For the Authors
In the following, the authors and prospective authors can find the guidelines concerning the manuscript preparation as well as the necessary information on the review and publication process.
By submitting an article to the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin, the authors declare that
- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.
- The text adheres to the formal and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Submission Guidelines.
- The submission file is .doc, .docx or RTF document file format with UNICODE encoding. It should not exceed respectively 10,000 words for Research Articles, 3,000 words for Miscellaneous Contributions and Review Articles or 1,200 words for Review Notes. Image file(s) are submitted separately. Main tables must be included in the article file.
- All author and corresponding author(s) details are stated in the article and affiliations are provided.
- Research articles and notes are accompanied by an abstract.
- The authors have respected the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin publication ethics.
Please sign this form and submit it together with your contribution.
Submission Guidelines
Content and length of submissions
The bulletin accepts (1) research articles of c.2000-10000 words (accompanied by an abstract of 100-200 words); (2) shorter research notes (always accompanied by an abstract) and (3) review articles. For the miscellanea section (not peer reviewed) it also accepts (4) joint or individual project descriptions of c.600-3000 words; (5) conference and activity reports of c.400-1000 words; (6) dissertation abstracts; and (7) book reviews. In case of special issues (such as conference proceedings, or thematic issues with guest editors) lengths of contributions can be discussed.
Form of submissions
Contributions should be submitted in electronic form to eugenia.sokolinski"AT"uni-hamburg.de in both Word/RTF and PDF.
We accept articles in English, French, German, and Italian. Occasionally, other languages may be considered for publication. Non-English articles must be supplied by an English abstract of c. 150 words.
Images must be submitted as separate JPEG or TIFF files (not embedded in the Word file). The resolution for colour images must be at least 300 dpi, for grayscale images at least 600 dpi.
The paper must carry the full name and affiliation of the author.
Formatting
Do not use any special formatting features in your file(s), apart from paragraphing (each new paragraph should be indented), italics / cursive and tabs (where necessary). The main features to follow are:
- Font: Times New Roman. Please avoid using special non-unicode fonts; if such use is indispensable please submit the font together with the text file.
- Font size: main text: 11 pt; footnotes: 9pt.
- Title: justified, bold; 12 pt.
- Author(s) names: justified, immediately under the title; 12 pt.
- Institutional affiliation: justified, immediately under the author(s) names; 12 pt.
- Abstract: font size: 10, immediately under the institutional affiliation.
Style
The New Oxford Style Manual should be followed wherever possible.
- Transliteration: Transliteration of oriental alphabets should be full and consistent throughout the article. For Arabic, Hans Wehr transliteration (1961/1979, not 1994) should be followed at all times. For Hebrew, the preferred transliteration is the one of the Society of Biblical Literature (check the online transcription tool here). For Syriac, please use the LOC standard.
- Dates: For non-Common Era dates specify the calendar used and provide the Common Era equivalent (e.g. AH 450/1058 CE).
- Quotations: Short quotations in the text should be punctuated with single quotation marks. Lengthy quotations (over 40 words) should be displayed, indented, in the text, without quotation marks.
- Notes: Use footnotes, not endnotes, when necessary.
- Abbreviations: Avoid the use of abbreviations wherever possible. Do not use abbreviations for publications, institutions, libraries, etc. Common abbreviations (e.g.; i.e.; etc.; cp.) are acceptable.
- For a book review, the first lines of the review will comprise the following: the author’s full name, the complete title of the book under review, the name of the publisher, the number of pages, and the ISBN number.
References
The COMSt Bulletin uses the author-year reference system: the items quoted are abbreviated in the text or in the footnotes as author's name, the year of publication and the page(s): (Bausi 2010, 14). Do not use "op. cit.", "ibid." or similar types of reference. Do not use "f. or ff." for page numbers, but always give a specific page reference or a specific page-number range.
Items should be written out in full in a bibliographical list at the end of the article as follows:
- Books
Author's Last Name, First Name[, other authors if applicable] Year. Monograph Title, Series Title, Series Volume Number (Place: Publisher, Year).
Examples:García Martínez, F., E. J. C. Tigchelaar, and A. S. van der Woude 1998. Qumran Cave 11.II: 11Q2-18, 11Q20-30, The Discoveries in the Judean Desert, 23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).Hutter, I. 1997. Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturen-handschriften, V: Oxford College lLbraries, Denkmäler der Buchkunst, 9 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1997).Sisam, C. 1976. The Vercelli Book: A Late Tenth-Century Manuscript Containing Prose and Verse, Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 19 (Copenhagen: Allen and Unwin, 1976).
- Editions and translations
Editor's Last Name, First Name[, other editors if applicable] Year. Monograph Title (comprising the name of the original Author, if applicable), ed. Editor's First Name, Last Name, tr. Translator's First Name, Last Name, Series Title, Series Volume Number (Place: Publisher, Year).
Example:Beck, E. 1972. Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen auf Abraham Kidunaya und Julianos Saba, ed., tr. E. Beck, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 322, 323, Scriptores Syri, 140, 141 (Louvain: Peeters, 1972).
- Articles in periodicals
Author's Last Name, First Name[, other authors if applicable] Year. 'Article Title', Journal Title, Issue Number (Year), Page-Page.
Examples:Brock, S. P. 1965. 'An Early Armenian Palimpsest Fragment of Hebrews', Revue des études arméniennes, NS 2 (1965), 129-134.Kamil, M. 1957. 'Ein syrisches Ostrakon aus dem V. Jahrhundert', Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 57 (1957 = Scritti in Onore di Giuseppe Furlani, I, Roma: G. Bardi), 411-413.Noret, J. 1987. 'Quand donc rendrons-nous à quantité d'indéfinis, prétendument enclitiques, l'accent qui leur revient', Byzantion, 57 (1987), 191-195.Posener, G. 1951. 'Sur l'emploi de l'encre rouge dans les manuscrits égyptiens', The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 37 (1951), 75-80.
- Articles / Chapters in collective volumes
Author's Last Name, First Name[, other authors if applicable] Year. 'Article Title', in Editor's First Name, Last Name, Edited Volume Title, Series Title, Series Volume Number (Place: Publisher, Year), Page-Page.
Examples:Featherstone, M. 2004. 'Court Orthography: Spelling in the Leipzig Manuscript of De Cerimoniis', in B. Janssens, B. Roosen, and P. van Deun, eds, Philomathestatos: Studies in Greek and Byzantine Texts Presented to Jacques Noret for his Sixty-Fifth Birthday / Études de patristique grecque et textes byzantins offerts à Jacques Noret à l'occasion de ses soixante-cinq ans, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 137 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 239-247.Förster, M. 1913. 'Der Vercelli-Codex CXVII nebst Abdruck einiger altenglischer Homilien der Handschrift', in F. Holthausen and H. Spies, eds, Festschrift für Lorenz Morsbach: dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern, Studien zur Englischen Philologie, 50 (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1913), 21-179.
- Reviews
Example:Dorandi, T. 2007. Review of D. Searby, The Corpus Parisinum. A Critical Edition of the Greek Text with Commentary and English Translation. A Medieval Anthology of Greek Texts from the Pre-Socratics to the Church Fathers, 600 B.C. - 700 A.D., I-II (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), Elenchos, 28 (2007), 482-486.
The names of places and publishers should be left in the original language.
For titles in languages using non-Latin scripts, please provide the title in the original script, accompanied by a scientific transliteration and a translation in parenthesis. Please be consistent in your transliterations and, when applicable, specify your transliteration system so that the Editors may adjust the systems used in different contributions where necessary.
Electronic publications should be cited like printed sources, accompanied by the permalink URL/DOI and the date of access. Quoting dynamic/unstable Internet pages should be avoided.
For publications that are about to appear, use "forthcoming" instead of the year.
Manuscripts should be cited by city (in English), library (name in the original language), collection (in the original language), shelfmark.
Do not use any abbreviations for journals, series, libraries, etc.
Reference management software
Our reference template is available for all products that support Citation Style Language styles (CSL), such as Mendeley and Zotero. Using the word processor plug-ins from these products, authors only need to select the appropriate journal template when preparing their article, after which citations and bibliographies will be automatically formatted in the journal's style.
Copyright and responsibilities
Authors bear the responsibility for securing permission, when necessary, for figures, tabular materials, or any other material protected by copyright laws.
Fees
There are no article processing charges involved.
Review process
The COMSt Bulletin employs double blind reviewing.
The articles received first undergo a preliminary selection for the evaluation of their compliance with academic criteria, the domains of the journal and the guidelines.
Each article that passed this preliminary selection is peer reviewed by one or two anonymous referees who are chosen according to their domains of expertise.
Authors will receive from the editors a report, by e-mail, with comments and recommendations made by the referees.
Revised manuscripts should be returned to the editors, who take the final decision to publish them or not.
Check our Publication Ethics Statement for more details on the rights and responsibilites of the editors and the authors.
Copyright Notice
Authors’ Certification
With the submission, the author or authors (hereafter authors) certify and warrant, on behalf of themselves and their co-authors, that:
- The authors are authorised by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements. The submitting author ensures that the manuscript has been approved by all the authors.
- The contribution (article, review etc) is original, has not been formally published either in whole or in part, has been submitted exclusively to ‘COMSt Bulletin’, is currently not under consideration by any other journal and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights.
- If the authors decide to offer a submitted manuscript to another journal, it must be first formally withdrawn from ‘COMSt Bulletin’ before the new submission is made.
- They are the sole authors and have the full authority to enter into this agreement and in granting rights to ‘COMSt Bulletin’ are not in breach of any other obligation or rights of any other persons. This also applies to text(s) and photo(s) from other sources; for these, the authors had obtained the necessary and required permission to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere. The content of the manuscript is completely free from copyright violation. In the event of any conflict, the authors will promptly inform the publisher.
- The manuscript contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy.
- In the event that the parties of this agreement, either individually or collectively, are held responsible for damages or the costs of a legal process undertaken by a third party as a result of the authors’ actions under points 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, the authors agree to release the publisher from the claims of the third party and to indemnify the publisher for any loss, expense or damage.
- The authors bear the responsibility for securing permission, when necessary, for figures, tabular materials, or any other material protected by copyright laws.
Copyright Agreement
Authors will retain the copyright for their intellectual work. Contributors who publish with this journal agree to the following license and copyright agreement:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal an exclusive right of first publication in paper and electronic form. The work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license is valid for both electronic and paper copies.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (for example, post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), provided that ‘COMSt Bulletin’ is acknowledged as the original place of publication.
- Authors grant ‘COMSt Bulletin’ commercial rights to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals, as well as to integrate the work, its title, and its abstract in databases, abstracting and indexing services, and other similar information sources.
- Court of jurisdiction is Hamburg, Germany.
The legal code of the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (in German, Namensnennung - Share Alike 4.0 Deutschland)
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