This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The Journal recommends that authors follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the author responsibilities section on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.
We also encourage you to familiarize yourself with our Editorial Policies and our Publication Ethics Policies.
Sage Publishing disseminates high-quality research and engaged scholarship globally, and we are committed to diversity and inclusion in publishing. We encourage submissions and peer review from a diverse range of authors and reviewers from across all countries and backgrounds. Read our diversity, equity, and inclusion pledge.
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal. Open access options are available – see below.
Please refer to submission guidelines below and submit manuscript including all requested documents to the Editor in electronic formats as WORD attachments:
Editor: Suzanne Buchan
Email:suzanne.buchan@rca.ac.uk
Access: Subscription
Accepts preprints? No
Identity transparency: Double anonymized
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal.
For specifically requested colour reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from Sage after receipt of your accepted article.
Optional open access publishing is available for a fee via the Sage Choice program, and Open Access agreements, where authors can publish open access either discounted or free of charge depending on the agreement with Sage. Find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage. Open Access agreement eligibility is determined by the corresponding author’s affiliation matching an agreement at acceptance. For more information on Open Access publishing options at Sage please visit Sage Open Access.
For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit Sage’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies.
Open access fees do not cover color charges and are charged separately.
Your article must be within the scope of the journal and be of sufficient quality. If not, it will not be reviewed. Please read the journal’s Aims and Scope to see if your article is appropriate.
The manuscript must be your original work, you must have the rights to the work, and you must have obtained and be able to supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, including figures, illustrations, tables, lengthy quotations, or other material previously published elsewhere.
What do we publish?
We accept manuscripts of 6,000-9,000 words including endnotes, excluding reference bibliography.
Animation isan interdisciplinary journal with an arts and humanities foundational footing in film and media studies. We aim to encourage and foster dialogue across the wide spectrum of animation as it features in culture, society, and STEAM research.
Along with single discipline animation studies articles, we also publish research that works with other disciplinary fields. Interdisciplinary submissions should demonstrate a specific focus on aspects and features of animation itself, rather than using it to illustrate a topic that would be better placed in another discipline.
Submissions must clarify the relevance of a specific proposed method and the necessity of the approach, articulate a clear vision of disciplinary integration and of the intended contribution, and the author's scholarly understanding of the disciplines involved must include knowledge of and referencing to animation studies.
For queries concerning potential submissions working with non-humanities interdisciplinary methods, please contact the Editor.
Reviews
animation: an interdisciplinary journal accepts reviews of publications and relevant conferences and exhibitions. In addition to books in English, the journal encourages reviews of key texts published in other languages.
Reviews are typically 800-1200 words and may be commissioned by the Reviews Editors. For a list of books available to review contact the Reviews Editors.
Non-commissioned potential reviewers may contact Review Editors to express interest in submitting a review. They should send a brief cover letter outlining their area(s) of expertise for the title for which they would like to serve as a reviewer, a statement of impartiality and any potential conflicts of interest pertaining to the title.
Please visit the Sage Journal Author Gateway for guidance on producing visual and/or video abstracts.
Please read the guidelines in full before submitting your manuscript.
Manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. You do not need to follow a template, but please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined.
Your article title, keywords, and abstract all contribute to its position in search engine results, directly affecting the number of people who see your work. For details of what you can do to influence this, visit How to help readers find your article online.
Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services.
Please include an unstructured abstract of 150-200 words between the title and main body of your manuscript that concisely states the purpose of the research, major findings, and conclusions.
Please include a minimum of 5-8 keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic.
Use a clear readable style, avoiding jargon. If technical terms or acronyms must be included, define them when first used. Use non-racist, inclusive and gender-neutral language.. Spelling: UK spelling. Punctuation: use single quotation marks with double quotes inside single quotes. Present dates in the form 1 May 1998. Do not use points in abbreviations, contractions or acronyms (e.g. AD, USA, etc.).
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures, and graphs in electronic format, please read Sage’s artwork guidelines.
Figures supplied in color will appear in color online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in color in the printed version. If you have requested color reproduction in the print version, we will advise you of the costs on receipt of your accepted article.
Please ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. As these can take time to acquire, we recommend you begin enquiring about permission foryour images, as we will require them in advance of your final submission. The Editor can provide you with a Permission Request Form template.
For further information on copyright and permissions, please see the Sage Copyright and permissions page https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/copyright-and-permissions
To ensure fair and anonymous peer review, your manuscript must be fully anonymized. Please ensure any identifying information is removed from the main manuscript document and included on the Title Page instead. Do not include any author names in the manuscript file name and remove names from headers and footers. This version of the manuscript will be sent to the peer reviewers. The Title Page will not be sent to peer reviewers. See the Sage Journal Author Gateway for detailed guidance on making an anonymous submission.
The Title Page should include:
If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the end of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. Per ICMJE recommendations, it is best practice to obtain consent from non-author contributors who you are acknowledging in your manuscript.
Writing assistance and third party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third-party, for example a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the covering letter. Please see the Sage Author Gateway for what information to include in your Acknowledgements section. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the journal editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.
To ensure proper anonymization, please include a section with the heading ‘Statements and Declarations’ on your title page, after the Acknowledgements section [and Author Contributions section if applicable] including each of the sub-headings listed below. If a declaration is not applicable to your submission, you must still include the heading and state ‘Not applicable’ underneath. Please note that you may be asked to justify why a declaration was not applicable to your submission by the Editorial Office. This information will be added to the end of your published paper.
Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to explicitly state this. You can find information on what to say in your ethical statements as well as example statements on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.
All papers reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must state that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board approved the study, or waived the requirement for approval, providing the full name and institution of the review committee in addition to the approval number. If applicable, please also include this information in the Methods section of your manuscript.
Please include any participant consent information under this heading and state whether informed consent to participate was written or verbal. If the requirement for informed consent to participate has been waived by the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (i.e. where it has been deemed that consent would be impossible or impracticable to obtain), please state this. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section. More information and example statements can be found on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.
Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted. Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.
The journal requires a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors so that a statement can be included in your article. For guidance on conflict of interest statements, see our policy on conflicting interest declarations and the ICMJE recommendations.
If no conflict exists, your statement should read: ‘The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article’.
All articles need to include a funding statement, under a separate heading, even if you did not receive funding. You’ll find guidance and examples on our Funding page.
The Journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
The journal follows the Sage Harvard reference style (link to Sage Harvard Guidance).
Scholars in the arts and humanities disciplines, where this journal is located, tend to mainly work with citations, with occasional paraphrasing. For interdisciplinary submissions, please be aware that we do not accept extensive paraphrasing and summarizing typically used in the social sciences,business, economics, and some of the life sciences.
Every in-text citation (Author(s), year: page number) must have a corresponding citation in thebreference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year.
If you translate a passage yourself from one language into another language in your manuscript,your translation is considered a paraphrase, not a direct citation. To cite your translated material, include the author and year (and page number if available) of the material in the in-text citation. In the references list, include a translation of the bibliographic details followed by the original language details. Add a foot/endnote to the citation referring to your translation of it. For details, see the APA Style guide https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-your-own-translations
If you use EndNote to manage references, you can download the Sage Harvard EndNote output file.
This Journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc.) alongside the full text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. For that list and more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files.
Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Author Services. Visit Sage Author Services for further information.
As part of the submission process you will need to confirm that this is your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that this is for first publication in this Journal, that it is not being considered for/has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.
Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that the journal may accept submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.
Please submit your manuscript directly to the Editor.
The journal welcomes submissions of 6000-9000 words. Please ensure that your submission includes the Title Page described in the section 'Preparing your manuscript for submission, the manuscript anonymised for the purpose of peer review, and all documents listed below under 'Files'.
Ensure that the submission is formatted according to the submission guidelines and send to the Editor in electronic format:
Editor: Suzanne Buchan, Royal College of Art, UK
Email:suzanne.buchan@rca.ac.uk
The journal welcomes reviews of typically 800-1200 words.
Reviews Editors
Patrick Sullivan, Texas A&M University, USA
Reviews should be sent to: sage.animation.reviews@gmail.com
Please view our authorship policies, which includes information on criteria for authorship, who should be the corresponding author and more.
Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.
A complete submission includes all documents noted below.
Only electronic files conforming to the journal's guidelines will be accepted.
We cannot accept submissions provided as links to online drives, servers or websites.
Further details are available from the Editor.
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency: Double-anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: None
Your manuscript will undergo an initial evaluation. If it does not conform to the requirements laid out in these guidelines, it will be returned to you for amendments prior to peer review. Manuscripts may be desk rejected without peer review at this point if they are out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.
After passing the initial evaluation, your manuscript will then be peer reviewed. You can log in at any time to check the status of your manuscript. We will notify you when a decision has been reached.
The journal adheres to a rigorous double-anonymized reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are always concealed from both parties. Two independent reviews are required for a manuscript to reach a Revise or Accept decision.
Submissions to the Interstices section will be peer reviewed by the Editorial team, and in some instances other reviewers may be called upon.
To ensure the integrity of the peer review process we assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.
All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Editor who then makes the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue or special collection. The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the Journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor/Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.
The journal has an Editorial Board who serve the journal as external peer reviewers. Each member of the Editorial Board are active researchers in the field and selected based on strict criteria, ensuring they possess the necessary expertise and experience. The Editor may use one Editorial Board Member as a reviewer for each manuscript, and will then reach beyond this pool to include additional reviewers to meet the required number before a decision can be made. This ensures a comprehensive and robust peer review process, aligning with our commitment to publish the most credible and valid research. Care is taken not to invite any Editorial Board Member that has any potential conflict of interest with any author of the paper.
As a COPE member we engage with multiple forms of post-publication discussion in line with wider guidance from Sage: Commentaries, Critiques and Responses.
You can view our complaints and appeals policy here.
Read Sage's complete peer review policy.
The journal and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. Please read Sage's complete policy on plagiarism and the actions we may take.
Before publication, we require the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Sage’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive license agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and license to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the Sage Journal Author Gateway.
Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal, Sage Edit, or by email, and should be returned promptly to avoid delaying publication. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence, and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. This is the final opportunity to make changes to your manuscript. Further corrections will not be possible after publication. Changes to the author list are not permitted at this stage.
OnlineFirst publication: This enables us to publish final articles online immediately, without waiting for assignment to a future issue of the Journal. This usually significantly reduces publication lead time. Visit the Sage Journals help page for more details, including how to cite OnlineFirst articles.
Access to your published article: We provide you with online access to your published article. The online access link is provided to the corresponding author for sharing with their co-authors.
Publication is not the end of the process. Between us, we can ensure that your article is found, read, downloaded and cited as widely as possible. Many of the most effective tactics are those you can do quickly and easily to your network of contacts and peers. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway for numerous resources to help you promote your work.
The Sage Journal Author Gateway has some general advice on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance your article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journals Solutions Portal.
The Frequ@ently Asked Questions page on the Sage Journal Author Gatewayis alsohelpful.
You can direct any questions to the journal’s editorial office:
Suzanne Buchan, Editor-in-Chief
animation: an interdisciplinary journal
School of Communication
Royal College of Art
London UK
Email: suzanne.buchan@rca.ac.uk