|
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Journal Style for Final Manuscript Submission
For purposes of manuscript review, only the much less exacting Minimum Standard need be met. The requirements of Journal Style are not imposed on authors until a paper has been conditionally accepted for publication (unconditional acceptance will follow on submission of a final manuscript that conforms to journal style). There are guidelines concerning the technical requirements for the final manuscript files, as well as requirements on content and style. In October 2026, the AJP made a change to its journal style and authors of manuscripts accepted after that date should only follow the guidance below.
Please follow these instructions carefully; much grief can be avoided during the production process if authors prepare their manuscripts well. It also minimizes the lag between acceptance and the appearance of your finished article online and in print.
Key Checklist for Authors
The editorial office copyedits all accepted manuscripts after final submission before typesetting. Where not inconsistent with other advice on this page, the AJP follows the Australian Government Style Manual. Authors are not expected to ensure their manuscript conforms to these standards in every detail; that is the job of the production team. Authors must accept copyedits made in accordance with the style guide at proof stage, even if the edits made diverge from your personal preference.
However, we do expect authors to ensure their final submitted manuscript complies with the following key requirements. A coherent journal style is important to us in producing a consistent reading experience from article to article. Please ensure too that the overall structure of your manuscript has all needed components.
- Spelling: the language of the the journal is Australian English. Any spellchecker should be set to Australian English. Quotations and bibliographical data should follow the spelling of the source.
- Quotations and mentioned expressions: use single quote marks ‘, ’. Punctuation that is not part of the quoted material goes outside the quote marks. Substantial quotations (3 lines or more) should be shown as a block quotation.
- Citations and References: AJP uses an author-date system. Citations and references should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition). Please ensure page and/or issue numbers, DOIs, URLs are all present where they exist (including for older item not originally published electronically); ensure page ranges are separated by an en-dash ‘–’, not a hyphen ‘-’.
- Please use the ellipsis symbol ‘…’ rather than sequential full-stops. Asides—like this!—should be surrounded with unspaced em-dashes, if not enclosed in parentheses.
- Logical/mathematical text: ensure you have used equation editor for all (including single variables in text—don't simply italicise).
- Be aware of the difference between angle brackets (⟨, ⟩) and less than/greater than symbols (<, >);
- When giving a mathematical definition, AJP prefers the use of the definition symbol ‘≝’;
- In general, please use only standard mathematical symbols that are available in the Unicode standard.
- Figures and Tables: ensure they are numbered and captioned, and all references to figures and tables should be as ‘Table 1/Figure 1’ rather than ‘above’ or ‘below’, etc., as these constructions may ‘float’ away from their placement in your manuscript. Ensure that figure files are sufficiently high resolution. Any text in figures should visually match the journal text as closely as possible (the AJP is set in Minion).
- Headings: please number main text sections/subsections and style as headings.
- Internal cross references should be by section, rather than page: 'as I will argue in section 3'. You may abbreviate ’section’ by ‘§’: ‘As I will argue (§5), …’.
- Any notes should be inserted as footnotes, not endnotes. Footnotes should be substantive; those merely giving citation information should be avoided, and the citation incorporated into the main text.
- No full stops between letters in acronyms and initialisms; thus ‘AIDS’/‘MIT’ not ‘A.I.D.S.’/‘M.I.T.’. Introduce novel abbreviations as follows: ‘Principle of Alternate Possibilitities (PAP)’.
- Use of ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’. In the main text, use ‘for example’ and ‘that is’, reserving ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ for use only in footnotes.
- Use the Oxford comma: ‘it was intriguing, provocative, and false’; ‘see Smith, Lan, and Mehta (1995)’.
Please keep formatting and styling to the minimum needed—you are producing input to the production process, not properly typeset output. Keep style semantic where possible (i.e., apply a style to a piece of text in virtue of its functional role, not what it looks like).
Inclusive language
Authors must avoid using terms that discriminate on the basis of a person’s race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual identity, disability status or age. Use singular they as a generic gender-neutral pronoun, and respect the pronouns of anyone you are writing about. Avoid gender-specific titles in favour of neutral alternatives such as chairperson/chair or flight attendant.
The AJP's readership is culturally and linguistically diverse, and authors should be mindful of that diversity when writing. The use of technical terms and expressions that may be unfamiliar to most competent readers of English is sometimes unavoidable in philosophical writing, but deliberate obscurity in choice of vocabulary or syntax should be avoided. A sturdy and plain style, avoiding unnecessarily ornamental constructions, is generally preferred for effective philosophical communication. Self-consciously ‘literary’ affectations should be avoided.
Technical Requirements
A final manuscript must be supplied in a format which the editorial office and our publisher’s typesetters can handle. At present that means all final accepted submissions must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document in .docx or .doc format. Authors who have written their original submission in LaTeX or some other format must convert their document to Word format before final acceptance can occur. We recommend using Pandoc for this task. The conversion works best with ‘vanilla’ LaTeX, so try not to rely on recherché packages in producing your manuscript. While LaTeX has sophisticated typesetting capabilities, our workflow means anything that cannot be represented in Word should not be included as it will not render correctly if at all in the typeset published article. Unfortunately the editorial office cannot provide technical support for Pandoc.
For the convenience of authors, the AJP imposes only fairly modest formatting requirements at the point of acceptance. To make things easier for the production team, your final accepted manuscript must use no styles or formatting beyond the minimum needed to structure and present your manuscript. Please do be sure to format section headings and sub-headings, lists, tables, and equations using Word's built-in tools. You may use Word's built-in numbering and cross reference features, but note all internal links and dynamic numbering should be stripped at the point of final submission and replaced with their content (the easiest way to remove these from a Word document is to use Word’s ‘unlink fields’ command: select the entire document using Ctrl+A [Mac: ⌘A] and then press Ctrl+Shift+F9 [Mac: ⌘6] to replace fields with their contents).
Submitted documents should be self-contained, with the exception of figures (see below for more information on figures). This includes tables, which should be prepared using built-in tools and incorporated in your document. Each figure and table must have a caption and be numbered in order of appearance; note that figures and tables are numbered separately, so that for example the first table following Figure 1 will be Table 1. Figures and tables will be typeset as 'floats' to ensure efficient usage of page space, and so they must be referred to by number.
Please do make use of equations/math(s) mode for any mathematics—even single variables in text. Equations may but need not be labelled.
Bibliographical information is to be supplied in the correct format (Chicago author-date 18th edition). If you wisely make use of an external reference manager to manage your bibliographic matter in Word, the resulting formatted references must be supplied in your main document to the editorial office without dependencies on external databases and without embedded field codes (again, the easiest way to remove these from a Word document is to use Word’s ‘unlink fields’ command). The AJP recommends authors use a system, such as Zotero or Mendeley, that can understand 'Citation Style Language' and can produce, from accurate metadata, an accurate bibliography: we encourage using the journal's preferred style from the Zotero repository.
For purposes of comparison, please supply with your final manuscript a .pdf rendition that shows your intentions for any potentially tricky issues of typesetting. We may not be willing or able to reproduce your intended typesetting exactly, but it is an important guide for us in resolving any difficulties that emerge during copyediting and proofing.
Figures
Figures—diagrams, images, and other non-text elements—can be embedded in the manuscript file to indicate roughly where they should appear. Figure captions should be brief but descriptive. In multi-part figures, each part should be labelled (e.g. ‘Figure 1(a)’, ‘Figure 1(b)’).
Please also provide each figure as a separate image file. Provide high quality and high resolution files for your figures. Indicative resolutions that produce acceptable output:
- Minimum 1200 dpi for line art;
- Minimum 600 dpi for greyscale;
- Minimum 300 dpi for colour.
Note: figures and diagrams will be rendered in greyscale in print; we recommend minimal use of colour to ensure that figures and diagrams remain legible and comprehensible.
The publisher provides more information on how to prepare artwork. Image file names should be aligned to the figure numbering: e.g. Figure1.tiff, Figure2a.eps.
Structuring your final manuscript
The structure of an article, discussion or critical notice
Authors may take the structure of recent articles in the printed version of the Journal as a rough guide.
The following general pattern must be followed in production of your final submission:
Please ensure that the content of your manuscript complies with the key checklist for authors.
Structure of a book review or book note
The foregoing does not apply to book reviews and book notes, which should not be divided into sections and should omit much of the other apparatus of an article.
A book review/note should be titled with the book under review, in the following format:
Author Forename Surname, Book Title: Subtitle, Publisher, Year of publication, pp. length in pages (including any frontmatter), price with currency (format), ISBN.
Sara Protasi, The Philosophy of Envy, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. xv + 247, AUD141.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781316519172.
The body of the review should follow the title, following standard journal conventions. The one exception is that the book under review should be cited by page number or chapter number alone. Quotations from the book under review should be followed by the page number in parentheses following the quoted material; omit ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’. You may refer to chapters or sections in the book as follows: ‘In chapter 3, X argues…’; ‘The central argument of the book appears in chapters 2–4’; ‘X makes much of this observation (§3.2)’, and so on.
The review should conclude with a block of author details in this format:
Jeanette KennettIf there are multiple authors, please include multiple author blocks in this format.
Macquarie University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0879-3215
If needed include a section of 'References' after the author block. The book under review should not appear in the list of references. Book notes cannot have references.