Aims and Scope

JPP aspires to be the intellectual home of those who think of plasma physics as a fundamental discipline. The journal focuses on publishing research on laboratory plasmas (including magnetically confined and inertial fusion plasmas), space physics and plasma astrophysics that takes advantage of the rapid ongoing progress in instrumentation and computing to advance fundamental understanding of multiscale plasma physics. The Journal welcomes submissions of analytical, numerical, observational and experimental work: both original research and tutorial- or review-style papers, as well as proposals for its Lecture Notes series.

Types of Article

JPP welcomes the following article types:

• Research Articles*
• Review Articles*
• Letters*
• Tutorials*
• Lecture Notes*
• Editorials**
• Comment**
• Reply**

*All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver.

** No APCs are required for these article types.

Article Length

JPP Letters are short communications (up to 12 pages in JPP style, not including abstract and references).

Other article types in JPP have no page limits. Each paper will be judged on its own merits, however those deemed excessive in length will be rejected or will require significant revision.

You can access the JPP Overleaf template here.

Preparing your article for submission

Authors are strongly encouraged to compose their papers in LATEX. Authors should use the jpp.cls style file and supporting files provided below:

LaTeX Template files for submission (zip file).

A PDF of the LATEX file should then be generated and submitted via the submission site. The LATEX source file should not initially be submitted alongside the PDF, but upon provisional acceptance of the paper, the LATEX source file, along with individual figure files and a PDF of the final version, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes. See the publication process after acceptance page for further information.

Authors may also compose their papers in Word, though this will lead to the paper spending a longer period in production. If using Word, please note that equations must NOT be converted to picture format and the file must be saved with the option ‘make equation editable’.

Abstract and Keywords preparation

All papers should feature a single-paragraph abstract of no more than 250 words, which provides a summary of the main aims and results. Further guidance on writing an effective abstract can be found here.

Authors should not enter keywords on the manuscript, as these must be chosen by the author during the online submission process and will then be added during the production process. For further details, please see the submitting your materials page.

Notation and Style

Generally any queries concerning notation and journal style can be answered by viewing recent pages in the Journal. However, the following guide provides the key points to note. It is expected that Journal style will be followed, and authors should take care to define all variables or entities upon first use. Also note that footnotes are not normally accepted.

Mathematical notation

Setting variables, functions, vectors, matrices etc

Italic font should be used for denoting variables, with multiple-letter symbols avoided except in the case of dimensionless numbers.

Upright Roman font (or upright Greek where appropriate) should be used for:

Operators: sin, log, d, ∆, e etc.

Constants: i (√−1), π (defined as \upi), etc.

Functions: Ai, Bi (Airy functions, defined as \Ai and \Bi), Re (real part, defined as \Real), Im (imaginary part, defined as \Imag), etc.

Physical units: cm, s, etc

Abbreviations: c.c. (complex conjugate), h.o.t. (higher-order terms), DNS, etc.

Bold italic font (or bold sloping Greek) should be used for:

Vectors (with the centred dot for a scalar product also in bold): i · j

Bold sloping sans serif font, defined by the \mathsfbi macro, should be used for:
Tensors and matrices: D

Script font can be used as an alternative to italic when the same letter denotes a different quantity (use \mathcal in LATEX)

The product symbol (×) should only be used to denote multiplication where an equation is broken over more than one line, to denote a cross product, or between numbers (the · symbol should not be used, except to denote a scalar product specifically).

Other symbols
A centred point should be used only for the scalar product of vectors. Large numbers that are not scientific powers should not include commas, but have the form 1600 or 16 000 or 160 000. 

Tables and Artwork

Tables

Tables, however small, must be numbered sequentially in the order in which they are mentioned in the text. The word table is only capitalized at the start of a sentence.

Figures

Figures should be as small as possible while displaying clearly all the information required, and with all lettering readable. Please use the font "NimbusRomNo9L" (or another Times font) so figure labeling to matches the typeset main text. Every effort should be taken to avoid figures that run over more than one page. There is no charge for colour figures. For review purposes figures should be embedded within the manuscript. Upon final acceptance, however, individual figure files will be required for production. 

Each figure should be accompanied by a single caption, to appear beneath, and must be cited in the text. Figures should appear in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text and figure files must be named accordingly to assist the production process (and numbering of figures should continue through any appendices). Failure to follow figure guidelines may result in a request for resupply and a subsequent delay in the production process.

For further information, please consult the Cambridge Journals artwork guide

Citations and References 

All papers included in the References section must be cited in the article, and vice versa. Citations should be included as, for example “It has been shown (Rogallo 1981) that...” (using the \citep command, part of the natbib package) “recent work by Dennis (1985)...” (using \citet). 

Where there are up to ten authors, all authors’ names should be given in the reference list. Where there are more than ten authors, only the first name should appear, followed by et al.

Acknowledgements 

Acknowledgements should be included at the end of the paper, before the References section or any appendicies, and should be a separate paragraph without a heading.

Multimedia Content Publishing

The Journal of Plasma Physics publishes papers that contain multimedia content.

Authors wishing to submit a paper containing multimedia content should visit the JPP online submission system to submit their work.

Authors who have multimedia content that they wish to include as part of their paper should include this within the body of the article. Authors should also include the individual multimedia files as part of their original submission with the file designation 'movie'. The multimedia files should appear in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text and the multimedia files should be named accordingly.

Authors should also provide a relevant frame still from the video clip that they feel is representative of the content of the multimedia file. This will be used as an image that users can click on to start playback of the multimedia content.

For further information please contact the Editorial Office.

Seeking permission for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. As the author it is your responsibility to obtain this permission and pay any related fees, and you will need to send us a copy of each permission statement at acceptance.

For information on how to obtain permission, please refer to this guidance document.

Ethics and Transparency Policy requirements

Please refer to JPP's Publishing Ethics and Research Transparency policies when preparing your manuscript.

During the submission process, the Corresponding Author must declare that they have the authority of all co-authors for the submission. The Corresponding Author will be asked this question when they submit the article for review.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Data Availability - our preferred repository is Zenodo

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts. JPP has partnered with Zenodo to provide authors with the tools to do this. Zenodo is a free service that gives authors the ability to deposit and provide access to the data objects or datasets that underlie the figures and tables in their published research. Zenodo assigns all publically available uploads a DOI so that the datasets can be easily referenced. For further information and guidelines on how to deposit a dataset in Zenodo, please read the separate document JPP-Zenodo guide for authors.