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Information for Guest Editors

Thank you for your interest in becoming a Guest Editor of the European Journal of Politics and Gender (EJPG). EJPG is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes international, cutting-edge research in the broad field of politics and gender.
You may want to look at our regular Call for Special Issue Proposals here.

Before you start work on your special issue please read our guidance for guest editors (below) in full.

EJPG Aims and Scope
The Role of the Guest Editor
Article Information for Guest Editors
The Peer Review Process
Production Schedule
Marketing
Contact us
Bristol University Press Resources

EJPG Aims and Scope

EJPG is firmly embedded in global politics and gender scholarship, its scope is not limited to Europe. EJPG aims to advance gender and politics research in all its diversity. To this end, EJPG publishes Research Articles in the wide field of gender and politics. Special issues are collections of research articles on a shared theme.

Research articles should use argument, evidence, and data to advance their claims. The style should be analytic and critical. Research articles may cover single country case studies or be comparative in scope. We recognize that much of the work done by scholars of politics and gender has real-world implications and that this work informs how laws, policies, and practices can be amended and transformed to produce better outcomes. We encourage authors to draw out these implications but to primarily focus on presenting and analyzing the evidence in relation to the existing body of work in the field. This presentation may include offering new conceptual frameworks for understanding existing phenomena and/or reaching new insights and conclusions about existing or new phenomena. We discourage authors from presenting submissions that are purely prescriptive.

EJPG understands gender as a political phenomenon that shapes power relations. Gender is contextual and is influenced by the intersection of multiple social categories and identities. The processes produce patterns of political inclusion and exclusion that are sometimes immediately visible, but often also hidden. EJPG therefore studies the formal and informal components of politics in local, national, transnational, and global realms. Subfields encompass but are not limited to: social movements; political representation; political participation; governance; public policy; the European Union; political economy; conflict and development; citizenship; LGBTQIA+ politics and policies; sexuality; political theory; women, peace, and security; and international relations.

The Role of the Guest Editor

Guest editors guide each individual contribution from start to finish. They play an important role in providing authors with feedback before articles are submitted for peer review. Guest editors should follow the following guidelines:

Guest editors must establish a timeline for the SI, which includes an internal review process, deadlines for submission to EJPG for peer-review, and target deadlines for resubmissions (where invites to revise and resubmit are received).
All pieces should have at least one round of internal review with the special issue (SI) guest editors before uploading to the EJPG portal for external review. Guest editors should provide comments on each manuscript. An internal, ‘pre-peer review process’ ensures coherence in the issue and allows for valuable guest editor feedback on content. Internal review also raises the likelihood that articles successfully advance through the peer review process.
The guest editors need to make all contributors aware that not all articles will successfully pass through peer review. This should be stressed early and to everyone. The articles have to both stand alone and talk to the issues raised in the SI as a whole. On the latter point, the SI guest editors can use the internal review process to help show authors where valuable and relevant cross-references can be made to the other submissions.
Guest editors will provide a list of six potential reviewers for each manuscript. Reviewers should not be close colleagues or recent coauthors of the manuscript’s author(s).
Guest editors will contribute a strong (1,500-word) introduction explaining what the key themes/questions are. These themes/questions need to also appear in each of the SI’s articles.

Guest editors must meet deadlines and help their contributing authors meet the deadlines. Guest editors should further ensure that contributing authors’ submissions meet the standards for research articles and are written in good academic English. Doing so raises the chances that submissions advance successfully through the review process. By contrast, guest editors who don’t work with authors to develop rigorous research articles and who don’t impose discipline on individual article writers to use the SI’s analytical framework raise the risk of losing articles along the way.

Article Information for Guest Editors

Word Count: Research articles must not exceed 9000 words in length, including any notes, tables, figures, etc. (but not references). This applies to all stages of the review process. Please note that submissions which exceed the word limit will be returned.

Abstract: Articles must be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 150 words.

Key messages: Each research article must include 3-4 ‘key messages’ summarizing the main messages from the paper in up to four bullet points. The contribution made by the paper to the field should be clear from these key messages. Each bullet point must be less than 100 characters. These points may be used by the editorial board to promote the article on Twitter.

Self-citations: Self-citations should be avoided or minimized as much as possible; authors may include a very limited number of self-references where this is key to the paper and/or to avoid creating the impression of not being aware of this literature. We normally expect to see no more than 5 self-references (all authors included) in the entire manuscript. Where authors do need to cite their own work, please make sure that the reference is anonymized in the third person, e.g., "Smith has argued," not "I have argued." Please note that submissions that have not been sufficiently anonymized or that contain too many self-citations will be returned.

Online Appendices: We recommend that any supplemental data is hosted in a data repository (such as figshare) for maximum exposure and is cited as a reference in the article.

Conflict of Interest: Please declare any possible conflicts of interest, or state ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’ if there are none.

Funding: Please list any funding, including the grant numbers you have received for the research covered in your article as follows: ‘This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].’

Referencing: Harvard referencing is required for all articles that receive an invitation to revise and resubmit.

Language: British English spellings preferred.

Permissions: Information for Rights & Permissions that may be needed for tables, figures, etc. can be found at: http://policypress.co.uk/rights-permissions

Copyright: All accepted papers will be requested to complete a Copyright Assignment Agreement form, assigning copyright to the European Conference on Politics and Gender who exclusively licenses all publication rights to Bristol University Press.

Social Media: After acceptance, articles should provide a tweet to be used by EJPG on Twitter, and any social media details of the authors and their institutions, to enable EJPG to promote the articles effectively on publication.

Further information and instructions for authors can be found on the journal homepage.

The Peer Review Process

EJPG uses the Editorial Manager online submission system:

http://www.editorialmanager.com/ejpg/default.aspx

Article submissions should be fully anonymous. EJPG operates a strict double-anonymous peer review policy. The review process for the special issues operates at the same level of rigor than that of regular submissions. It is therefore likely that most papers will have to undergo at least one round of revisions and that unfortunately some might not be accepted in the end.

Articles should be original submissions; they should not have been published before in a current or substantially similar form and should not be under consideration concurrently by another journal.

Please note that the EJPG Lead Editors will handle the review process of special issue articles once they have been submitted to the system. Guest Editors are not expected to manage articles on the system. Guest Editors will be copied in on decision letters sent out by the EJPG Editors.

A maximum of 10 papers are expected for the special issue, plus an introduction laying out the key themes, debates, and framework as well as an overview of the key findings of the collection of articles. Please note that EJPG publishes 7 articles per issue. Should more articles of the special issue be accepted for publication, then the excess articles will be published in a subsequent, regular issue as individual research articles. The EJPG Editors reserve the right to reject a special issue article if it does not meet the required quality standards of the journal. Likewise, they reserve the right to publish a paper submitted too late for a special issue in a subsequent issue. If too few papers pass the review stage, EJPG editors reserve the right to cancel the special issue and offer the possibility of publishing the smaller number of accepted papers as a themed section or as individual research articles instead. An invitation to submit to a special issue is not a guarantee of acceptance for publication.

Production Schedule

EJPG aims to return reviews and an initial decision within 2.5 months of submission.

Authors that receive an invitation to revise and resubmit will have additional time (typically three months in the first round) to complete the revisions, with another review process of 2.5 months after that.

Once accepted and submitted to the publisher, papers are copyedited and then typeset before being sent to authors for proof-checking. Please ensure proofs are checked thoroughly.

All articles are published online as soon as they are ready.

Guest Editors should take these time frames into account when drafting the schedule. The journal editors will work with the guest editors to establish the exact dates. However, we cannot guarantee exactly when the SI itself will come out if there are delays. Some contributors take longer than others to get things done. We as a journal also have other SIs in the pipeline and our rule of thumb is to prioritize SIs whose contributions arrive without delay.

Marketing

After publication, we aim to heavily promote the articles via social media, using both Twitter and Facebook to maximize exposure. Please follow the journal on Twitter: @EJPGjournal for news and updates. Our Facebook page will be used to promote both the journal and articles. Please like/follow us at: https://www.facebook.com/ejpgjournal

Guest Editors and Authors are encouraged to do the same via their own social media accounts, blogs, and networks. Information about self-archiving and repositories can be found here: http://policypress.co.uk/self-archiving.

Guest editors and guest authors also have opportunities to promote their articles by writing blog posts for Bristol University Press’s Transforming Society blog: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/. Papers that have particular policy relevance could also be promoted via policy briefings. More information is available on Bristol University Press’s website: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/author-hub/promoting-your-book/writing-a-policy-briefing alongside recent examples on the Transforming Society blog.

Contact us

For any further queries, please contact the EJPG Editors at: editors@ejpg-journal.com