Author Guidelines

Updated: March 2022

Articles

The British Journal of Military History (the BJMH or Journal) welcomes the submission of articles on military history in the broadest sense, and without restriction as to period or region. The BJMH particularly welcomes articles on subjects that might not ordinarily receive much attention but which clearly show the topic has been properly researched.

Papers submitted to the BJMH must not have been published elsewhere.

The editors are happy to consider papers that are under consideration elsewhere on the condition that the author indicates to which other journals the article has been submitted.

Authors should submit their article manuscripts, including an abstract of no more than 100 words, as an MS Word or RTF file attached to an e-mail addressed to the BJMH Co-editors at editor@bcmh.org.uk.  All submissions should be in one file only, including the abstract, followed by the main text, and with any illustrations, tables or figures included within the main text.

Authors must provide appropriate contact details including your full mailing address.

The editors are keen to encourage article submissions from a variety of scholars and authors, regardless of their academic background. For those papers that demonstrate great promise and significant research but are offered by authors who have yet to publish, or who need further editorial support, the editors may be able to offer mentoring to ensure an article is successfully published within the Journal.

The BJMH is a ‘double blind’ peer-reviewed journal, that is, communication between reviewers and authors is anonymised and is managed by the Editorial Team. All papers that the editors consider appropriate for publication will be submitted to at least two suitably qualified reviewers, chosen by the editorial team, for comment. Subsequent publication is dependent on receiving satisfactory comments from reviewers. Authors will be sent copies of the peer reviewers’ comments.

Following peer review and any necessary revision by the author, articles will be edited for publication in the Journal. The editors may propose further changes in the interest of clarity and economy of expression, although such changes will not be made without consultation with the author. The editors are the final arbiters of usage, grammar, and length.

Articles should be a minimum of 6000 words and no more than 8000 words in length (including footnotes) and be set out according to the BJMH Style Guide which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style.

Authors should note that articles may be rejected if they do not conform to the Journal’s Style Guide and/or they exceed the word count.

Also note that the Journal editors endorse the importance of thorough referencing in scholarly works. In cases where citations are incomplete or do not follow the format specified in the Style Guide throughout the submitted article, the paper will be returned to the author for correction before it is accepted for peer review.

Authors are encouraged to supply relevant artwork (maps, charts, line drawings, and photographs) with their essays. The author is responsible for citing the sources and obtaining permission to publish any copyrighted material.

The British Journal of Military History, acting on behalf of the British Commission for Military History, does not accept responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by contributors.

Research Notes

We welcome shorter 'Research Notes'.  These are pieces of research-based writing of between 1,000 and 3,000 words.  These could be, for example: analysis of the significance a newly accessible document or documents; a reinterpretation of a document; or, a discussion of an historical controversy drawing on new research.  Note that all such pieces of work should follow the style guidelines for articles (including being submitted with an abstract of no more than 100 words) and will be peer reviewed.  Note also that such pieces should not be letters, nor should they be opinion pieces which are not based on new research.

Keynotes

We are interested in producing refelective pieces of the type which might have appeared as keynote lectures at conferences.  As an example, we produced the first such piece in volume 8.3.  Please contact the editors if you are interested in submitting in this category.

Book Reviews

The BJMH seeks to publish concise, accessible and well-informed reviews of books relevant to the topics covered by the Journal. Reviews are published as a service to the readership of the BJMH and should be of use to a potential reader in deciding whether or not to buy or read that book. The range of books reviewed by the BJMH reflects the field of military history, taken in the widest sense. Books published by academic publishers, general commercial publishers, and specialist military history imprints may all be considered for review in the Journal.

Reviews of other types of publication such as web resources may also be commissioned.

The Journal’s Editorial Team is responsible for commissioning book reviews and for approaching reviewers. From time to time a list of available books for review may be issued, together with an open call for potential reviewers to contact the Journal Editors. The policy of the BJMH is for reviews always to be solicited by the editors rather than for book authors to propose reviewers themselves. In all cases, once a reviewer has been matched with a book, the Editorial Team will arrange for them to be sent a review copy.  Please do not in any circumstance submit a review without having already agreed with the Book Reviews Editor that you will review that book.

Book reviews should generally be of about 700 words and must not exceed 1000 words in length.

A review should summarise the main aims and arguments of the work, should evaluate its contribution and value to military history as broadly defined, and should identify to which readership(s) the work is most likely to appeal. The Journal does not encourage personal comment or attacks in the reviews it publishes, and the Editorial Team reserves the right to ask reviewers for revisions to their reviews. The final decision whether or not to publish a review remains with the Editorial Team.

The Editorial Team may seek the views of an author of a book that has been reviewed in the Journal. Any comment from the author may be published.

All submitted reviews should begin with the bibliographic information of the work under review, including the author(s) or editor(s), the title, the place and year of publication, the publisher, the number of pages, the ISBN for the format of the work that has been reviewed, and the price for this format if available. Prices should be given in the original currency, but if the book has been published in several territories including the UK then the price in pounds sterling should be supplied. The number of illustrations and maps should also be noted if present. An example of the heading of a review is as follows:

James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: a Strategy of War Crimes. London: Hurst, 2003. xii + 322 pp. 1 map. ISBN 978-1850654995 (Paperback). Price £17.50.

The reviewer’s name, and an institutional affiliation if relevant, should be appended at the bottom of the review, name in Capitals and Institution in lower case with both to be right aligned.

Reviews of a single work should not contain any footnotes, but if the text refers to any other works then their author, title and year should be apparent in order for readers to be able to identify them. The Editorial Team and Editorial Board may on occasion seek to commission longer Review Articles of a group of works, and these may contain footnotes with the same formatting and standards used for articles in the Journal.

Editing and Copyright

Following peer review and any necessary revision by the author, Articles, Research Notes and Book Reviews will be edited for publication in the Journal. Through the copy-editing process editors may propose further corrections or changes in the interests of clarity and economy of expression, although substantive changes will not be made without consultation with the author. Copy-edited versions of Articles and Research Articles will automatically be sent back to authors for approval.  Copy-edited Book Reviews will not be sent to authors for approval unless specifically requested by the author at the time the editors indicate that the review has been accepted for publication, or unless the editors propose substantive changes.  The editors are the final arbiters of usage, grammar, and length.

The submission of an Article, Research Note or Book Review is taken by the editors to indicate that the author will willingly transfer the copyright to the BJMH and to the British Commission for Military History. However, the BJMH and the British Commission for Military History will freely grant the author the right to reprint his or her piece, if published, in the author’s own works. A Contract and Assignment of Copyright setting out these terms will be sent to authors of Articles and Research Notes when approval is sought for the text of their copy-edited article.  Book Review authors will not be sent a Contract and Assignment of Copyright unless it is specifically requested at the time the editors indicate that the review has been accepted for publication, and if it is not so requested, consent to the terms above will be presumed from the act of submission to the journal.

Authors may deposit their work published in the journal in the repository of any higher educational institution to which they are attached.

Licensing and fees

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

There is no fee payable by authors to publish in the journal, and we do not pay authors a fee for publishing in the journal.

BJMH STYLE GUIDE (JULY 2019)

The BJMH Style Guide has been designed to encourage you to submit your work. It is based on the Chicago Manual of Style and more about this style can be found at:

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html

SPECIFIC POINTS TO NOTE

Use Gill Sans MT 10 Point for all article and book review submissions, including footnotes.

Text should be justified.

Paragraphs do not require indenting.

Line spacing should be single and a single carriage return applied between paragraphs.

Spellings should be anglicised: i.e. –ise endings where appropriate, colour etc., ‘got’ not ‘gotten’.

Verb past participles: -ed endings rather than –t endings are preferred for past participles of verbs i.e. learned, spoiled, burned. While is preferred to whilst.

Contractions should not be used i.e. ‘did not’ rather than ‘didn’t’.

Upon first reference the full name and title of an individual should be used as it was as the time of reference i.e. On 31 July 1917 Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), launched the Third Battle of Ypres.

All acronyms should be spelled out in full upon first reference with the acronym in brackets, as shown in the example above.

Dates should be written in the form 20 June 2019.

When referring to an historical figure, e.g. King Charles, use that form, when referring to the king later on in the text, use king in lower case.

Foreign words or phrases such as weltanschauung or levée en masse should be italicised.

Footnoting:

• All references should be footnotes not endnotes.
• Footnote numeral should come at the end of the sentence and after the full stop.
• Multiple references in a single sentence or paragraph should be covered by a single footnote with the citations divided by semi-colons.

Quotations:

• Short (less than three lines of continuous quotation): placed in single quotation marks unless referring to direct speech and contained within that paragraph. Standard footnote at end of sentence.
• Long (more than three lines of continuous quotation): No quotation marks of any kind. One carriage space top and bottom, indented, no change in font size, standard footnote at end of passage.
• Punctuation leading into quotations is only necessary if the punctuation itself would have been required were the quotation not there. i.e. : ; and , should only be present if they were required to begin with.
• Full stops are acceptable inside or outside of quotation marks depending upon whether the quoted sentence ended in a full stop in the original work.

Citations:

• For books: Author, Title in Italics, (place of publication: publisher, year of publication), p. # or pp. #-#.
• For journals: Author, ‘Title in quotation marks’, Journal Title in Italics, Vol. #, Iss. # (or No.#), (Season/Month, Year), pp. #-# (p. #).
• For edited volumes: Chapter Author, ‘Chapter title’ in Volume Author/s (ed. or eds), Volume title in italics, (place of publication: publisher, year), p. # or pp. #-#.
• Primary sources: Archive name (Archive acronym), Catalogue number of equivalent, ‘source name or description’ in italics if publicly published, p.#/date or equivalent. Subsequent references to the same archive do not require the Archive name.
• Internet sources: Author, ‘title’, URL (with date accessed) The time accessed may also be included, but is not generally required, but, if used, then usage must be consistent throughout
• Op cit. should be shunned in favour of shortened citations.
• Shortened citations should include Author surname, shortened title, p. # for books. As long as a similar practice is used for journals etc., and is done consistently, it will be acceptable.
• Ibid., with a full stop before the comma, should be used for consecutive citations.

Examples of Citations:

• Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 21.
• Michael Collins, ‘A fear of flying: diagnosing traumatic neurosis among British aviators of the Great War’, First World War Studies, 6, 2 (2015), pp. 187-202.
• Michael Howard, ‘Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 510-526.
• The UK National Archives (TNA), CAB 19/33, Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Sclater, evidence to Dardanelles Commission, 1917.
• Shilpa Ganatra, ‘How Derry Girls Became an Instant Sitcom Classic’, The Guardian, 13 February 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/13/derry-girls-instant-sitcom-classic-schoolgirls-northern-ireland. Accessed 1 January 2019.

Note: Articles not using the citation style shown above will be returned to the author for correction prior to peer review.