Submissions

Author Guidelines

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts will be submitted using the OJS application that is available on the Journal’s website http://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/recp/index, by clicking the option “ENVÍOS” (submissions) on the main menu.

The manuscript must be presented in an anonymized way, omitting any reference that could allow the author/s identification. Any bibliographical references to the author’s work must also be omitted in the initial submission phase. In case of its publication, the references of the author/s could be added to the final document. In the same way, the authors must delete data that could identify them in the file properties (see the section “checklist for preparing the submission”).

The submission of manuscripts presupposes knowledge and acceptance of these guidelines by the author/s.

While the manuscript is under review by the RECP, the author/s shall not submit it for evaluation to any other journals.

The works have to be unpublished in any language. It will be the responsibility of the author/s to provide any relevant information about copyright. The publication of a work that infringes upon these rights will be the responsibility of the author/s. The author/s must indicate, in this case, if the article or research note has a direct relation with their own previous publications – whether it is partial repetition, development of the theme or any other aspect; and they should also identify the relevant bibliographical references. If this is not done, and if the RECP Editorial Board later becomes aware of such a circumstance, the Board will adopt the appropriate decisions in line with the editorial and legal norms applicable to the case.

The author who submits the manuscript will be the addressee of all communications related to the proposal that the RECP editorial manager might send through the OJS platform of the Journal. This corresponding author will be responsible, in the case of collective authorship, for contacting their co-authors and for providing the necessary information about them through the OJS platform. This corresponding author is also responsible for any possible conflicts about authorship of the manuscript. If a change of corresponding author is wanted, this must be explicitly requested.

Language of the manuscripts

The RECP accepts works in Spanish and English and publishes them in the language they were written. If a manuscript is submitted in English, the quality of English must be perfect, which means that the text must have been written or reviewed by a native English speaker.

Types of manuscripts accepted

• Articles: Original research works, of a theoretical or empirical nature. These will be between 8,000 and 10,000 words long, including the notes and bibliographical references.
  
  
• Research notes: Brief information about unique findings or new contributions resulting from ongoing research projects or studies. These will be between 5,000 and 7,000 words long, including the notes and bibliographical references.
  
  
• Review Articles: Unlike book reviews, review articles deal with two or more recent publications on the same topic or research question. They are expected not only to describe the contents of these works, but also to discuss their epistemological or methodological context as well as the most relevant aspects and achievements of the scientific field where they belong. Therefore, a review article should constitute in itself a contribution to the scientific literature; and it should promote a contextualized, systematic and critical reading to the progress reached in the knowledge of a topic, highlight existing gaps and recommend new avenues for a future research agenda. Recycled versions of the literature review chapters from an MA dissertation, a PhD thesis or a research project will not be considered as such.
  
  Review articles will be between 6,000 and 12,000 words long, and they will have a substantive title. Authors interested in writing this type of contribution should send a brief proposal to the RECP editors or editorial manager, stating the possible objectives and content of the piece, as well as a provisional list of main books to be analyzed, preferably published within the last five years. They will go through a peer review evaluation process like articles and research notes submitted to the RECP.
  
  
• Book Reviews: Brief essays that critically analyze and contextualize an editorial novelty of academic interest for the Journal’s thematic scope. The maximum length will be 2,000 words. These must include the cited bibliographical references.

Thematic sections

The Spanish Journal for Political Science (RECP) may publish in its issues monographic sections on special subjects of interest for Political Science, approached from one or various sub-disciplines.

The inclusion of a monographic section can be requested by one or various researchers or by formal invitation made by the RECP Editorial Board. The maximum number of articles published in the monographic section will be five, so that there is space left for other articles in the Journal’s issue.

The proposals of monographic sections must be sent to the editors or recp@aecpa.es and approved by the Editorial Board. They must include, in a document of 3,000 words maximum, the following aspects:

• Topic of the thematic section.
• Justification of interest of the proposal.
• First name, surname, institutional affiliation and brief CV of the promoters of the monographic section and of the authors of the articles that it comprises.
• The titles and abstracts of possible articles for the monographic section following the RECP authors’ guidelines, as well as an estimate of the delivery date of the articles.

Once the monographic section is accepted, each of the articles proposed will be uploaded via the OJS application available at http://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/recp/index. Each manuscript will go through a peer review evaluation process like any other article submitted to the RECP. Provided that four or more articles receive a positive evaluation, they will be published as a monographic section; if there are less, they will be published in the regular article section of the RECP.

The person/s promoting the thematic section will assume the role of coordinator/s of that section and they will collaborate in the evaluation and editing process. The coordinator/s of the monographic section will be allowed to attend the meeting of the RECP Editorial Board in which the articles presented to the thematic section will be studied.

Copyright

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” (CC BY-NCe--ND 4.0) License. You may read here the basic information of the license, that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, and without commercial purpouses or derivatives uses.

The authors also authorize the RECP the public communication of their work for dissemination through intranets, Internet and such portals and wireless devices decided by the editor, by making available to users the online consultation of its content and abstract, for printing on paper and/or for downloading and filing, all in the terms and conditions appearing on the webpage where the work is located.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Open Access Policy

Revista Española de Ciencia Política provides free access to full-text articles immediately after publication. There are no processing charges.

Dishonest practices: plagiarism and scientific fraud

Pursuant to the Law of Intellectual Property in relation to actions and procedures that can be initiated against those who infringe upon the rights of intellectual property, the publication of a work that contravenes the said rights will be the responsibility of the author/s, who will assume any conflict that might take place over copyright. The most significant conflicts can occur over plagiarism and scientific fraud. Plagiarism is defined as:

1. Presenting a work that is not one’s own.
2. Adopting words or ideas from other authors without due acknowledgement.
3. Not employing inverted commas in a quote.
4. Giving incorrect information about the true source of a quote.
5. Paraphrasing from a source without referencing the source.
6. Abusive paraphrasing, even if the source is referenced.

The following practices constitute scientific fraud:

1. Fabrication, falsification or omission of data and plagiarism.
2. Duplicate publication.
3. Authorship conflicts.

Format

Regarding articles and research notes, an anonymized version in word in Times New Roman 12 will be uploaded to the Journal’s website. The application will also include a brief biographical note (no longer than 150 words) of the author/s, with complete data, including institutional affiliation and the emails of each author, as well as an indication of who will act as corresponding author for the purposes of communication with the Journal.

Tables and figures

All tables and figures will be numbered with correlating Arabic numbers after the word ‘table’ or ‘figure’ (as appropriate). A concise title that reflects its content is required, and the source shall be cited at the foot, even if it is of author’s own elaboration, in which case the words ‘own elaboration’ should be used. The tables and figures should be inserted in the place that corresponds in the text. At the same time, they should be sent separately in the original version of the program employed (Photoshop, PowerPoint, Acrobat, Excel, etc.).

The images have to be inserted in the text and also be sent separately, in tif or jpeg format, with a resolution of 300 pixels/inch, and with a minimum width of 10 cm.

Order of authors

The order of the authors that appears in the manuscript will be scrupulously respected. Regarding the way of the signatures, the following is recommended:

1. First name + Surname.
2. If there are two names, it is recommended to use First name + the initial of the second name + Surname.
3. For two surnames, First name + (the initial of the second name) + First surname + Second surname.

Title

The articles, research notes and review articles will be entitled in Spanish and English. Titles longer than 15 words are not recommended. The titles should be informative and closely reflect the content of the work. Empty or superfluous words should be avoided. Titles should include, wherever possible, descriptors taken from the appropriate specialized thesaurus. The use of abbreviations, acronyms, symbols and formulas should be avoided.

Abstract

Articles and research notes will be preceded by a brief abstract in Spanish and English. The length of the Spanish version of an abstract for an article must be between 175 and 250 words, while the limit for research notes and review articles abstracts is 200. It must be strictly informative in scope, and it should always follow the structure: objectives-methods-results-conclusions. Additional information that is not in the text of the article cannot be included. Words or expressions that have little significance, circumlocution and excessively long phrases should also be avoided.

Descriptors

A maximum of 10 descriptors or key words, in Spanish and English, should also be included. For standardization purposes, these words should be drawn from thesaurus and standardized vocabularies: for example, CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts Thesaurus and the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBBS) Thesaurus.

Bibliographic citations

• These should appear in the body of the text and never in page footnotes. For quotes in the text, Harvard’s author-year system should be employed (author, year: page):

  (Dahl, 1989: 323)

• The documents with two authors should be cited by their first surnames linked with ‘and’ (Newton and Norris, 2000):

  (Telles and Ortiz, 2011)

• If the work of three or more authors is cited, it is sufficient to cite the first author followed by et al.:

  (Amador et al., 1989)

• If various works by an author or group of authors is cited from the same year, a, b, c, must be added after the year:

  (Franzen, 2012b)

• When the surname of the cited author forms a part of the text, the year of the cited work must always be indicated in parenthesis:

  As Goldthorpe states (2010)...

• Every one of the bibliographic citations must correspond with a reference in the final bibliography.

• Self-citations should be avoided, with their use restricted to essential cases only.

Notes

The use of notes must be exceptional, and they should be placed at the bottom of the page. Notes will only contain additional text and must not include bibliographical references.

Bibliography

A list of references will be included at the end of the article, research note or review article. It will only contain references that are cited in the text. Therefore it is expressly prohibited to include additional references. The Harvard system will generally be employed, except for the use of lower case for the titles and the elimination of parentheses for the years. Authors will be ordered alphabetically. The norms that should be used when citing the bibliography at the end of the text are:

1. Surname(s), First name. The full name should be used. If it is a compound name, the first part should be in full and for the second only the initial should be used. In the case of multiple authorship, names should be separated by commas, except the last that will include ‘and’. Starting from the second author, the name will be written in direct order: first name, surname. In the case of a work having various authors without specification, VV. AA. will be used.

   Sageman, Marc and Bruce Hoffman. 2008. “Does Osama still call the shots? Debating the containment of al Qaeda’s leadership”, Foreign Affairs, 87 (4): 4163-166.

   VV.AA. 2003. Introducción a la economía y administración de empresas. Madrid: Ediciones Pirámide.

2. When various works by the same author appear in the bibliographic list, they will be listed in strict chronological order, starting with the oldest. The surname and first name will always be in the same format for all references.

   Navarro, Clemente J. 2000. “El sesgo participativo. Introducción a la teoría empírica de la democracia participativa”, Papers, 61: 11-37.
   
   Navarro, Clemente J. 2002. Democracia asociativa y oportunismo político. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch.

3. The year of publication must include a, b, c, etc. wherever the bibliography contains more than one work by the author that is dated in the same year (for example: 2008a, 2008b, etc.).

   Ragin, Charles C. 2008a. “Measurement versus calibration: a set-theoretic approach”, in Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Henry Brady, and David Collier (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   
   Ragin, Charles C. 2008b. Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

See below for examples of the most common types of documents:

• Journal articles

  Enders, Walter and Todd Sandler. 1993. “The effectiveness of antiterrorism policies: a vector-autoregression-intervention analysis”, American Political Science Review, 87(4): 829-844.

• Monographs

  Dahl, Robert. A. 1999. La democracia. Una guía para los ciudadanos. Madrid: Taurus.

• Parts of edited volumes

  Wildavsky, Aaron. 1989. “A cultural theory of leadership”, in Brian D. Jones, (ed.), Leadership and politics: new perspectives in Political Science. Lawrence: Kansas University Press.

• Presentations and papers in conferences

  Boundi Boundi, Mohamed. 2008. "Marruecos: estructuras sociales y tendencias de consumo en una sociedad en transición”, in Sociedad, consumo y sostenibilidad. Actas del XIII Congreso Nacional de Sociología en Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo: Asociación Castellano-Manchega de Sociología.

• Unpublished theses

  Galais, Carolina. 2008. ¿Socialización o contexto? La implicación política subjetiva de los españoles (1985-2006). Fraile Maldonado, Marta (dir.), Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

• References to web pages

  Green, Melanie C., John A. Krosnick and Allyson L. Holbrook 2001. The survey response process in telephone and face-to-face surveys. Differences in respondent satisficing and social desirability response bias. Available online: http://www.Clas.ufl.edu/users/kenwald(pos6757/spring02/tch62.pdf [Consulted: 21 September 2010]

Acknowledgements

The author/s are allowed to add an acknowledgement section labelled that way and placed before the bibliographic references. Details of funding received and the reference, as appropriate, to the funded research project can be provided here.