SiC uses a dual system of notes and references that is generally used in the social and natural sciences. "Documentation Two" in Chicago Manual of Style and a back issue of the journal should be used as guides when preparing the manuscript. Sources are listed alphabetically according to the author's last name and full first name at the end of the paper. When references are cited in the text, the author and date (and pages if relevant), are set off in parentheses to refer the reader to the reference list. Note: Footnotes are not used to cite sources, but only to present important and relevant points that do not fit in smoothly and that would otherwise interrupt the flow or structure of the paper (see also below).
Reference List: General Rules
1. BOOKS. General style: Author’s last name, author’s full first name, not just initial. Date. Title, 2nd ed., 2 vols. City: Name of publisher.
Bourbaki, Nicolas. [1960] 1994. Elements of the History of Mathematics. Translated by John Meldrum. Berlin: Springer.
Cantor, Georg. 1991. Georg Cantor: Briefe. Edited by Herbert Meschkowski and Winfried Nilson. Berlin: Springer.
Corry, Leo. [1996] 2003. Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures, 2nd revised edition. Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser.
2. ARTICLES IN BOOKS: Author. Year. “Title of Article.” In Title of Book, edited by name of editor, translated by name of translator, page numbers. City: Publisher.
Corry, Leo. 1996. "David Hilbert and Physics." In The Symbolic Universe: Geometry and Physics, 1890-1930, edited by Jeremy Gray, 22-24. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. ARTICLES IN JOURNALS: author. Year. “Title.” periodical volume (issue):pages.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” Ideology and Consciousness 3 (Spring):7-26.
4. ARTICLES IN NEWSPAPERS: Author. Year. “Title.” Newspaper, date, p. = page.
Smith, James. 1991. “The British System.” New York Times, 15 December, p. 3.
5. WEBSITES: Title (remove “the”). Name of editor (if given). Version. Date of last update. Sponsoring Institution or Organization. Date of access URL.
American Museum Congo Expedition 1909-1915 . Ver. 2.0. January 2003. American Museum of Natural History. 20 July 2003, http://diglib1.amnh.org/ (last accessed September 15, 2011).
6. WEB PUBLICATION, same as journal / book, date of access and URL.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. http://www.literature.org/auth... (last accessed July 17.2003), online version of Darwin, Charles. 1859 . On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life .
7. UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL: Unpublished material should appear in quotation marks; it should not be italicized.
Smith, John. 1987. “Law and Land Use in Israel.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
8. Two or more authors, reverse the name of only the first one; if more than two names, insert commas between names (also before "and").
9. For two or more entries by the same author with the same date: add a, b, c, etc. after date (no space between). Sort chronologically if possible, otherwise, alphabetize the publications by title.
10. Cap / lower case of titles: cap. first word, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs; lc articles, prepositions, conjunctions: "The Story behind the News." The History of the Women's Movement.
Author-Date Citation in the Text
11. Style - (Author date, page number(s) or vol. number: page number) -- e.g.: (Sperry 1972, 1:22). No space between colon and page number.
12. If more than one work by the same author, references are listed in chronological order.
13. Placement of reference in the text: before punctuation, preferably at the end of a sentence.
14. After a displayed quotation (more than 60 words and indented without quotation marks), the reference appears in parentheses after the quotation's final period. No final period in or after the reference parenthesis.
15. Use "ibid." (without quotation marks and not italicized) when reference is same as preceding one; without a page number if pages are also identical; with page number if different.
FOOTNOTES
16. Footnotes are used when information is not confined to an author/date reference (“see” or “cf.” followed by just an author/date reference can still be treated as an in-text reference).
17. A reference should not stand alone at the beginning of a footnote; such a reference belongs in parentheses in the text.
FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND SYMBOLS
18. Non-Roman alphabets, special characters, mathematics and chemical formulas, and all diacritical markings should be marked clearly. For Russian, please see the transliteration rules at the beginning of Vol. 15 (2002), issue no. 2. For non-Russian, but Cyrillic alphabets such as Ukranian, for Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Hindu, Arabic, Coptic, Amharic, etc., as well as for languages based on ideograms such as Chinese, etc.), please contact the journal.
19. All foreign language quotations are translated into English. Foreign language terms up to seven words may be given in parentheses after their English translation. In special cases, the quotation in the original language may be included in a footnote.
20. References in French, German, Castilian (European and/or Central- and Latin-American), Italian, and Portuguese are not translated into English. References in all other languages are to be translated into English (as verbatim as possible), and thus are presented bilingually (the original wording is kept, the translation follows each part of the reference). Example: Balaban, Majer. 1929. Zabytki historyczne Zydow w Polsce [Jewish historical antiquities in Poland]. Warsaw: Nakł. Tow. Krzwienia Nauk Judaistycznych w Polsce. – This is to say: all strings of signs within [ ] are not italicized, since they are added by authors. For further information, contact the journal.
ILLUSTRATIONS
21. Figures may be used to illustrate an article. The journal prints figures only in black and white free of charges. Should the original illustrations be in colour, they will be converted into greyscale files by the journal for printing. For all colour figures that appear in the print version of the journal charges will apply. At the time of submission, contributors should clearly state whether their figures should appear in colour in the online version only, or whether they should appear in colour online and in the print version. There is no charge for including colour figures in the online version of the Journal but it must be clear that colour is needed to enhance the meaning of the figure, rather than simply being for aesthetic purposes. 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.
22. Figures must be supplied as scans (electronic files). TIFF format is the required format; however, formats such as JPEG and BMP are also accepted if the quality (resolution, etc.) conforms to standard. Halftones should have a minimum resolution of 300 PPI and line drawings of 1200 PPI.
23. Each figure should have a short caption describing it and indicating its source.
24. The author is responsible for obtaining copyright permission to reproduce the illustrations in Science in Context. Suitable acknowledgment may be included in the caption.
25. Illustrations within WORD files (or similar documents) are not accepted for the publication, but may be used for the version to be sent to referees.
26. Illustrations in PDF format are not accepted unless for purposes of simplifying the handling of a manuscript (refereeing and/or copyediting).
27. All electronic documents which do not conform to the above standard will not be accepted.
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.
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”.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 here).
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)].