Submissions

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
The submission file is in Microsoft Word document file format.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.

Submission Guidelines and Style Information

The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association welcomes manuscripts of scholarly articles in any field related to Ottoman and Turkish Studies. We are also interested in publishing images and new translations of primary sources, reviews of film, instructional materials, and other media on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, other aspects of the Turkic peoples in history, and Turkish and Turkic languages and literatures.

Submission of manuscripts for publication in the Journal implies that the work is original and that it has never been previously published nor is it proposed for submission for publication elsewhere. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish copyrighted material. All submissions should be sent electronically. You should anticipate an acknowledgement of receipt of your article within 2 weeks, and comments from reviewers within 8-16 weeks after acknowledgement of receipt of your submission. If your article is accepted, the revised version will be expected within 8 weeks of receipt of comments from the editor.

Scholarly Articles

You must include a coversheet that lists the author’s name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, postal address, and phone number(s). If you travel for more than 2 weeks in the 9-12 months after submission of your article, please send us your updated contact information when you leave and when you return.

JOTSA follows a double-blind peer review process, so authors must avoid putting their names in headers or footers and avoid any references to themselves in the body or the footnotes such as might betray their identity to referees.

The title should be centered on the first page of the manuscript without the name of the author or the author’s institutional affiliation. All articles must include a 100-200 word abstract, which should appear under the title of the article.

Article length should be between 7,000-10,000 words including footnotes. Special issues of the journal should consist a minimum of 7 articles with a length of less than 8,000 words a piece.

Articles must be submitted in English and should be typed, single-spaced, in 12-point font with 1” margins on all sides. All pages should be numbered consecutively.

The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association conforms to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, and follows the transliteration guidelines of The International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Use American spelling: color, not colour; analyze, not analyse; traveling, not travelling. Use serial commas: blue, green, and yellow. For quotations, use American-style formatting, which puts the final period or comma inside the quotation marks, for example, “Gandhi said, ‘Poverty is the worst form of violence.’” For capitalizations, check the dictionary; when in doubt, do not capitalize. Examples: President Obama; president of the United States; the president.

Footnotes must be numbered consecutively throughout the text and should be single spaced in 10-point font at the bottom of the page. When references to the same work follow without interruption, use ibid. When notes to the same work follow after interruption, use the author’s last name and a shortened title of the book or article. Acknowledgements should be typed at the bottom of page 1 and signaled by an asterisk at the end of the title.

A full bibliography for the article should be sent along with the cover sheet and manuscript. The bibliography must include the secondary source materials consulted for your article. A narrow “works cited” bibliography is not sufficient, nor is a bibliography consisting only of primary source citations. Articles submitted without a generous bibliography will not be considered for publication.

Dates

Use common-era dates (C.E. / B.C.E.) unless the original source contains dates in other forms (hijri, solar, etc), in which case use the date listed in the original source with the common-era equivalent in parenthesis. Use the European date format, i.e. 14 April 2014. Use twentieth century, NOT 20th century; 1990s, not 1990’s or the nineties.

Numbers

Spell out whole numbers, cardinal and ordinal, from one to one hundred; for exceptions see the Chicago Manual of Style. For percentiles, use numbers but spell out “percent,” for example, 20 percent, except in tables and parentheses where it should be 20%.

Tables and Figures: Tables and figures must be cited in the text, provided with clear captions, and numbered consecutively.

Primary Source Translations

The submission packet should include the following:

a clear, legible copy of the original text;
a translation into English, formatted as described above for scholarly articles;
any accompanying images formatted as described below for photos and images.

This category may include new translations of formerly translated materials, if the new translation corrects significant misinformation in the pre-existing translation.

Photos

Photographs and images should be submitted together as a .zip file during the supplementary file step during your submission to OJS. Photographs and images must be accompanied by documentation of copyright permission or documentation that the image or photograph is no longer bound by copyright laws in the country of origin. Photographs and images must be accompanied by captions and contextualizations in the format described for scholarly articles.

Reviews of Instructional Materials, Films, and Other Media

Reviews for materials other than books should be submitted through the OJS system, following the same submission guidelines as for book reviews.

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