Guidelines for
Contributors
The editors will consider for publication in The Catholic Social Science Review articles, book reviews, review essays, etc. in the social sciences or in the humanities (if dealing with social questions) that combine high quality scholarship and compatibility with the Church’s Magisterium. A prospective contributor of a symposium, article, or documentation piece to the Review can submit materials by sending an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word to the appropriate editor. Submissions for the Public and Church Affairs section must address specific public or Church policy questions or issue areas. All submissions of regular articles, symposium submissions, and Public and Church affairs articles and review essays (not a regular book review or documentation material) must include an abstract of approximately 100 words.
Submissions intended for the articles section must conform to the highest standards of scholarship. Articles that are polemical, that fail to demonstrate adequate grasp of the current academic literature on a given topic, or that are in some other way inappropriate for publication in a scholarly journal, may be rejected by the editor-in-chief at his discretion and without obligation to undertake the peer review process.
Regular articles and symposium submissions should be 5,000 words or less, including notes; book reviews should normally be 1000 words or less, articles for the Public and Church Affairs section should be 1,750 words or less, and articles for the documentation section no more than 1500. Longer submissions will be considered, however. Submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Typeface of the text should be 12-point Courier. The notes must appear as endnotes. Graphs and illustrations should be placed at the end of the manuscript, one to a page, with their locations and captions clearly indicated in the text of the manuscript. Acceptance of a manuscript for publication may be conditioned on the author’s making changes deemed necessary or desirable by the Editorial Board.
The Review appears in October/November each year, and submissions made by December 1 have the best chance of appearing in the upcoming issue, unless that issue is already filled.
Blind Review
Articles should be submitted ready for blind review. The author’s name should appear nowhere in the manuscript–it should only appear in your e-mail message indicating you are submitting an electronic version of an article.
Be sure to avoid references to your own scholarship that identify you as the author of the article. For example, avoid phases like: “As I have shown in an other article...” or “See my...”
Acceptance of a manuscript for publication after refereeing may be conditioned on the author’s making changes deemed necessary or desirable by the Editorial Board.
Title and Abstract
Title should be centered, all UPPER CASE, and not in Italics.
Your name, without Ph.D. after, and your institutional affiliation, should be in italics, and centered.
The abstract is critically important and should be about 100 words. Please put it in Italics, and do not include the word “Abstract” as a title. Should you use a book title that would normally itself be italicized, do not underline it, but place it in non-italic print.
Headings
We do not have absolute uniformity in regard to headings, but only relative uniformity.
Put your headings in bold and do not use all upper case. (In WORD, at Format/Case, hit “title case”)
It is up to you whether you enumerate your headings.
If you have a single level of headings, they should all be centered, bold, not all upper case.
If you have two levels, the second level should be left justified, in bold and italics.
In most cases we would discourage a third level of headings.
Titles and Italicization
Italicize all book titles; do not underline. Likewise, if you have underlined a word or phrase for special emphasis, change that to italics.
In your endnotes, italicize all book titles and journal titles. (If your manuscript has heavy use of underlining, you can easily use the “find” and “replace” feature to change everything in an instant.)
Do not italicize ibid., id., i.e., and e.g. Do not italicize foreign phrases commonly used in English, such as vis-à-vis, Zeitgeist, a fortiori, a priori.
Punctuation
All punctuation goes inside of quotation marks, and inside of endnote numbers, “like this,” and “like this.”
When using parenthetical remarks at the end of a sentence, the period goes after the last parentheses (like this). This includes situations where a source is placed in parentheses at the end of a sentence (Jones, 1980, p. 34).
If an indented block quote is used, and it has a source at the end, a period goes after the quotation is finished, and then another period within the parentheses. (Seligman, 1972, 94.)
On the use of commas separating items in a series, and specifically, the use of a comma before the word “and.” Example: “We have previously discussed commutative justice, distributive justice, and legal justice.” Should a comma be placed before the word “and” or not? Answer: we prefer the use of the comma, and in editing will place the comma therein, unless an author makes known to the editor that he or she has a strong preference otherwise.
Hyphens and Dashes
Hyphenated words use the very short hyphen mark: pre-Enlightenment social thought.
Compound adjectives are hyphenated; the same words used as a compound noun are not. An example of a very common usage is:
the nineteenth century (noun)
nineteenth-century philosophy (adjective)
When using a dash—and some authors use it a lot—be sure not to use a single hyphen, but the longer “em dash”. If you type TWO hyphens, WORD will turn it into an “em dash” when you hit the space bar after the word following your dashes.
Use of numbers
Please refer to chapter 9 of the Chicago Manual of Style for guidelines too numerous to mention here. The most important rule is consistency. The same passage should not include “six” and “7,” for example.
Miscellaneous Items
When citing Scripture, use Catholic abbreviations (two or three letters, no period) and then chapter and verse as follows: Gn 4:12 Gn 4:13-15. At your first Scriptural usage, indicate in an endnote which translation you are using.
Graphs and illustrations should be placed at the end of the manuscript, one to a page, with their locations and captions clearly indicated in the text of the manuscript