Insight on Africa

Guidelines for Contributors to Insights on Africa

• MANUSCRIPTS: Manuscripts or articles should be submitted in an electronic format in MS-word or any other standard software, in double-space with figures and tables attached in separate files. The cover page should carry only the title of the article and the author’s name, address (both postal and e-mail addresses), and phone and fax num­bers. All articles must include an abstract of approximately 200 words and 4–7 keywords that reflect the theme of the article (for example: Nigeria, Mali, Terrorism, West Africa, Regional Security). The length of the manuscript should be between 6,000 and 7,000 words.

Manuscripts and all editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, Insight on Africa, Centre for African Studies, 351-School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi-110067;e-mails: office@insightonafrica.in or insightonafrica@gmail.com

• HEADINGS: Limit the levels of heading within an article to three or four (maximum). Avoid lengthy headings and do not number them. The printed style will demonstrate their order clearly without recourse to an explicit numbering, such as 1.1.
   
• SPELLINGS: Use British spellings rather than American (hence, ‘programme’ not ‘program’, ‘labour’ not ‘labor’, and ‘centre’ not ‘center’). Although variable usage is acceptable in English, for reasons of consistency the use of a universal ‘s’ is preferred in ‘-ise’ and ‘-sation’ words (‘realise’, ‘emphasise’ and ‘democratisation’); also use a hyphen in words like ‘co-ordination’, ‘co-operation’, ‘neo-colonialism’, ‘inter-ethnic’.
   
• QUOTATIONS: Use single quotation marks, reserving double quotation marks for quoted words within a quotation. Spellings of words in quotation should not be changed. Spellings of words in quotations should not be changed. Quotations of 45 words or more should be separated from the text with a line space above and below.
   
• ITALICS and DIACRITICAL MARKS: Use of italic and diacriticals should be minimized, but use them for book titles, journal names and foreign words, unless particular terms occur so frequently that they are better in upright (roman) type. Proper nouns in a foreign language should always be in roman. We also prefer to set common terms such as ‘status quo’, ‘a priori’, ‘ibid.’ and ‘et al.’ in roman.
   
• ABBREVIATIONS: Include a final stop in abbreviations (words shortened by omitting the end), such as p., vol. and ed., but not in contractions (words shortened by omitting the middle), such as Mr, Dr, edn, eds and Rs. No stops are needed between capitals: for example, CPI, INTUC, MLA. Short forms likely to be unfamiliar to some readers should be spelt out in full the first time they occur. Please avoid ‘i.e.’ and ‘e.g.’ in the text but use them in notes if you wish. Abbreviations can be introduced at first use—e.g., Oriental and Indian Office Collections (hereafter OIOC) or Board of Revenue Proceedings (hereafter BRP).
   
• NUMBERS: Write numbers in figures (rather than words) for exact measurements and series of quantities, including percentages. Spell out numbers from one to nine, 10 and above to remain in figures. In text use ‘per cent’; in tables the symbol ‘%’. Write ‘0.8’ rather than ‘.8’, except for levels of probability. Use lower-case italics for p (probability) and n (number). Use fuller forms for numbers and dates—e.g., 1780–88, pp. 178–84, and pp. 200–2.

• DATES: Give specific dates in the form 10 September 1760. Decades may be referred to as either ‘the eighties’ or ‘the 1880s’. Spell out the ‘nineteenth cen­tury’, etc. Use thousands and millions, not lakhs and crores.
   
• NOTES: Should be consecutively numbered and presented at the end of the article, not at the foot of each page. Notes must contain more than a mere reference.
   
• FIGURES AND TABLES: Please use short and crisp titles and headings in tables and figures. Ensure that the units of measurement are stated and check any totals or averages.

Tables and figures should be indicated separately (see Table 1), not by placement (see Table below). Give an exact indication where the tables and figures should be placed in the text.

Black and white illustrations should be supplied electronically at a resolution of at least 300 dpi, as .eps, .tif or .jpg files. They should be saved separately from the article file. All figures should have short descriptive captions typed on a separate sheet.

The complete source references for tables, figures and maps should be cited below each respective tale, figure and map under the section ‘Source’.

• PERMISSIONS AND RELEASES: Material taken directly from a copyrighted source should be clearly identified, and the copyright holder’s written permission to reproduce it must be submitted in a separate file. Obtaining permission to reproduce copyrighted material is the author’s responsibility, as is payment of any fees the copyright holder may request. Further information and a template Permission Request Letter is available on SAGE’s Journal Author Gateway (http:// www.sagepub.com/authors/journal/permissions.sp).
   
• BOOK REVIEWS: Book Reviews must contain the name of the author, title of the book reviewed, place of publication, name of publisher, year of publication, and the number of pages and price of the book. The name of the reviewer and full particulars of his/her affiliation should appear at the end of the text, and the length of the review should be between 1500 and 2000 words. Only solicited Book Reviews are published.
   
• REFERENCES and CITATIONS: We follow the Chicago (Author-Date) Manual of Style in the formatting of the reference details for articles, books, essays, theses and other publications.

A consolidated listing of all books, articles, essays, theses and documents referred to (including any referred to in the tables, graphs and maps) should be provided at the end of the article.

• References Styles: Following is an encapsulated list of the formatting styles for some of the frequently used types of references.

Book
Dubey, Ajay. 1989. Indo-African relations in post-Nehru era. New Delhi: Kalinga Publications.

A Book by Two Authors
Mwagiru, Makumi and Aparajita Biswas. 2013. East Africa-India security relations. Nairobi: IDIS/PRIASA

Article or Chapter of a Book
Dubey, Ajay. 2011. Looking West: Africa. In Handbook of India’s International Relations, ed. David Scott, 189–200. UK: Routledge.

Journal Articles
Dubey, Ajay. 1994. Parliament in Mauritius. International Studies 31, no. 2: 139–169.

Website Content
Ray, Nivedita. 2006. Instability in Nigeria’s Niger delta region. http://www.idsa.in/publications/stratcomments/niveditaray_13206.htm

Paper Presented at a Meeting or Conference
Dubey, Ajay. 2012. India-Africa Relations: Emerging Challenges. Paper presented at international workshop on Africa- India Relations in 21^st Century at University of KwaZulu Natal, September 25-27, in Durban, South Africa.

• Citation Styles:

One Work by One Author:
(Dubey 1989, 65)

One Work by Two Authors:
(Mwagiru and Biswas 2013, 104-7)

One Work by Three or More Authors:
(Laumann et al. 1994, 262)

Two or More Works by Different Authors in One Citation:
(Blada 1980, Kamil 1988, Peeperberg and Funk 1990)

Authors with the Same Last Name:
To prevent confusion, use first initials with the last names:
(E. Johnson 2001, L. Johnson 1998)

Two or More Works by the Same Author(s) in One Citation:
(Dubey 2003, 2010, 2011)

More than One Work by the Same Author(s) in the Same Year in One Citation:
(Dubey 2011a, 2011b,)
Mark the years with a, b or c in the References too accordingly.

Publication ethics

SAGE is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the SAGE Author Gateway