Author Guidelines

Instructions for contributors

1. General instructions

Editorial board accepts for submission only original articles from the area of literary and linguistic Slavic Studies which have not been yet published (it also applies at mutations of the texts in foreign language and translations) and whose authors have no intent to publish elsewhere in future. Studies and Overviews and Materials are accepted in Slavic or world languages, News and Anniversary/Obituary Articles, and Reviews are accepted in Czech, Slovak or Russian languages, in exceptional cases approved by the editorial board also in other languages.

Manuscripts are accepted exclusively in electronic form in formats .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt.

Authors of the articles will provide affiliation in English: name and surname, institution (department, faculty, university) and e-mail. Authors are not permitted to publish under another name, anonymously or under pseudonym.

Editorial board reserves the right to require editing the article in the required formal format by the author. Moreover it reserves the right to decline publishing of the paper a) if it counters the ethical and moral principles listed on the journal website, b) if the author refuses to follow the required formal format of the article, c) if the paper is of apparent low orthographic level d) if the author refuses to incorporate objections of the review process into the article. Final decision on publishing or not publishing the paper lies solely in the hands of the executive editors and editor in chief of the journal.

Articles are invited by e-mail at the editorial office address.

The deadline for sending manuscripts of peer-reviewed articles is February 28, and for non-peer-reviewed articles, it is April 30 for the first issues and September 30 and October 31 for the second issues.

2. Formal requirements on the manuscripts and their placement into the sections

Articles are published in four sections: Studies and Overviews and Materials—maximal extent of 12 standard pages*, Reviews and News and Anniversary/Obituary Articles—maximal extent of 5 standard pages. Editorial boar reserves the right to ask the author to shorten the article in case of exciding the scope or, on the other hand, in justified cases, provide a longer paper. 

*[Standard page is an abstract unit based on the past typing machine standard: 30 lines with 60 characters, e.g. 1800 characters spaces included (which corresponds with 250 words or 0.5 of page A4 by characters with fond 12 and spacing 1.5.]

Studies have to be accompanied by abstract (with extent of max. a half of standard page) and key words (min. 5) in the language of the article, and with abstract, key words, and title in English.

Contributions to the section Overviews and Materials are published without abstracts and key words. In this section, shorter articles and/or overview articles are published.

Review has to contain full bibliography quotation (author, title, place of issue, year of issue, optionally number of pages, publisher, ISBN etc.). Reviews can comprise both monographs and journals etc. Reviews can be both individual and also multiple (usually thematically related monographs or more monographs written by one author).

In section News and Anniversary/Obituary Articles, important news from the field of study are published, commemoration of various anniversaries and jubilees, profiles, obituaries, conference and workshop invitations as well as news from them.

Other contributions (discussions, polemics, comments, criticism, article feedback, furthermore interviews, short informative reviews and all other materials) are placed by its character in sections Overviews and Materials, Reviews or News and Anniversary/Obituary Articles.

Treatises in the section Studies are reviewed anonymously by two independent reviewers, other sections are not reviewed (details on the review process can be found on the web).

3. Recommendations for word processing and proofreading

In the text of the submitted paper, it is recommended:

• not to indent using spaces,
• avoid manual line breaks,
• align text to the left flag without hyphenation,
• separate paragraphs by a line without paragraph indents,
• use a single font and font size,
• separate paragraphs by the skipped row,
• highlight exclusively by italics, bold, exceptionally bold italics; underlining and tracking are not recommended,
• create footnotes using the automatic function.

Journal is produced in LaTeX system, not in Word, therefore all simplifying and automatic editing (except for footnotes), even if carried out in good faith, mean further obstructions for the typesetter’s work.

Editorial board carries out only systematic typographic editing of the text, proofreading is not carried out; nevertheless the editing board reserves the right for all language, orthographic, stylistic, formal or other changes to the paper. All performed changes can be assessed by the author during author’s page proofreading, which is performed in all the contributions based on the submitted PDF (proofreading is done in electronic form; just in justified cases proofreading can be done in paper form). If large number of proofreading or more significant changes applies, second author’s proofreading can be performed.

If the article contains strange, special or unusual characters (accents in Cyrillic, Old Slavonic, phonetic transcription, oriental or exotic languages etc.), corresponding font has to be attached. In these cases, it is recommended to submit the text also in PDF format for checking. The same applies if the text contains pictures, charts, graphs and other graphic elements. Pictures should be sent separately not to lose the level of quality during compression e.g. in Word.

4. Bibliographical references and footnotes

Due to the requirements of the international databases, it is necessary to list all the bibliographic references in the text as well as at its end in transliteration into the Latin alphabet (even in the texts in Cyrillic). Transliteration is carried out by the editing board in accordance with uniform rules. Author of the submitted text, therefore submits the references in original, nontransliterated form.

Please list bibliographical references collectively at the end of the article in the following form:

• monograph: NOVÁK, P. – NOVÁKOVÁ, P.: Aktuální otázky současné jazykovědné a literárněvědné slavistiky. Brno: Vydavatelství 5P, 2006, 320 s. ISBN X-123-456-789-0.
• Journal article: NOVÁK, P.: Aktuální otázky současné jazykovědné a literárněvědné slavistiky. Slovanské jazyky, 2006, č. 6, s. 1–10. ISSN 1234-5678.
• Contribution in proceedings: NOVÁK, P.: Aktuální otázky současné jazykovědné a literárněvědné slavistiky. In: NOVÁKOVÁ, P. (ed.): Slovanské jazyky. Brno: Vydavatelství 5P, 2006, s. 1–10. ISBN X‑123-456-789-0.
• URL: www.aktualni-otazky.cz/jazykovedne. [online]. [cit. 01.12.2006].

Other online materials are cited as monographs or articles, always containing the date of the last assess (e.g. SURNAME, J. (year): Title of the article. Title of the journal. Year. Number. [online]. Available at: www.aktualni-otazky.cz/jazykovedne. [cit. DD.MM.YYYY])

In the text of the article itself, references are fully cited in footnotes. For repeated references, common words like ibidem are used.

Footnotes at the end of articles are not permitted.

Bibliographical references are transliterated according to the transliteration rules used by the National Library of the Czech Republic. It is possible to use the following web application for the transliteration: http://translit.slavistika.phil.muni.cz/

5. Complimentary copies

Editorial board sends complimentary and review copies to the authors of articles and to reviewers. Electronic versions of all contributions suitable for downloading/printing are available in Digital Library of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (http://digilib.phil.muni.cz).

6. Publication fees

The journal does not require authors to pay for any publication fees.