Preference for Exclusivity
We strongly recommend that you submit your manuscript to us exclusively. As described below, our review process is lengthy; unlike many journals, we conduct faculty reviews and a vote of our entire staff before we accept pieces. As a result, we are often unable to make quick decisions when faced with exploding offers from other journals. Accordingly, if your preference is to publish your manuscript in the Journal, please consider submitting it to the Journal exclusively at least 10 days before submitting it to other journals.
Authors who choose to give us an exclusive submission should indicate the date they expect to send the manuscript to other journals. Of course, we apply the same standards of review to all submissions, but submitting exclusively makes it more likely that we will have time to put the manuscript through all the stages of our review process.
Review Process
The Journal carefully considers all manuscripts that it receives. Our selection process has many steps: each piece is reviewed anonymously, at least two editors review every submission, and many pieces go through substantially more stages of review, including an Articles Committee vote, a preemption check, faculty peer review, and a vote by the body of the Journal. Although we make every effort to honor requests for expedited review, we do not omit any of our review stages in response to such requests. When requesting an expedited review, please understand that our selection process takes time.
There is no best time to submit a manuscript to the Journal. We will never reject an article for lack of space; rather, we will hold it over for consideration by the next volume. While we encourage contributors to submit articles as soon as they are ready, we do not review articles between mid-May and the beginning of August, so there is no need to rush during this period.
We notify authors of our decisions by email. We normally do not inform authors of the status of their manuscripts other than through email. As a matter of policy, we do not discuss the reasons for our publication decisions.
Book Reviews
While most of our Book Reviews are solicited, we welcome submissions of both proposals and finished Book Reviews. Because the selection process for Book Reviews differs from the process for Articles and Essays, we strongly encourage authors to submit both through our electronic submission system and by email to the Book Reviews Chair at info@ijlet.org. Proposals need not be long; many successful proposals run just a few pages, and some are short enough to fit in the body of an email. Please remember that we strongly prefer to publish Book Reviews within one year of the title’s publication date and that proposals accepted during the spring Articles season will be published no earlier than December.
Symposia
The Journal is accepting proposals for co-sponsored symposia for our print publication at this time.
Source Attribution Policy
The Journal aims to ensure that any ideas that already exist in the literature are properly referenced. To that end, we do not allow authors to repurpose sentences or paragraphs published elsewhere without quotation marks or citations. In addition, as part of our editorial process, we require quotation marks whenever a non-trivial amount of exact language has appeared in another source and citations whenever an idea has been paraphrased from another source — even if the source is the author’s prior work. Finally, the Journal’s editors work with authors we publish to help them meet our self-citation requirements.
Article Titles and Article Abstracts in English
Regardless of the language of the main body of the manuscript, the manuscript might provide an accurate, comprehensible English language translation. Scholarly articles must have abstracts, and those abstracts must be translated to English.
Bibliographic Information in Roman Script
Cited references, names, and affiliations must be published in Roman script to allow rapid, accurate indexing and easy comprehension by our global users.