Accepted file types

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.

The LaTeX files are also accepted. A LaTeX template is available on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

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.

Title

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.

Abstract

Please include an unstructured abstract of 150 words between the title and main body of your manuscript that concisely states the purpose of the research, major findings, and conclusions. If your research includes clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered.

For clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.

Keywords

Please include a minimum of 3-4 keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic.

Artwork, figures, and other graphics

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. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

Tables, figures and images should be numbered separately and continuously.

Each table or figure should be provided with an individual caption and an exact reference.

Text in tables and figures should be in a readable font size, normally 12 and not smaller than 10 points.

Explanatory notes should be indicated with superscripted small letters, e.g. 4,5a.

Units of measure should be indicated in column heads where appropriate, and numbers should be indicated in base units, millions or billions with a comma separating thousands; numbers with decimals should be separated with a point and normally be presented to the precision of two decimals.

For graphs produced from spreadsheets or other tabulations, please provide any available source files that can be used for formatting the end document.

 

Figures supplied in color will appear in color online but will appear in black and white in print (unless otherwise arranged). Therefore, it is important that you supply images that are comprehensible in black and white as well (i.e. by using colour with a distinctive pattern or dotted lines). The captions should reflect this by not using words indicating colour.

 

Title page

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:

• Article title
• The full list of authors including names and affiliations of each
• The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript – please indicate this on the title page.
• All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission (please see the authorship section for more information).
• Contact information for the corresponding author: name, institutional address, phone, email
• Acknowledgments section
• Declaration of conflicting interest
• Funding statement
• Ethical approval and informed consent statements
• Data availability statement
• Any other identifying information related to the authors and/or their institutions, funders, approval committees, etc, that might compromise anonymity.

Acknowledgments

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.

Statements and declarations

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.

Ethical considerations

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.

Consent to participate

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.

Consent for publication

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.

Declaration of conflicting interest

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’.

Funding statement

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.

Reference style and citations

Please note in general, The Journal of Current Chinese Affairs follows the Sage Harvard guidelines, but there are some modifications. Please check the below guidelines if you are not sure.

All references in the text and notes must be specified by the authors’ last names and date of publication together with page numbers if given. All quoted authors and sources must be listed in an alphabetical bibliography at the end of the text. Please check for completeness and double check to ensure that you are citing authors first and last full names in the reference list. Second first names should be abbreviated using initials.

Interviews should be cited in the following way:

Anonymous 1 (year) Interview, position of interviewee, town (where interview was conducted), exact date (day + month).

Anonymous 2 (year)…

For titles in non-European languages, please provide translation in brackets. Please follow the examples below in case of references to Chinese texts. Both the Chinese author name in Pinyin as well as in Chinese characters is required.

In-text citations use the author-date citation system and can be either parenthetical or narrative citations.

For titles in non-European languages, please provide translation in brackets for example:

In-text citations use the author-date citation system and can be either parenthetical or narrative citations.

Articles in Chinese:

Last Name (full) First Name Full Name in Chinese characters (publication year) Title in Chinese characters [English translation]. Journal title in Chinese characters [English translation] Volume(Number): xxx–xxx.

Books in Chinese:

Last name (full) First Name Full Name in Chinese characters (publication year) Title in Chinese characters [English translation], Place of publication: Publisher in Chinese characters [English name].

Book chapters in Chinese:

Last name (full) First Name Full Name in Chinese characters (publication year) Title in Chinese characters [English translation]. In: Last name abbreviated First Name Full Name in Chinese characters (ed) Title in Chinese characters [English translation]. Place of publication: Publisher in Chinese characters [English name], pp.xxx–xxx.

 

Reporting Statistical Results

When referencing and reporting statistics or data, authors may find this guide by Bryan Burnham useful. 

 

Formatting

Send the text as a plain Word file and include page numbers. Please use standard font (e.g., Times New Roman, 12 pt). , left alignment (not “justification”) and avoid word division in your text.

Organise titles and subtitles using a clear hierarchy; please do not use more than three levels of headlines. Refer only to sections, not to specific pages. 

Please do not use footnotes! Use British English spelling and style conventions consistently throughout the text, and please be sure to write clearly and use correct punctuation; non-native authors are strongly encouraged to have their contributions proofread. 

 

Other style points

- Use double quotation marks outside the end punctuation and single quotation marks for quoted text within a quotation. Commas and full stops always precede closing quotation marks.

In case of quotations, authors should provide exact page numbers.

- Shorter quotations should be within the text. In case you quote longer text passages (>40 words), please separate the quotations from the text by indenting them.

English translations of relevant Chinese phrases or terms in the text should be followed by the Chinese characters and pinyin in brackets. For example: “[…] and by presenting itself as the party of stability (稳定 , wending) […]”. If pinyin is used within the text, please use italics and add the Chinese characters in brackets. Please always provide a translation or short definition of Chinese terms and concepts when first mentioned.

Further suggestions for consistency include the following:

- use abbreviations such as e.g., i.e. without space; no space before ff. and f.

- spell out numbers up to and including thirty

- spell out numbers at the beginning of sentences; use four digits for years, e.g., 1973; when referring to a decade, please write 1970s

- percentages should always be given as numerals

- spell out the word "per cent" in text (use % only in tables, without a space between number and symbol)

- million and billion should be spelled out

- use bank abbreviations (USD, EUR) before the figures when referring to currencies

refrain from using URLs within the text

- mention long names of institutions or organisations only at the first use providing their acronym in brackets; refer to them later in the text by use of acronyms

do not italicize organization, party, agreement, or treaty names, but only foreign technical terms and translated names from non-European languages.

Every in-text citation must have a corresponding citation in the reference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year.

Authors should update any references to preprints when a peer reviewed version is made available, to cite the published research. Citations to preprints are otherwise discouraged.

Supplemental material

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.

English language editing services

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.

The journal will consider submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.

Please enter the preprint DOI in the designated field when submitting your manuscript. We advise that you inform the Journal Editorial office about your posted preprint at submission.

Note that you should not post an updated version of your manuscript on a preprint server while it is being peer reviewed.

Learn more about our preprint policy.

• ORCID ID of the submitting author.
  • It is strongly encouraged that all co-authors ensure their ORCID IDs are linked to their accounts in the submission system prior to article acceptance, as this is the only way to have their ORCID ID present on the published article. ORCID IDs cannot be added to manuscripts after acceptance/publication. Please note that each co-author must log in to the submission system to add their own ORCID ID to their account. To add an ORCID ID, edit your account, click the link when prompted, and sign into your ORCID account to validate your ID. You will then be redirected back to the submission system and your ORCID ID will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata.
  • Please create an ORCID ID if you do not already have one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.