Bulletin of SOAS
Academic freedom is essential in the pursuit of scholarly truth and dissemination of knowledge. Submissions to all SOAS-owned journals are considered on their academic merits, irrespective of their topic. SOAS is opposed to any attempt to restrict access to our publications on the basis of their content.
BSOAS spans all periods, from ancient times to the early twentieth century, of the cultures and civilizations of the Near and Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, South-East Asia and Africa. It publishes articles on the history, religions and philosophies, literatures and languages, music, arts and archaeology of all these regions.
References
The preferred style of reference is citation by author and date, e.g. Robinson (2000: 80) including a complete reference list giving full bibliographical details as follows:
Robinson, Chase F. 2000. Empire and Élites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A clear system of abbreviations or other critical apparatus should be used for archival and manuscript sources.
The following system of references will also be accepted: a first footnote citation giving full bibliographical data, e.g. M. Boyce, Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour (Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies, 7, Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1992), 187. Thereafter by short title; op. cit. should be avoided and ibid. used only to refer to the reference immediately preceding.
Titles of books and journals are italicized with initial capitals. Citation by volume and part is in the following form: BSOAS 60/1, 1997, 231–9. Titles of articles are roman within double quotation marks.
Illustrations and scripts
Line drawings, graphs, etc., should be supplied as good quality originals for scanning, or electronically. For further details of file formats please see Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide. Authors are responsible for clearing copyright permissions and providing the acknowledgement line. Photos and non-roman scripts, including Chinese and Japanese characters, will only be accepted where they are essential to the text.
If you request colour figures in the printed version, you will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.
Transliteration
Scholarly transliteration systems should be used where appropriate for all language groups. BSOAS does not impose any particular style and authors may use any recognized academic system that meets their needs, explaining any non-standard or unusual elements in a footnote. Authors should bear in mind the academic readership of the journal.
Copyright
The policy of BSOAS is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant SOAS, University of London a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer
Submission
This journal uses ScholarOne to submit manuscripts
If you are unfamiliar with online manuscript submission you should click on the ‘Instructions and Forms’ link under ‘Resources’ on the SholarOne login page (the link for which can be found on the Submitting your materials page). The link on the login page will lead you to the ‘ScholarOne Author Quick Guide’. Then follow the instructions provided. If you do not yet have an account on the ScholarOne Manuscripts site, please click the link ‘Register here’ and follow the registration steps. You will be able to choose your user name and password during registration (and you can change them at any time if needed via the ‘Edit Account’ link once you are logged in). If you are unsure whether you have an account or in case you have forgotten your login details, please enter your e-mail address in the Password Help field and click ‘Go’.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
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.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.