Instructions for Authors

 

 

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

Manuscript Submission

Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts online via the Current Anthropology Editorial Manager system at http://ca.edmgr.com. Detailed instructions are available below. Our style guide can be found online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/journals/ca/style.html?journal=ca#styleguide. If you do not have access to the Web, please send one hard copy of your manuscript and a CD-R containing all relevant electronic files to the editorial office.
 

Gold Open Access Option

Current Anthropology offers authors the choice to make the electronic version of their articles freely available to the public (“free access” or “open access”) in perpetuity. When you submit a manuscript in the Editorial Manager system, you will be presented with the option to make it open access. The fee is US$400. If you elect to make your article open access and your manuscript is accepted for publication, the journal office will send you a form with payment options and instructions.
 

Statement of Policy

Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind. The journal defines such research in the broadest possible way: to encompass all scholarship on human cultures and on the human, or closely related, species. It therefore makes a strong commitment to a comprehensive view of anthropology and provides a forum for active scholarly critique as a major means by which to achieve this view. To this end, all major articles undergo the CA☆ treatment: commentators, selected from around the world, write critiques that appear in the same issue as the article, along with a reply from the author. The journal also publishes research reports, book reviews, interviews, forums, and critical comments.


Current Anthropology hopes to build a comprehensive anthology by publishing analytic, theoretical, or synthetic articles that communicate significantly to the largest number of anthropologists and to scholars in related disciplines. One way to achieve this breadth of articles is to span disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries. Another way is to provide essential knowledge to anthropologists in the other subdisciplines. The journal will not publish articles that do not reach a broad international audience through one means or another.


The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research sponsors Current Anthropology in order to create a worldwide community of scholars that transcends national borders and parochial intellectual orientations.


Current Anthropology, in its very name, makes a commitment to publish articles contributing to current debates in anthropology and related disciplines. Articles should be at the forefront of present-day scholarship and may take controversial positions; they may even be speculative at times, as long as their intention is to bring important questions into scholarly debate.


Current Anthropology is published in both print and electronic versions. The journal intends to pioneer the use of the new forms of scholarly publication permitted by the Internet while at the same time maintaining the exacting standards it observes in print. The electronic version is expected to become part of the permanent record of scholarship in anthropology and be a resource as valuable as the print journal has been over the past 40 years.


Current Anthropology requires the assignment of copyright to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for major articles, reports, forums, discussion items, and commentaries. Although copyright to other contributions remains with their authors, it is understood that, in return for publication, the journal has the nonexclusive right to publish the contribution and the continuing right, without limit, to include the contribution as part of any reprinting of the issue in whole or in part, by any means and in any format, including computer-assisted storage and read-out.

Formatting Electronic Files

Please adhere to the requirements below when submitting a new or revised manuscript via Editorial Manager. The system relies on automated processing to create a PDF file from your submission. If you do not follow these instructions, your submission cannot be processed and will not be received by the journal office.

Acceptable Formats

  • Microsoft Word (.doc)(any recent version)
  • PDF (.pdf)
  • LaTeX (.tex)
  • WordPerfect (.wpd)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)

File Contents

Word documents should be submitted as a single file. Authors should submit figures as separate files, in TIFF (.tif) or EPS (.eps) (not GIF [.gif] or JPEG [.jpg]) format.


If you submit a LaTeX file, all figures and tables should be external files that are referenced within the main "ms.tex" file by using appropriate commands. LaTeX is especially suited for articles containing extensive math; authors of math-intensive manuscripts can use the AASTeX manuscript package available at http://aastex.aas.org/.


Please note that authors of accepted manuscripts may be required to submit high-resolution hard copies of all figures during production, as not all digital art files are usable.


In addition to the main manuscript file, submit your cover letter as a separate file in the same format as your main file. If you used any revision or editorial tracking tools in your word-processing program, be sure the final version of your manuscript does not contain tracked changes. Authors are encouraged to submit the names and addresses of possible reviewers; there are pages in the submission form for authors to include names of suggested and opposed reviewers.

File Compression and Archives

If you have more than two files to upload into the system (e.g., manuscript, figures, and cover letter), we recommend you combine these files into an archive, so you upload only a single file when submitting the manuscript. Applications for Mac OS (such as StuffIt) and Windows (such as WinZip) support the formats listed below.


The following archive formats may be used:

  • Zip (e.g., "archive.zip")
  • Unix tar (e.g., "archive.tar" or compressed with a gzip as "archive.tar.gz" or "archive.tgz")


If you cannot create archives in these formats, you may still compress individual files to shorten upload time:

  • Unix compress (e.g., "ms.tex.Z")
  • gzip (e.g., "ms.tex.gz")

Revised and Final Versions of Manuscripts

If you are submitting a revised manuscript, please include your responses to the reviewers comments as part of the cover letter file. When submitting a revised manuscript with figures, include all figures, even if they have not changed since the previous version. The final version of your manuscript must be submitted in Word (doc.), Rich Text (.rtf), or LaTeX (.tex) format, because the text wil be edited; a PDF does not contain usable character data and is thus not adequate. For both revised and final versions of manuscripts, please observe the same formatting instructions outlined above.

General Specifications

Manuscript Formats

Current Anthropology publishes scholarship in several formats. Major Articles with commentaries—those that receive the CA☆ treatment—must make theoretical or methodological interventions into current controversies within anthropology, broadly construed. Major articles are no more than 12,000 words in length (references and endnotes are included in this count) and must be accompanied by abstracts of no more than 200 words. Reports present research findings of theoretical significance to anthropology, and this significance must be made clear in the text. Reports are a maximum of 5,000 words in length, including references and endnotes. They also require abstracts of a maximum of 200 words.


Current Anthropology publishes two forums as means of stimulating debate: the Forum on Public Anthropology concerns the involvement of anthropology in public issues or the interactions of anthropology with society, and the Forum on Theory in Anthropology presents contending arguments on important theoretical issues. Papers written for the forums are no more than 7,500 words in length.


Current Anthropology also publishes short discussion items or replies to Articles, Reports, or Forums that have appeared in the previous 8 months. These discussion items should not exceed 800 words, including references.


Authors may not submit a new major Article or Report manuscript until two years after the publication of their last one. Current Anthropology does not consider more than one submission at a time for any author.


The books reviewed in the journal are chosen from among those received at the editorial office. Book reviews are by invitation of the editor only, and unsolicited book reviews will not be considered.


Articles published in Current Anthropology are in the English language only. However, manuscripts may be submitted in other languages, and funds exist for making translations into English. This means that authors need not translate their articles into English before submitting them and that authors will be able to revise their papers, should they be accepted, using their native tongue. Contributions submitted for review should not have been published in any form or language. Manuscripts should be double spaced and in 12-point font, and all pages should be numbered. References cited should be double spaced and listed alphabetically at the end of the paper. Endnotes, numbered in sequence throughout the paper, should be double spaced at the end of the manuscript. Acknowledgments, if any, should appear as a separate paragraph at the end of the manuscript text. When submitted in final form for publication, tables should be typed on separate pages, titled, numbered with Arabic numerals, and cited in numeric order in the text. Figures should also be numbered and cited in numeric order in the text. Legends for all figures should be typed, double spaced, on a separate page.

Electronic Enhancement Formats

Online versions of articles will include all elements of the print version, but they may also contain enhancements that electronic publication permits. The presence of these enhancements, referred to as CA+, is meant to expand the scholarly significance of the article. Articles enhanced for electronic publication may contain any of the following additions to the original text: sound files, video clips, color photographs, color-enhanced graphics, maps (with zoom capability), supporting texts, multiple abstracts, or additional data, as well as links to related articles, official documents, and other relevant sites on the Internet.


Enhancements for electronic publication should be submitted in these forms:

  • Short sound files should be submitted in MP3 (.mp3), MPEG (.mpg), Quicktime (.mov, .qt), or AVI (.avi).
  • Photographs and other graphics should be submitted in TIFF (.tif) or EPS (.eps) format. EPS files saved by a commercial-quality graphic program (such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or Kaleidagraph) are generally the most reliable. Current Anthropology prefers that contributors provide high-resolution files without downsampling or lossy compression (e.g., converting the image to JPEG format).
  • Additional data may be submitted in a variety of formats, including delimited text, Data Interchange Format (DIF), or spreadsheet files.
  • WordPerfect (.wpd)


As with printed matter, the editor must give approval to any and all enhancements to the electronic version. The copyright agreement between authors and the Wenner-Gren Foundation covers both print and electronic publication.

Online Submission Instructions

Please have the following items readily available before beginning the online submission process:

  • Manuscript in an acceptable format as described above
  • Cover letter as a separate file
  • Information from title page (to be typed into the peer review database): title, short title, list of authors and affiliations, and contact information for the corresponding author
  • Abstract of the manuscript (to be copied and pasted into a field in Editorial Manager)


Go to the Current Anthropology Editorial Manager system at http://ca.edmgr.com to submit your manuscript. If you do not have access to the Web, please send one hard copy of your manuscript and a CD-R containing all relevant electronic files to the editorial office.