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Preparing your materials

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. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content. 

In particular, any use of an AI tool: 

  • to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s) 
  • to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements. 
  • to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript 
  • must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission 

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article. 

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.

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. 

Publication Ethics

All authors are required to comply with Cambridge University Press’s publishing ethics guidelines. As part of its editorial processes, this journal may share relevant submission data and manuscript content with in-house or third-party tools to perform research integrity and other submission checks. Any such information sharing is conducted in accordance with the appropriate privacy and processing laws, applicable Terms of Use, and ethical guidance. In cases of alleged or suspected misconduct, the journal will investigate in line with COPE recommendations.

All submissions of studies with human subjects must include:

  1. In the text or in a footnote of the paper, include the identifying project number indicating approval of your project from the relevant Institutional Review Board. If there is no IRB approval, a statement indicating that IRB approval was not required for the project must be included.
  2. In the text, papers must indicate the sample size of the study and how decisions were incentivized. Any procedures that might be considered as deception of subjects must be indicated. Information about subject eligibility or selection to participate in the study, such as exclusions based on past participation in certain experiments or college major, or exclusions resulting from the targeting of a specific demographic distribution. must also be provided. The method whereby participants were recruited must be described. 
  3. The original instructions to participants must be provided in full as an appendix at the time of submission. 

Preregistration and citation of replications

Authors are strongly encouraged to preregister their studies in a repository. If the study is preregistered, authors should include a link to their preregistration in their submitted manuscript to aid editors and reviewers in evaluating the study.

If you are citing a previously published article reporting an experimental study, authors should also cite any replications of the original study. 

Before acceptance

If your paper reports an experiment, before your paper is accepted for publication you will be asked to include a replication package for evaluation by our data editor. This package must contain:

  1. The original instructions (even when these are already included as an appendix to the paper). Include an English translation of the instructions as well if the experiment was not conducted in English.
  2. Information about subject eligibility or selection, such as exclusions based on past participation in experiments, college major, etc.
  3. Any computer programs, configuration files, or scripts used to run the experiment and/or to analyze the data. These should be summarized as appropriate in the submitted manuscript and provided in full as a supplementary file prior to publication.
  4. The raw data from the experiment. These should be summarized as appropriate in the submitted manuscript and provided in full as an ASCII or text file prior to publication, with sufficient explanation to make it possible to use the submitted computer programs to replicate the data analysis.
  5. A readme file describing the contents of the files in the replication package.