Article
Peer-reviewed articles providing original research findings form the heart of each IQAS issue. Three articles per single issue are obligatory, though one article may be replaced by a review article. The articles of one issue may all focus on a common topic (Special Issue) or address different themes. All articles undergo the double-blind peer review process. They have to include an abstract, keywords, and author information. Article length is 6,000–8,000 words, excluding notes and references. Articles may contain pictures, illustrations and tables as long as the copyright permissions have been cleared by the author before submision.

Review Article
Review Articles discuss a sample of up to three newly published books on an issue relevant to current debates in Asian Studies. Review Articles take the presentation and assessment of the chosen book(s) as a starting point for discussing current developments within the academic field. They are treated in the same way as conventional academic articles, meaning that the article guidelines described above apply to them. Review Articles are an optional format; not more than one is accepted per IQAS issue.

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Download Guideline for Articles and Review Articles as PDF

I) General Information


• Aims and Scope of IQAS

IQAS provides a platform for multidisciplinary research on current and historical topics relevant to, among others, politics, economics, culture, nature, religion, language, society, science and technology in Asia. The journal serves to promote fresh scholarly enquiry on and from Asia, and it encourages studies that communicate across disciplinary and regional boundaries. It seeks to foster cross-disciplinary cooperation, translocal and transregional analysis, comparative perspectives, and research that goes beyond established meta-geographies and conventional container categories in Area Studies. Authors employ up-to-date theoretical and/or methodological approaches, particularly those originating from Asia and the wider region.

IQAS adopts an innovative approach to Area Studies, inviting critical views on knowledge production, generation and dissemination on Asia. It is committed to an understanding of space as multi-sited, multi-scalar and multi-modal, including non-territorial and non-geographical understandings of spatial entities. This approach allows for an explicit inclusion of local epistemologies and context-sensitive studies.

IQAS welcomes contributions addressing readers in and beyond the scholarly world. We accept submissions from all academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, cultural studies, development studies, economics, environmental studies, geography, history, international relations, literatures and languages, political economy, politics, social policy and sociology.

 

• Publication Procedure

SUBMISSION
In order to submit a manuscript to IQAS, please contact us and use the submission site on our homepage.

ASSESSMENT
After the submission of your manuscript to our journal, the document will be anonymised and forwarded to the editors. They decide if the article is to be sent out for external peer-review. Feedback and comments from at least two reviewers to your article form the basis for the editors’ final decision concerning acceptance or rejection of the reviewed manuscript. Articles recommended for publication with either no or minor changes by the reviewers will automatically be accepted for publication and sent on to the publication process.

EDITING
Once a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the reviews will be sent to the author for revision of the manuscript. Another stage of internal content-related editing might follow. Approval of the final content-related revision of the manuscript lies with the editors.

PROOFREADING
Articles accepted for publication undergo a professional proofreading and language check. After proofreading, authors have a chance to finalise the wording of their manuscript. The content, however, may no longer be substantially altered.

TYPESETTING
The next step is typesetting, followed by the creation of a print version in PDF format (proof). The author receives this final proof for a last check before publication. At this stage, only very minor errors, such as typos or misspellings, can be corrected.

PUBLICATION
The final article is published both online and in print. IQAS aims at a simultaneous publication of the online and the print version of each issue, but delays in the print version might occur. We seek to publish accepted manuscripts as soon as possible, usually in one of the forthcoming issues. However, the final decision of when to publish rests with the editors.

 

• Evaluation of Manuscripts

The peer-review process plays a critical role in both the evaluation and development of the manuscript submitted for publication. We do not see peer reviews only as a filter for acceptance or rejection, but as an important tool in a collaborative editorial process. The ultimate goal is to refine the content and expression of a paper to maximise its contribution to scholarship. IQAS seeks to maintain high academic standards. Reviewers are selected from a pool of established experts in the given field who are qualified to perform an impartial and independent assessment. Submissions are first evaluated by the editors; once they are deemed suitable for publication, manuscripts move on to a double-blind review process.

IQAS uses a closed double-blind peer review process. For each manuscript, a minimum of two external reviewers with subject-related expertise are selected. In line with IQAS’s multidisciplinary readership, we try to find reviewers from at least two different disciplines relating to the topic of the manuscript. In the event of highly contradictory assessments, a third reviewer is chosen. The objectivity of this process rests on the anonymity of authors and reviewers at all stages of the review process. Should bias or conflict of interest nonetheless occur, reviewers are requested to communicate this to the editorial management.

Following the assessment of the reviewers, the editors decide on the manuscript’s acceptance 1) without any changes, 2) with minor changes, 3) with major changes (revise and resubmit), or 4) its rejection. In case of acceptance for publication (1 and 2), the author receives the anonymised comments of the reviewers. These relate primarily to methodology, clarity of arguments, structure, and theoretical framework.

For more information on the Peer Review Process please follow the link: Read more

• Language

IQAS uses British Standard English as its language of publication. All manuscripts undergo a professional proofreading based on the British English orthography. We ask our authors to use a non-discriminatory and inclusive language especially with regard to gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, disability status and religious beliefs. We pay strong attention to a fair and tolerant form of communication in the submitted drafts, the peer reviews and the interpersonal correspondence. Submitted drafts must not contain any defamatory statements about individuals or organisations.

• Proofreading and Typesetting

All IQAS contributions undergo a professional proofreading and copy-editing, including an English language check by our external partner. Both proofreading and typesetting are provided free of author charge by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute.

• Author Fees

Accepted articles are published free of charge, including Open Access services, as all costs are supported by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, HASP and the University Library of Heidelberg.


• Copyrights and Permissions

IQAS is published in both a free open access digital version and a paid print version. All articles are published under a Creative Commons license and will be hosted online in perpetuity. The standard license for the journal is the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International). Any article may be shared freely, copied and redistributed in any medium or format under the following terms: appropriate credit must be given, and changes made must be indicated; the material may not be used for commercial purposes; and a modification of the material (remixing, transforming, or building upon the original) may not be distributed. All rights remain with the author.

The authors grant IQAS the non-exclusive right to reproduce his or her contribution in physical form, and to provide a paid print version of each issue in addition to the free online version.

All articles submitted to IQAS must not have been published or be under consideration elsewhere. We are unable to pay for permissions to publish pieces whose copyright is not held by the author. Contributors will be responsible for clearing all copyright permissions before submitting interview citations, translations, illustrations, tables or long quotes.

• Data Protection

The names and e-mail addresses entered in this journal’s site or made accessible during the publication preparation will be used exclusively according to our privacy policy and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party. Please be aware that we publish the contact details of all authors in a List of Authors at the end of each issue. Therein the postal and e-mail addresses of the authors’ institutions will be listed. This list will be published both in the print version and the complete online issue for download. If you do not with to be included in this list, please let us know. Your data will then be excluded from the List of Authors. 

• Author Responsibilities / Good Practices Commitment

ORIGINALITY / PLAGIARISM
With the submission of the manuscript the authors ensure that they have written entirely original works and own the rights to the work. If the work and/or words of others are used they have been appropriately cited or quoted whether that work is published or unpublished, or available in an open access form. The author further ensures that the submission has not been previously published, nor is it being considered for publication elsewhere. Any data that has been included in another work by the author must be clearly identified by the author at the submission stage. With the submission of the manuscript the authors declare that they refrain from any form of plagiarism. Plagiarism constitutes a serious abuse of the most basic principles and foundations of scientific research and cannot be tolerated. Papers that raise concerns about possible misconduct will be investigated.

AUTHORSHIP
All authors who have made a significant contribution to the research and the preparation of the written work must be named. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged at the beginning of the article or listed as contributors. The ordering of the names of the authors should be agreed upon prior to the submission of the work. The corresponding author should ensure that all co-authors have agreed to the submission of the manuscript, are included in the publication process, and have seen and approved the final version of the paper before publication.

REPORTING STANDARDS
Authors reporting results of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements, falsifying data or results, or manipulating images in order to falsify results are unacceptable.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Authors are required to disclose any support for research, financial or non-financial, at the submission stage. Also any possible conflicts of interest, financial or other, that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript must be disclosed.

FUNDAMENTAL ERRORS
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in her/his submitted manuscript, s/he must immediately notify the IQAS editors and cooperate in correcting the paper or preparing a retraction, either when it is published or still under review. Should the editors become aware of a serious case of violation of the author’s responsibilities and the journal’s standards during or after publication the author will be asked for a statement, the article will be retracted and the author banned for further publication in IQAS.

II) Manuscript Preparation

An article manuscript should not exceed 8,500 words (without footnotes, references, etc.) and must be written in (British) English. In addition, an abstract of the text should be added at the beginning; it should be between 150 and 180 words in length. Please provide five keywords, a short running title, your email address, institutional affiliation and postal address for the list of authors.

Formatting
Kindly submit your manuscript in plain text using a Word document with as little formatting as possible. If you used some other software, convert your files to .docx before submitting. Please use a standard font such as Times New Roman, 12 pt. We ask you not to use endnotes; footnotes for additional information should be numbered consecutively.

For references to literature cited kindly use in-text citation: references should be placed within the text in parentheses and chronologically, e.g. (Willson 1964: 57; Adams / Meyer 1983: 60–67). For more than two authors use “et al.” after the first author’s name.

Do not use hyphens to break words at the ends of lines; let lines wrap naturally. Italics should be kept to a minimum and reserved for foreign words or phrases not considered part of the English language and for brand names. Leave no comments, tracked changes, highlighting or hidden text in the final version of the manuscript.

Titles
Article titles, subtitles and subheadings should be brief but meaningful. Please avoid putting note numbers on article and chapter titles. The use of a maximum of three levels of titling is suggested, either without numbering or with Arab numbering.

Quotes
Short quotes should be written in the text itself with “double quotation marks”. Quotes of three or more lines should be set off as block quotes from the surrounding text, indented on the left side without quotation marks.

Tables, figures and other graphics
Tables and figures should be kept to a minimum and numbered consecutively. They must be cited in the text and followed by a clear indication of where the table or figure should be placed in the text. Each table and figure must be provided with a self-contained title and an exact reference. Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online but will appear in black and white in print. Please make sure you are in possession of the appropriate copyright permissions when including images and keep written records of permissions to be produced on request. Authors are solely responsible for obtaining reprint authorisation. Each table and figure must be provided in a separate document, either in Microsoft Excel or .jpeg format in a sufficient resolution (which is at least 300dpi for images).

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