Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in Microsoft Word (doc or docx), RTF, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect document file format.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining; footnotes are used rather than endnotes; and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines below.

Author Guidelines

Target readership: ministers of religion, scholars of Christian theology, lay people with an interest in theology.

Theology in Scotland accepts articles from any source on the understanding that they are the original work of the authors named and that they are being offered only to Theology in Scotland.

Submissions of any of the following are welcome: essays, research articles, review articles, conference papers, lectures, reflective and creative pieces, and book reviews.

Articles should be up to 5000 words (inclusive of endnotes). Longer articles may be accepted for publication from time to time. Summaries/abstracts of proposed articles should be provided (not more than 100 words long).

Book reviews should be up to 2000 words. Article length reviews of major new works will also be considered for publication, by arrangement with the editors.

Text formatting

– Indent the first line of new paragraphs with a tab unless preceded by a heading or block quotation. Do not use blank spaces to achieve indents. Do not leave spaces between paragraphs.
– Use a single space after full stops.
– Use hyphens for compound words and phrases (e.g. inter-denominational, once-for-all)
– Use en-dashes (PC: ctrl + - ; Mac: ⌥ + -) for page number and date ranges (e.g. 1–12, 1886–1968).
– Use en-dashes surrounded by spaces for parenthetical statements or comments (e.g. ‘And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day.’)

Headings

Left justified; text in lower case except initial letter and initial letters of proper nouns.

Notes

Use footnotes rather than endnotes. Where applicable, the footnote number appears in the article text after the punctuation mark.

Quotations

Short quotes of four lines or less should be integrated into the body of the text and placed between single quotation marks. Use double quotation marks for quotation within a quotation.

For longer quotes, use block quotations indented by 1cm from the left-hand margin. In this case, do not use quotation marks or italics.

– Punctuation should follow the closing quotation marks except where whole sentences are quoted.
– Any modification to a quotation should be indicated between square brackets (e.g. [...], [and]).
– The footnote number appears after the end quotation mark. If a punctuation mark follows directly after the end quotation mark, the footnote number appears after the punctuation mark.

References

Use Chicago (CMOS 17) or SBL Notes and Bibliography citation style: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish in the journal grant to Theology in Scotland, St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews (“the Publisher”), the following:

1. An irrevocable non-exclusive right to reproduce, republish, transmit, sell, distribute, and otherwise use the Work in electronic and print editions of the Journal and in derivative works throughout the world, in all languages, and in all media now known or later developed.

2. An irrevocable non-exclusive right to create and store electronic archival copies of the Work, including the right to deposit the Work in open access digital repositories.

3. An irrevocable non-exclusive right to license others to reproduce, republish, transmit, and distribute the Work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial [CC-BY-NC] 4.0 licence.

Copyright in the Work remains with the author and the author retains the right to reuse the article (e.g., in institutional repositories, on their website or published in a book).

Warranties

The Author represents and warrants that the Work is the Author’s original work and that it does not violate or infringe the law or the rights of any third party and, specifically, that the Work contains no matter that is defamatory or that infringes any literary or proprietary rights, intellectual property rights, or any rights of privacy. It is the author's responsibility to obtain written permission to reproduce copyright-protected material in her/his article.

The Author also warrants that he or she has the full power to make this agreement, and if the Work was prepared jointly, the Author agrees to inform the co-Authors of the terms of this Agreement and to obtain their signature to this Agreement or their written permission to sign on their behalf. The Author indemnifies the Publisher against any losses and other expenses, including reasonable attorney’s fees, after final judgment of any claim or action against any or all of these warranties.