoidable).

  • For drawings (such as architects’ originals), paintings or other artworks: author, subject (in italics if it is a title), date, medium (if not described under subject) and location, followed by (in parentheses) an acknowledgment to the body holding the copyright (the wording of which may be determined by its holder).
  • For buildings: name of the building, location, part of the building, architect (where appropriate), followed by date(s) of construction/completion or, in the case of a historic image or photograph, by an indication of its date — eg, ‘photograph of 1896’ — and (in parentheses) the document’s location followed by its source: either the original publication or an acknowledgement to the body holding the copyright (the wording of which may be determined by its holder). Such a caption might run as follows: Town Hall, Birmingham, rear elevation, watercolour by John Surman of 1963 (collection of the artist’s family; with permission); or, Bedford House, Accra, photograph of 1956 (from Udo Kultermann, New Architecture in Africa, 1963).
  • Captions should not normally contain information beyond the above. Occasionally they may be used to draw attention to important features of the illustration which might otherwise be missed, but this is preferably done in discussion of the image in the text.

Tables 

Tables should be as simple as possible. They should be submitted in separate files, and each must have its own title and brief caption.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. 

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”. 

English language editing services 

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.  

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal. 

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated. 

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.