Aims and scope | Submission checklist and editorial policies | Policy on prior publication | Article types | Research and reporting requirements | Preparing your article for submission | Overleaf | Competing Interests | Author affiliations | Authorship and contributorship | Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools | ORCiD | Supplementary materials | Author Hub

Aims and scope

Phonological Data and Analysis (PDA) publishes original, high-quality research papers distinguished by a particularly detailed examination of phonological patterns. The journal’s aim is to encourage scholarship grounded in substantive data that contributes to the revelation, clarification, and testing of phonological generalizations, or of the theories designed to account for them. 

Papers appropriate for PDA include those that use rich data sets to document sound patterns in individual languages; that draw typological conclusions from a carefully assembled cross-linguistic database; that explore probabilistic generalizations in corpora; that examine and elucidate the assumptions of phonological theories; and that test phonological predictions with computational models or experimental methods. 

Submission checklist and editorial policies

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors if they don't adhere to these guidelines:

• Policy on prior publication. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration. Please see the journal’s 'Policy on prior publication' section below for more details. Following accepted ethical practice in academia, authors are not allowed to submit the same manuscript to more than one publication venue at a time (e.g., a different journal or an edited book). Papers at any stage of the process, including accepted papers, which are found to have been submitted elsewhere will be immediately rejected, and the editorial team of the other publication may be alerted to the double submission. Authors who have submitted similar research elsewhere are expected to consult the editors and are strongly encouraged to send a copy of the other work along with the submission to PDA. Submissions incorporating results that have been published in a working papers or conference proceedings volume may be considered for publication in PDA, provided that they build substantially on those results and develop the ideas and evidence along new lines or in greater depth. Articles based on MA theses or dissertation chapters may be acceptable after appropriate revision. Contact the Editors beforehand to confirm whether a submission incorporating components of previously published research will be eligible for review.

• Multiple submissions to PDA. Authors may have up to 2 papers in the review and production pipeline at the same time, if at least one is co-authored.

• Anonymization. The submission does not contain any personally identifying information. For more information on anonymizing your manuscript, please see the 'Peer review and anonymization' section below.

• Permissions for copyrighted material. All authors should clear permissions for any copyrighted material used in their submission. For more information, please see the Cambridge's Guidelines on seeking permission to use copyrighted material.

Article types

The following article types are available for submission at PDA:

Article type	Length	Notes
Research Article	Max. 18,000 words*	Including notes and appendices, but excluding tables and references.
Squib	6,000-9,000 words	Including notes and appendices, but excluding tables and references.
Puzzles and Problems	6,000-9,000 words	Including notes and appendices, but excluding tables and references.

*PDA explicitly welcomes data-rich submissions. Therefore, exceptions may be made in some cases when overlength is due primarily to the inclusion of data, at the Editors’ discretion.

Please note that submissions that are within the 18,000 word limit but are otherwise lengthy (i.e., over 12,000 words) will be assessed for appropriateness and may be returned for revision before being sent out for review.

PDA’s length policy is in place for multiple reasons, including that it is difficult to provide a timely review for very long submissions as it takes longer to assess them at every stage of the process. After publication, readers may be less inclined to read longer papers than shorter ones, which can reduce the impact of long papers.

Research and reporting requirements

Author statements

All articles submitted to PDA should include the following statements:

• Acknowledgements (optional) – including a statement disclosing the use of AI during manuscript preparation, if relevant (see the 'Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools' section below).
• Authorship contribution statement (CRediT) (optional) – see the 'Authorship and contributorship' section below.
• Conflict of interest statement (mandatory) – see the ‘Competing interests’ section below.
• Funding disclosure statement (mandatory)
• Ethics statement (mandatory) – all papers should be accompanied by a short ethics statement (50-80 words) referring to any external validation of the experiment design, volunteer status of participants, anonymity, competing interests, etc., in accordance with practices in their country and expectations in international academic publishing.
  For more guidance on what information to include within the Ethics statement, see the ‘Ethical approval’ section below. 
• Data availability statement (mandatory) – see the journal's Research transparency page.

Please read the PDA's research transparency requirements before submitting your manuscript. 

Ethical approval

Research involving human participants, tissue or data should be approved by relevant institutional ethics committee(s) and should conform to international ethical and legal standards for research. The name of the ethics committee that approved the research, the ethics committee approval number and the types of consent obtained should be included at submission, within the paper’s Ethics statement. 

In cases where the need for formal ethics committee approval was waived, the name of the ethics committee that granted the waiver should be included at submission. 

If the article does not require ethical approval, please include the following statement: “Ethical approval was not required.”

Data requirements and referencing

Authors and referees are asked to pay special attention to referencing and to how data is handled in the submission:

• References should not only include the work consulted, but also the original source if at all possible.
• Data sources should be clearly referenced and, if publicly available, cited as such (e.g., with a URL), or appended to the article as Supplementary Materials. Where the data is not publicly available, authors should explain why it is not made available in a Data Availability Statement.
• Generally speaking, the contents and Supplementary Materials for articles reporting results of empirical studies should be sufficient to allow replication by other researchers. For further information, see the 'Supplementary materials' section below.
• For original data collected in the field, the availability of field notes will clearly depend upon circumstances, but if such notes are available we recommend that they be referenced and made available. Authors reporting original field work should be careful to report the appropriate metadata: where and when data were collected, how it was collected (in detail), and characteristics of those it was collected from including age, education, gender, whether bi- or multilingual, etc., along with a report on the general conditions of the language and community.

Preparing your article for submission

Main document file types

For the initial submission, authors should upload their (anonymized) manuscripts in PDF or MS Word, selecting the file designation 'Main Document' and embedding all figures and tables within the Main Document file. Authors are strongly encouraged to compose their manuscripts in LaTeX, using the style files provided below. A PDF of the LaTeX file should then be generated and submitted via the submission site. If not using LaTeX, authors should use double-spacing throughout. 

Upon acceptance of the manuscript, authors can opt to submit their (de-anonymized) final files in either MS Word or LaTeX. 

• If using LaTeX, the LaTeX source files, along with individual figure files and a PDF of the final version, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes.
  You can use the style files available on Overleaf or linked below to prepare your manuscript:
  PDA LaTeX Files
  
  
• If using MS Word, the MS Word manuscript file, along with individual figure files, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes.
  You can use the MS Word template below to prepare your manuscript:
  PDA MS Word Template

Please note that the final version of the manuscript that has been accepted for publication must adhere to the formatting and style guidelines outlined below.

For more information about how to submit your manuscript directly via Overleaf, please see the further guidance in the 'Overleaf' section below.

Manuscript requirements

All articles submitted to the journal should include:

• Abstract: Maximum 300 words.
• Keywords: 3-6 relevant keywords.
• Word/page count: See full article list above.
• Cover letter: Making, in brief, the case for your research and why it would be relevant for PDA.

Peer review and anonymization

PDA operates on a double-anonymous peer review policy: authorship of submitted articles must be anonymized. Citations to work conducted by the author(s) need not be anonymized but should be talked about in third person to preserve anonymity. 

Authors must ensure that they cannot be identified from any material submitted for peer review (such as web addresses/pages for raw data, or supplementary files). Please ensure that any material in online repositories is also anonymized (e.g., use anonymized view-only links on OSF and make sure that scripts contain no author-identifying information). 

Inclusive language

PDA supports the LSA’s inclusive language policy, both in general writing style and in choice of examples. Authors may be asked to revise nonconforming manuscripts prior to review.

Referencing system

PDA follows the LSA Unified Referencing Style.

Examples:

Book:

• In text citations: Akmajian et al. 1985
• Reference list entry: Akmajian, Adrian, Richard A. Demers & Robert M. Harnish. 1985. Linguistics, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  
  

Book chapter:

• In-text citation:
• Reference list entry: Roberts & Holmberg 2005 Roberts, Ian & Anders Holmberg. 2005. On the role of parameters in Universal Grammar: A reply to Newmeyer. In Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz & Jan Koster (eds.), Organizing grammar: Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, 538-553. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Journal article:

• In text citation:
• Reference list entry: Murray & Vennemann 1983 Murray, Robert W. & Theo Vennemann. 1983. Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology. Language 59(3). 514-528.

Formatting requirements

Author affiliations, where applicable, should adhere to the following conventions:

• Department/school, university/institution, city, state/province, country (abbreviate USA and UK)
• Use two-letter postal codes for state/province names
• If an author has multiple affiliations or if there are multiple authors, use superscript Arabic numerals to differentiate affiliations.

Spelling: either American- or British-English spelling can be used, but either should be used consistently throughout the paper.

Quotes: “double” quotation marks should be used, with periods and commas inside marks and ‘single’ quotation marks for quotes within quotes. Quotes of more than fifty words should be set as extracts with no quotation marks.

Title: the title should be written in sentence case, with subtitle run in and separated from the title by a colon.

Order of parentheses in text: ([])

Commas: the serial comma should be used. 

Abbreviations and acronyms: authors should spell out in full any abbreviations used in their manuscripts the first time that they use it.

Measurements and units: percentages should always be expressed as numerals, even when they are less than 10. However, you should spell out percentages if they begin a sentence. For example: Sales increased 5 percent. Fifty percent of this was due to Aitha. Only use the percent symbol (%) in figures and tables and parentheses.

Numbers: numbers less than 10 should be spelt out. Numerals should be used for numbers of 10 or larger. Exceptions to this rule:

• Numbers of years are always spelled, as in “two to three years.”
• Numbers beginning a sentence are always spelled out, as in “Fifteen different models were used…”
• When a number is spelled out according to one of the rules above and is associated with another number, that second number is also spelled out in order to maintain a consistent appearance. For example, “Fifteen of the twenty-two plans…” instead of “Fifteen of the 22 plans…”.

Punctuation: place punctuation inside the quote if the quote is mid-sentence. For example: “You may confirm this,” said Smith (2008).

Figures and tables: All figures must be called out in the body of the text, in sequential order. All titles and notes to figures and tables must be self-explanatory and sourced (with full references provided as outlined above). 

• Figures may have sources, and tables must have sources.
• Table column and row headings should be written in sentence case.

For more information on how to submit figures and artwork, visit the Cambridge's Journals Artwork Guide.

Note: If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. For more details, see the Cambridge's Guidance on seeking permission to use copyrighted material.

You can access the PDA Overleaf template directly on Overleaf. There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for PDA to be directed to the journal's submission system.