Author Guidelines

To submit an article for review please read through the below Style Guide, and make sure you read through and adhere to our Copyright Notice, Privacy and Ethics statement, as well as the Preparation Checklist. Only once these have been adhered to email the MS-Word document to:

submissions@transformationjournal.org.za

Transformation was established in order to:

  1. provide an outlet for discussion and debate of forces that are shaping the South African and southern African societies, and debate the meanings of ‘transformation’;
  2. understand the potential for and obstacles in the way of transformation;
  3. particularly, consider – historically and currently – the class nature of these societies; political, cultural, and ideological dynamics;
  4. provide a platform for serious and critical debate, from a range of perspectives and disciplines.

These aims are taken into consideration when making editorial decisions, although we are primarily guided by the recommendations of two anonymous reviewers. The review process is of variable length but might take around three months.

Style guide

Note that copy editing is done by the members of the editorial board who do this work on a voluntary basis. Please take care to ensure that your submission, in particular the revised accepted submission, adhere to academic convention in general and the journal’s guidelines specifically so we can prepare your articles more efficiently and speedily. In general follow the style format in the most recent issue of the journal, especially for references (see http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/trn/).

Please remove the author’s details from the articles submitted for review. Remember to check your header, footer, and the properties of the file.

Please take care to ensure that your submission, in particular the revised accepted submission, adheres to academic convention in general and the journal’s guidelines in particular so we can prepare your articles more efficiently and speedily.

This is a ‘guide’, so will not cover every possibility; but should be followed in what it does require.

Please remove the author’s details from the articles submitted for review. Remember to check your header, footer, and the properties of the file.

Abstract

Please prepare and abstract of up to 250 words.

Recommended word count
Analytical and Review articles – 8000 words including all material.
Debates, comment and book reviews  – 3000 words including all material.
Abstracts – up to 250 words.

Font and paragraph

Times New Roman, size 12, double spaced, default margins. Leave a line between each paragraph. Align text left

Dates
July 14, 2000

Spelling and hyphenation

Please use English spelling eg -ise

Punctuation

No periods with ie, etc, unless at end of sentence, eg etc.

Use commas to separate ‘thousands’ in numbers of a thousand and more. ie use 10,000,000 rather than 10000000 or 10 000 000.

Capitalisation

Upper case should only be for proper nouns. (persons, companies and place names).

Titles and ranks are generally lower case, except when used before a name, as a name or in forms of address. Eg Professor Higgins, President Bush,

Attorney General, Dalai Lama

– Laws  – capitalise initial letter (Act); bill (general reference), but Bill of Rights

Italics

No italics for commonly used ‘foreign’ phrases such as et al.

Use italics for all published book, magazine, journal and newspaper titles.

Unpublished dissertations or theses, papers, working papers, reports, not in italics

Abbreviations

Use per cent rather than percent or %. If %, then always numerals before, eg 9%, 24%.

Acronyms

UNESCO

US

EU

Numbers

Numbers from one to ten are written as words and from 11 onwards as numerals. If a number is at the start of a sentence then it would always be written as words.

Headings and subheadings

We prefer fewer subheadings without numbering. First level subsection headings are Times New Roman size 12 in bold, second level subsection headings are Times New Roman size 12 in italics (no bold

If heading numbering is deemed necessary use the following format: 1. Section title for first level and 1.1 Sub-section title for second level.

Diagrams, tables, graphs, photos
Graphs and figures should be embedded into the text at appropriate locations with captions. Please maintain consistency in style

In addition, please upload figures as supplementary files at the point of submission to allow the layout person to modify as necessary.

Caption Format: bold, font size 12 Times New Roman, centred.
Notes
Please note that notes should be end-notes, and should be used very sparingly, and certainly not for general referencing (we acknowledge that with certain references, such as archival material, it is clearer and, therefore, necessary to place in notes).

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements can be made in the first endnote which is linked to the article title, or, preferably, at end of article, before References.

REFERENCES

Please double check to ensure that all works cited appear in the reference list and vice versa.

Reference Style  Use Chicago Manual of Style

Transformation follows Author-Date style.

See quick guide online.

Author-date style https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html

In this system the author and year of publication (and page number where necessary) are cited in the text, and the full documentation is given in a reference list (alphabetised by author surname) at the end of the article.

Authors should reference full names or initials as appear in the sources. Transformation prefers full names throughout, if available.

Avoid using idem, op cit, ibid

In the Reference list do not use et al (It is only used in the text itself where more than two authors are referred to, taking the name from first entry). James et al
Avoid ampersands throughout (eg Barns & Morris should be Barns and Morris).

Quotations
‘Do not let time take its toll’ – single quotation marks.

‘Do not let time, as Darwin said, “take its toll”’. – (iow double for quotation within quotation, stop always after quotation marks and after references.)

Indent all longer quotations – indentation disposes of the need for quotation marks – except for a quotation within quotation)

Referring to quotations in text:
Examples:

  • ‘blah blah blah’ (Davis 1974, 43-45).
  • Davis was the first to direct us to ‘the notion of dreamworld’ (Davis 1974, 485). This point was noted by other commentators as well (Christopher 1973, Cornell 1973, Samuels 2000).
  • As Davis said: The world blah blah blah … dreamworld. (Davis 1974, 23)

Page numbers are required for all quotes and references to specific claims, unless the source is not paginated.

Where multiple works are cited in a single list they should be ordered. Ordering can be either chronological or alphabetic but should be consistent throughout the article.

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.

  1. 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).
  2. The submission file is in Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  3. The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  4. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal. This is particularly important on resubmitting an accepted article.
  5. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the author’s name has been removed from the title page, headers and footers and from the properties of the file (Word 2003: Click File, Properties) (Word 2007: Click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Prepare, and then click Properties. Click on Document Information Panel)
Once you have completed the above please email the MS-Word document to submissions@transformationjournal.org.za.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

    1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
    2. 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.
    3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

 

Publication Ethics Statement for Transformation

The purpose of this statement is to promote research integrity among all parties in the editorial and publication process of the journal Transformation. It sets out the roles and responsibilities of its authors, editors, and reviewers. The journal conforms to international standards of ethics.

Authors should submit original academic work that is properly referenced and cited. This work should be presented in accordance with the journal’s house style. Additionally, authors should have received the relevant ethical approval from their institutions before submitting their manuscripts to this journal. Authors are expected to understand the seriousness of ethical research practices and should not present the thoughts of any person as their own or include any materials without proper attribution as this is academic fraud and goes against the policy of this journal. By submitting to this journal, the author is aware of their responsibilities in this regard. Authors have the responsibility to respond to queries from the editor and their reviewers.

Editors commit to undertaking their duties fairly in the consideration of any manuscript that is submitted to the journal. Each journal issue has a set of responsible editors who will be responsible for approaching the relevant experts for review and bringing any challenging cases to the entire editorial committee to adjudicate the outcome of the review process and, if the manuscript is accepted, leading the author through the steps of preparing their manuscript for publication. If at any point in this process evidence arises that work has been plagiarised or the necessary ethical permissions and protocols have not been followed, the editors of Transformation will take appropriate measures not limited to forwarding evidence of these unethical practices to relevant institutions, bodies, and funders including the retraction of any of that author’s affected articles. Editors reserve the right to request documentary evidence of ethical clearance.

Reviewers are expected to review manuscripts based on the strength of their arguments and provide authors with constructive feedback. Reviewers in this journal commit to providing arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of manuscripts under their consideration with the expectation that the author will be able to use their comments to improve or critically evaluate the merits of their submissions.  Reviewers should not agree to review manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest and should rather inform the responsible editors of their responsibility to recuse themselves.

See the COPE website for more comprehensive information about publication ethics: https://publicationethics.org/