Author Guidelines

All authors submitted are asked to please abide by the guidelines below. Any submissions that are not in keeping to these guidelines will not be submitted to review.

MEMSA Journal Author Guidelines:

  • Articles should generally be between 5,000 and 8,000 words long, inclusive of footnotes, tables, figures, captions etc.  Longer or shorter submissions may be accepted, but only with prior permission from the journal officer. Contact the journal to discuss this before submitting. 
  • All references must conform to the most recent version of the MHRA style guide. If in doubt, put a note by the reference in question and a member of the editorial team will advise post-submission. NB. Any submissions without properly formatted references will be automatically returned to authors.  
  • Articles must be anonymised before submission. This means that any references to one’s own work should be replaced with ‘The Author, book/article/chapter/review, date’ 
  • All articles should be written in 12p Times New Roman with double line spacing. The document should have page numbers.
  • Authors should use single quotation marks for quotes, with double quotation marks used for quotes within quotes. E.g. ‘And so, by a route that is neither entirely marked or wholly determined he comes to me and to the notion “one of Fish’s victims”.’ (Fish, Stanley Eugene, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) p. 314). 
  • Longer quotations of 50 words or more should be indented without quotation marks. 
  • Quotations of any languages other than English must given in translation. The original should then be given in a footnote. Footnotes containing a foreign text in its original language will not be counted against the article’s overall word count. In the case that a particular aspect of the original language is crucial to the author’s argument, then this should be given in brackets within the translated quote. E.g. ‘Thus, reader, I am myself the substance (matiere) of my book: it makes no sense that you use your time on such a frivolous and vain subject.’ (Montaigne, Michel de, Essais, ed. by Pierre Villey and Verdun-Louis Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 1978, p. 3, trans. Zak Eastop).
  • Articles should be submitted as a Word document.

To be included with submission: 

  • Author details. This includes their full name, institutional affiliation, email address, ORCiD (if available). If the author’s institutional affiliation changes – or is due to change – during the peer review process, please include this new affiliation as a footnote.
  • An article abstract of no more than 200 words.
  • A brief biographical statement (ideally no more than 200 words).
  • 7 keywords: these should help other researchers find and identify your article, once published online.
  • If you are still supervised, please give us the name(s) of your supervisors so that we avoid accidentally asking them to review your work!