Manuscripts that do not conform to these guidelines may not be reviewed.
Manuscripts that do not conform to these submission guidelines, below, cannot be sent out for peer review.
Manuscripts that need “line editing” for readability and/or that have inadequate/incorrect citations often induce peer-reviewers to recommend rejection. Manuscripts that are ultimately accepted for publication will undergo thorough copy-editing by CEH/CUP, but only once accepted, so these problems must be addressed by the author before submission.
General Submission Guidelines
Articles should be between 6,000 and 12,000 words (plus notes); please contact the editors before submitting a shorter or longer manuscript.
Manuscripts must be anonymous. Please do not include your name or initials in file names, and if possible, purge your name from the “properties” of MS Word docx files. When citing your own work, do not identify yourself (this can be reversed, once a manuscript is accepted for publication).
General Style Guidelines
Authors are encouraged to familiarize themselves with articles that have appeared in CEH in the recent past as examples.
Central European History generally uses the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).
Use American (not British) spelling and punctuation.
Place an “Oxford” comma after the second-to-last item in a list.
Acknowledgements may be provided in an initial unnumbered note placed right before the first footnote.
(If acknowledgements cannot be done anonymously, then they should be omitted, at first, and added only once a manuscript is accepted for publication.)
The entire manuscript must be 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, and aligned left: this includes the title, text, subheadings, block quotations, and footnotes.
There should be no extra line breaks between sentences, paragraphs, or footnotes.
Quotations
Use “smart” (curly), not "straight" quotation marks.
Periods and commas are always inside closing quotation marks, “American style,” and colons and semicolons are always outside.
Question marks and exclamation points are also outside closing quotation marks unless they are part of the quoted material.
Single quotation marks should be used only for a quote within a quote.
Use italics for emphasis. “Scare quotes” are always double quotes and should be used sparingly.
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Please spell out acronyms and abbreviations when they first appear; they should be followed by the shortened form in parentheses, which should then be used in the rest of the manuscript.
If German or English, please use the original language, for example, Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party, SED). For other languages, please provide the English translation.
Italics
Use italics for books, films, newspapers, journal titles, words in languages other than English, and words referred to as terms. Do not underline.
Names
First name must be provided for every person mentioned for the first time, no matter how well known.
Dates
Dates should be written out as Month Day, Year (for example, April 30, 2005).
Decades: “the 1990s” (no apostrophe); or “the nineties.”
Numbers and Numerals
In general, please spell out whole numbers from one through one hundred, as well as any of those numbers followed by “hundred,” “thousand,” “million,” and so on, for example, “fifteen thousand soldiers” or “three million people.”
For all other numbers, use numerals. If the use of numerals is required for one number in a group of similar items in close proximity to each other in your text, use numerals for them all: “482 soldiers left home, but only 62 returned.”
Use a comma in numbers of four digits or more when they are expressed in numerals: “1,001.”
Numerals should always be used for percentages and for numbered parts of publications, such as pages, chapters, parts, volumes, tables, and figures, for example, “pages 4–6” or “chapter 1.”
“Percent” should be written out in both text and notes, for example, “only 45 percent responded.” The percent sign (%) may be used in tables.
Guidelines for Citations
Notes should be provided as footnotes, numbered consecutively, double-spaced, and 12pt Times New Roman. See sample notes below.
Initial citations must be complete, including place of publication, publishers' names, etc. Do not include DOI information for print journals. Page numbers should be given without p. or pp.
Use the English versions of place names, when common (for example, Zurich, not Zürich; Munich, not München).
Subsequent/Repeated citations of the same work should be abbreviated using the author's last name, the short title, and page number(s). Do not use ibid/idem.
For archival citations, please provide the full name and location of the archive, followed by an abbreviation in parentheses, when first cited: for example, Bundesarchiv (BArch).
Please provide the following information in this order: Archive (usually abbreviation), Name of Holding, File Number (etc.), Author of document, “Title of document” [or Type of document, if no title], Date of document.
When citing correspondence, where appropriate, please include both sender and recipient as well as the date.
Sample Notes
Journal Article
John Smith and Mary Jones, “Title of Article,” Title of Journal 6, no.2 (1977): 143–44.
Book
Mary Apples, Title of Book (Place of Publication: Publisher, 1990), 164–66.
Mary Wine, ed., Title of Book (Place of Publication: Publisher, 1991), 130–32.
Tom Jones, Title of Book, 3 vols. (Place of Publication: Publisher, 1980–83).
Tom Jones, Title of Book, vol. 1, Title of Volume 1 (Place of Publication: Publisher, 1980).
Chapter in a Single-Author Book
Mary Apples, “Chapter title,” in Title of Book (Place of Publication: Publisher, 1990), 102–79.
Contribution to an Edited Volume
Iolanthe Mab, “Title of essay,” in Title of Edited Book, ed. William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (Place of Publication: Publishers, 1990), 80–95.
Subsequent References
Smith and Jones, “Abbreviated Title,” 151.
Apples, Abbreviated Title, 89.
Mab, “Abbreviated Title,” 84.
PhD Dissertations
Kenneth F. Ledford, “My Dissertation” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1996), 200.
Newspaper Articles
John B. Reporter, “The State of History,” New York Times, Oct. 1, 2007.
Magazine Articles
Stephen Lacey, “The New German Style,” Horticulture, March 2000, 44.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Author Blurbs
During the ScholarOne submission process, you will be given space to provide a biographical blurb of 150-200 words, including your email address. Here is a sample of how to format your Biographical Blurb:
George Williamson is associate professor of history at Florida State University (gwilliamson@fsu.edu). He is the author of The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (2004). He is currently completing a book titled, "August von Kotzebue: A Political History, 1789-1819.”
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary materials. Supplementary materials will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary materials may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will be published with the same metadata as your parent article, and are considered a formal part of the academic record, so cannot be retracted or modified other than via our article correction processes. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please make sure you are familiar with our detailed guidance on supplementary materials prior to submission.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Statement on use of generative artificial intelligence (AI)
CEH encourages authors to use whatever tools can help them to proofread and improve their writing: spell checker, thesaurus, grammar checker, “friendly review” by peers, writing coaches, and even artificial intelligence writing assistants like grammarly.ai or claude.ai.However, manuscripts should be written by authors, not by computers, and should reflect authors’ own analyses.
Per CUP’s statement of publishing ethics, “authors are accountable for the accuracy, integrity and originality of their research papers, including for any use of AI”:
https://www-cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com/core/services/publishing-ethics/authorship-and-contributorship-journals#ai-contributions-to-research-content