Guidelines for authors

1. General information

Bioarchaeology of the Near East publishes original papers, general review articles and short fieldwork reports which conform to the journal's profile. Occasionally other kinds of texts (i.e., technical notes, comments, letters to the editor, book reviews) may be taken into consideration. Each manuscript should be prepared according to the rules specified below. Manuscripts submitted for publication or published elsewhere will not be considered. All correspondence should be sent to:

Dr. Arkadiusz Soltysiak
Department of Bioarchaeology, Institute of Archeology, Warsaw University
ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland
phone +48 225520120, fax +48 225520129
email: a.soltysiak@uw.edu.pl or a.soltysiak@poczta.onet.pl

Electronic submissions via email are strongly recommended. Manuscripts and tables should be submitted as RTF files, pictures as TIFF files (no compression or LZW compression), and drawings as EPS or PDF files. If a manuscript contains any special characters or diacriticals, an additional PDF version of whole text will be required. If electronic submission is impossible, a hardcopy and floppy/CD/DVD containing the text and all illustrations can be submitted by mail.

Manuscripts should be written in English, with use of one spelling style throughout the entire manuscript. Both British and American spelling will be accepted.

All submitted original papers and general review articles are sent for evaluation to at least two referees. The editors reserve the right to reject the manuscripts if they do not follow the guidelines or are too lengthy.

Galley proofs will be sent to the corresponding author via email from the editor as PDF file. All corrections should be clearly marked and returned within two weeks as a PDF file or hardcopy. This stage will involve only the correction of errors that may have been introduced during the production process.

2. Title page

The title page must contain the following information:
a) the full title of the manuscript,
b) full name(s) of the author(s),
c) affiliation(s) of the author(s) containing the full name of the institution, and its postal address,
d) email address, telephone, and fax number of the corresponding author (indicated with an asterisk),
e) running title (maximum 50 characters incl. spaces),
f) list of keywords (no more than seven, no less than three),
g) abstract (up to 300 words); it should be intelligible without reference to the rest of the paper.

For short fieldwork reports, points e) - g) should be omitted.

3. The text

The text of an original paper should be divided into sections (e.g. Introduction, Materials, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References). General review papers may also include sections and sub-sections. Section and sub-section headings should be clearly distinguished from the text and indicated by larger font and bold face (e.g., 16 pts for sections, 14 pts for sub-sections, and 12 pts for regular text). Numbering of sections is not allowed. Short fieldwork reports should not be divided into sections. Legends to all figures should be listed on a separate page at the end of the text following the References section; places of the figures in the text must be clearly indicated.

The title of a short fieldwork report must include the name of the site and country of its location, as well as the excavation season(s) reported. The following information must be covered by the text: name and affiliation of the excavation's director, chronology of the studied human remains and a brief description of their archaeological context, place of storage, information regarding used methods and aims of the research, preliminary results and assumed place of more detailed publications.

In text use of italics is only permitted for genus and species names or medical terms in Latin. The metric system (SI version) must be used for all measurements. Metric abbreviations should be expressed in standard lowercase, without full stops. All other abbreviations should be avoided. However, if it is impossible, the abbreviation must be expanded in brackets when used for the first time.

Footnotes are permitted only as comments for a table.

Number the manuscript pages consecutively beginning with the title page. The length of an original paper should not exceed 80,000 characters (incl. spaces), general review papers may contain up to 160,000 characters, and short fieldwork reports up to 40,000 characters.

4. References

In text references should be placed in brackets in the following manner: author's surname, year of publication, and as an option, the page(s) after a colon without spaces, e.g., (Horden 2005:135-137). In cases of two authors their surnames should be separated by "&", e.g., (Franklin & Brubaker 1998:124), in multiple author situations (three or more), the surname of the first author should be followed by "et al." (no italics, e.g. Mecsas et al. 2004). If there is more than one reference to the same author, years of publication should be separated by commas, e.g., (Horden 2004, 2005). Reference to the same author that appeared in the same year should be indicated by succeeding Latin letters and separated by commas, e.g., (Horden 2004a, 2004b). Reference to publications of different authors should be separated by semicolons, e.g., (Dols 1977; Horden 2005). If many references are listed, alphabetical and ascending chronological order should be kept.

All cited publications must be listed in the "References" section at the end of the paper. Publications not cited in text should not be included. The references should be listed in alphabetical order under the first author's name and sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the succeeding Latin letters, placed after the year of publication. In cases of more than one author, names of all authors must be included. Journals titles should not be abbreviated.

Bibliographical entries should be formatted according to the following examples:

a) papers in journals:
Mecsas J., Franklin G., Kuziel W.A., Brubaker R.R., Falkow S., Mosier D.E. (2004), CCR5 mutation and plague protection, Nature 427:606-608.

b) papers/chapters in books:
Horden P. (2005), Mediterranean plague in the Age of Justinian [in:] "The Cambridge companion to the Age of Justinian", M. Maas, A.D. Lee (ed.), Cambridge: University Press, pp. 134-160.

c) books:
Dols M.W. (1977), The Black Death in the Middle East, Princeton: Routledge.

5. Tables and illustrations

Tables should be accompanied by an explanatory caption above; each column should carry a separate heading. Additional explanations (such as abbreviations) should be given below the tables as footnotes. Only basic horizontal lines need to be used. Tables may be included in the text or typed on separate pages; in the second case their places in the text have to be clearly indicated. Tables must fit on the B5 page.

Figures should be used only if they clarify or reduce the text. No 3D diagrams are permitted. Data should be presented only once in a graph or a table, not in both. Only black-and-white or greyscale readable figures not exceeding 200x120 mm will be accepted. Required resolution is 300 DPI for greyscale images and at least 600 DPI for black-and-white drawings (although in that case vector format is recommended).

All figures and tables must be referred to in text and the references should be typed in bold. The editors reserve the right to ask authors to re-format tables and figures.

6. Editorial procedures

After submission, the corresponding author will receive an initial acknowledgement. Within two weeks the editor will make decision as to whether the paper should be rejected or sent to referees. The corresponding author will receive an e-mail regarding the outcome of this decision as soon as possible.

A preliminarily accepted paper is sent to two referees who are asked to return their comments as soon as possible. The editor then considers the paper in the light of the referees' comments and makes a decision concerning the paper. If it is declined, the editor will e-mail the corresponding author with extracts from the referees' letters to help explain his decision. If the paper is accepted, the editor will ask the author to revise the paper with the help of the referees' suggestions and comments. The referees may remain anonymous or disclose their names to the author.

Once the author has revised the paper, it should be sent back in a form completely conformable to the above guidelines. The paper will then be edited and a final version sent back to proof. Authors will be sent the galley proofs of their paper but are not expected to make any changes to the text at this point aside from minor spelling and grammatical mistakes. If the author wishes to make any other changes, the paper may be held back until the next issue.

7. Copyright

Submission of a manuscript implies that the submitted work has not been published before (except as part of a thesis or lecture note or report, or in the form of an abstract); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors as well as by the authorities at the institute where the work was carried out; that written permission of copyright holders is obtained by the authors for material used from other copyrighted sources; and that the manuscript or parts thereof will thus not be published elsewhere in any language without the indication of the original place of publication.