Bioarchaeology of the Near East

Guidelines for authors

1. General information

Bioarchaeology of the Near East publishes original papers, general review articles and short fieldwork reports which conform to the journal's profile. Occassionally other kinds of texts (reviews, comments, letters to the editor, book reviews) may be taken into consideration. Each manuscript should be prepared according to the rules specified below. Manuscripts submitted for publication or published elsewhere will not be considered. All correspondence should be sent to:

Dr. Arkadiusz Soltysiak
Department of Historical Anthropology, Institute of Archeology, Warsaw University
ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland
phone +48 225520120, fax +48 225520129
email: A.Soltysiak@uw.edu.pl

Electronic submissions by email are strongly recommended. Manuscripts and tables should be submitted as RTF files, pictures as TIFF files (no compression or LZW compression), drawings as EPS or PDF files. If manuscript contains any special characters or diacriticals, additional PDF version of whole text will be required. If electronic submission is impossible, the hardcopy and floppy/CD/DVD containing text and all illustrations can be submitted by mail.

Manuscripts should be written in English, with use of one spelling style throughout the entire manuscript. Both British and American spelling will be accepted.

All submitted original papers and general review articles are sent for evaluation to two referees. The fieldwork reports are not reviewed although the editors reserve the right to refuse their publication if they do not follow the guidelines or are too lengthy.

Galley proofs will be sent to the corresponding author via email from the editor, as PDF file. All corrections should be clearly marked and returned within two weeks as PDF file or hardcopy. This stage is to be used only to correct errors that may have been introduced during the production process.

2. Title page

The title page must contain the following information:
a) the full title of the manuscript,
b) full name(s) of the author(s),
c) affiliation(s) of the author(s) containing full name of the institution, and its postal address,
d) email address, telephone and fax number of the corresponding author (indicated with an asterisk),
e) running title of maximum 50 characters incl. spaces,
f) list of keywords (no more than seven, no less than three),
g) abstract (up to 300 words); it should be intelligible without reference to the rest of the paper.

In case of short fieldwork reports the points e) – g) should be omitted.

3. The text

The text of an original paper should be divided into sections (e.g. Introdution, Materials, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, Bibliography). General review paper may include sections and sub-sections. Section and sub-section headings should be clearly distinguished from the text and indicated by larger font and bold face (e.g. 16 pts for sections, 14 pts for sub-sections, 12 pts for regular text). Numbering of sections is not allowed. Short fieldwork reports should not be divided into sections. Legends to all figures should be listed on a separate page at the end of the text after Bibliography section; places of the figures in the text have to be clearly indicated.

The title of short fieldwork report must include the name of the site and country of its location, as well as excavation season(s) reported. The following information must be covered by the text: name and affiliation of excavation's director, chronology of studied human remains and brief description of their archaeological context, place of storage, information about used methods and aims of research, preliminary results and assumed place of more detailed publications.

In text use italics only for species, genus names, or medical terms in Latin. The metric system, in SI version, must be used for all measurements. Metric abbreviations should be expressed in standard lowercase, without fullstops. Other abbreviations should be avoided. However, if it is impossible, the abbreviation must be expanded in brackets when used for the first time.

Footnotes are allowed only as comments to the table.

Number the manuscript pages consecutively, beginning with the title page. The length of the original paper should not exceed 80,000 characters (incl. spaces), general review papers may contain up to 160,000 characters, short fieldwork reports up to 15,000 characters.

4. References

References in text should be given in brackets in the following sequence: author's surname, year of publication, optionally page(s) after colon without spaces, eg. (Horden 2005:135–137). In case of two authors their surnames should be separated by "&" (Franklin & Brubaker 1998:124), in case of three or more authors the surname of the first one should be followed by "et al." (no italics, eg. Mecsas et al. 2004). If there is more than one reference of the same author, years of publication should be separated by commas, eg. (Horden 2004, 2005). References of the same author that appeared in the same year should be indicated by succeeding Latin letters and separated by commas, eg. (Horden 2004a, 2004b). References to publications of different authors should be separated by semicolons, eg. (Dols 1977; Horden 2005). If many references are listed, alphabetical and ascending chronological order should be kept.

All cited publications must be listed in the "Bibliography" section at the end of the paper. Publications not cited in the text cannot be included. The bibliography should be listed in alphabetical order under the first author's name and sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the succeeding Latin letters, placed after the year of publication. In case of more than one author, names of all authors must be included. Titles of the journals should not be abbreviated.

Bibliographical entries should be formatted according to the following examples:

a) papers in journals:
Mecsas J., Franklin G., Kuziel W.A., Brubaker R.R., Falkow S., Mosier D.E. (2004), CCR5 Mutation and Plague Protection, Nature 427:606–608.

b) papers/chapters in books:
Horden P. (2005), Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian [in:] "The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian", M. Maas, A.D. Lee (ed.), Cambridge: University Press, pp. 134–160.

c) books:
Dols M.W. (1977). The Black Death in the Middle East, Princeton: Routledge.

5. Tables and illustrations

Tables should be accompanied by an explanatory caption above; each column should carry a separate heading. Additional explanations (such as abbreviations) should be given below the tables as footnotes. Only basic horizontal lines need to be used. Tables may be included in the text or typed on separate pages; in the second case their places in the text have to be clearly indicated. Tables must fit on the B5 page.

Figures should be used only if they clarify or reduce the text. No 3D diagrams or other bizarre illustrations are allowed. Data should be presented only once in a graph or a table, not in both. Only black-and-white or greyscale readable figures which do not exceed 200x120 mm will be accepted. Required resolution is 300 DPI for greyscale images and at least 600 DPI for black-and-white drawings (although in that case vector format is recommended).

All figures and tables must be referred to in the text and the references should be typed in bold. The editors reserve the right to ask the authors for additional formatting of tables and figures.

6. Editorial procedures

After submission, the corresponding author receives an initial acknowledgement. During two weeks the editor makes a decision as to whether the paper should be rejected or sent to referees. The corresponding author receives an e-mail with explanation of this decision as soon as possible.

Preliminarily accepted paper is sent to two referees who are asked to return their comments within one month (actually it may take up more time). The editor then considers the paper in the light of the referees' reports and makes a decision on the paper. If it is declined, the editor will e-mail the corresponding author with extracts from the referees' reports to help explain his decision. If the paper is accepted, the editor will ask the author to revise the paper with the help of the referees' comments. The referees may remain anonymous or disclose their names to the author.

Once the author has revised the paper, it should be sent back in a form completely comformable to above guidelines. The paper will then be edited and a final version sent back to proof. Authors will be sent the galley proofs of their paper but are expected not to make any changes to the text at this point aside from minor spelling or grammatical mistakes. If the author wishes to make any other changes, the paper may be held back until the next issue.

7. Copyright

Submission of a manuscript implies that the submitted work has not been published before (except as part of a thesis or lecture note or report, or in the form of an abstract); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors as well as by the authorities at the institute where the work has been carried out; that written permission of copyright holders is obtained by the authors for material used from other copyrighted sources; and that the manuscript or parts thereof will thus not be published elsewhere in any language without the indication of the original place of publication.