Aims and Scope

Politics and the Life Sciences (PLS) welcomes new, original research manuscripts that rigorously assess the relationship between biological mechanisms, broadly construed, and political behavior and institutions. The range of appropriate submissions is extraordinarily wide. Potential authors include, but are not limited to, political scientists, psychologists, life scientists, clinicians, health policy scholars, bioethicists, biosecurity and international-security experts, environmental scientists and ecological economists, moral and evolutionary philosophers, political and environmental historians, communications and public-opinion researchers, and legal scholars.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Research Note*
• Research Tool Report*
• Perspective Essay*
• Letter

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

Research Articles (up to 15,000 words) present novel empirical and/or theoretical findings that are based on rigorously conducted quantitative or qualitative research. Research Articles present complete Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections. 

Research Notes (up to 5,000 words) present summaries of novel findings that do not meet the level of theoretical and/or empirical contribution expected in Research Articles but do provide advances in research that are likely to stimulate further investigation. 

Research Tool Reports (up to 5,000 words) introduce and present best practices, innovations, or emerging research methods and techniques that can advance biopolitical research.   

Perspective Essays (up to 10,000 words) seek to develop and advance in a rigorous, systematic way new theory that is relevant to biopolitical research.  

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PLS publishes rigorously conducted empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative, that tests clearly articulated theoretical assertions and rigorously argued theoretical essays that are intended to stimulate further scientific research. It employs double-anonymous peer review in which reviewers are asked to rate a manuscript on several criteria including the worthiness and appropriateness of the subject, the scientific contribution of the manuscript, the rigor of the arguments and analyses, and the overall quality of the manuscript. 

To be considered, a submission must not have been published elsewhere, either in whole or in part, or be concurrently under review for publication elsewhere. A manuscript must offer new knowledge or a new understanding of existing knowledge. It must be both “political” and “life-scientific” in its implications, if not in its methods. Scholars of politics must take care to ensure that the life sciences content of their submissions is well-researched and supported, and scholars of the life sciences must take equal care to ensure that the political content of their work is theoretically sound, historically accurate, and philosophically aware.

PLS encourages pre-registered studies and registered reports. 

Preparing your article for submission

Submissions must include the following two documents as separate uploaded files (files can be either MS word, PDF, LaTex, or Zip files):

• Title Page: The author must attach a separate document containing titling information, which includes the title of the manuscript and one author's full contact information (including email address, telephone number, institutional affiliation, and her or his institutional position [e.g., graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, or Assistant Professor]). It must also include all the names, institutional affiliations, and institutional positions of all co-authors. As well, this document should include Twitter handles for all authors on Twitter, which will be used for publicity if the paper is accepted for publication. Finally, authors should include the word count of the manuscript. The title page, tables, figures, references, keywords, and any online appendices are not included in the word count.

• Full Manuscript: This document should be anonymized and include the complete manuscript including the manuscript title, an abstract, keywords, the word count, the full body of the text, tables, figures, appendices, and references. The abstract should be a single paragraph of 150 words or less that succinctly describes the research question addressed, the analytical approach, and the major findings. It should exclude references and citations to other work. Manuscript text and appendix materials should be double-spaced in a standard 12-point type font. Other materials, including tables and figures, may be single-spaced using the same font and size used in the body of manuscript. Tables and figures should be included in the manuscript where they are discussed. Explanatory foot- and endnotes are discouraged. All identifying information must be removed from the full manuscript file. This includes acknowledgments of funding, research assistance, or other institutional or personal information that could identify the author(s). Published articles require APA-formatted in-text citations and references as well as APA-formatted reports of statistical tests.

Authors of empirical papers presenting statistical analyses are strongly encouraged to make appropriate files publicly available for replication purposes. Please see the journal’s Research Transparency policy for more details.

ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

Before publication, all authors will be required to provide a brief disclosure statement concerning possible competing interests. 

Authors of accepted manuscripts using data from human subjects will be required to submit documentation of Institutional or Human Subjects Review Board Approval for their study or, if not possible, an explanation of how they addressed ethical issues in their research. If there are particular issues that required or should have required special ethical consideration because they were beyond minimal risk to the subjects or for other reasons, it will be expected that the authors address these issues in the manuscript itself.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For further guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated.

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.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see Funding statement above).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].