Instructions for authors – Journal Mondes arabes

Information for submissions

Mondes arabes publishes articles that present the results of original scholarship that falls within the editorial line of the journal.

The journal accepts contributions in both French and English.

Articles that have been published elsewhere, even partially, will not be accepted. Articles that are currently being reviewed by another journal cannot be submitted.

Proposals should be delivered in .doc or .docx format. For Open Office users, please remember to save the file as a .doc (not .odt).

Authors must also provide their name, first name, affiliation and email.

Finally, authors must attach a short biographical note, mentioning in particular their recent work as well as their research themes.

The editorial board examines each proposal to determine whether it is of scientific interest and whether it is consistent with the journal’s editorial policy. A reply will be given within three months.

Authors wishing to submit a proposal should respect the following guidelines (proposals that do not meet these criteria will not be considered):

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

To submit an article (‘Varia’ section)

The ‘Varia’ section welcomes all proposals for articles that are not part of a thematic issue. The proposal must be consistent with the journal’s editorial policy.

Please use the style sheet template provided for the journal by La Découverte. This template defines each of the fonts to be applied: running text (‘normal’ style), footnotes, titles, subtitles, etc.

The article length should not exceed 60,000 characters (including spaces and footnotes), or ca. 9,000 words. Please ensure that the article is anonymised in preparation for peer reviewing. A control PDF will also be requested.

Articles must be accompanied by an abstract (between 500 and 700 characters) in both French and English.

All articles are anonymously peer–reviewed by three internal or external reviewers.

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

To submit to a thematic special issue

The thematic issues revolve around a clear and coherent social science topic. They should include 5 to 8 original articles based on empirical material and should be informed by an introductory article that provides a general perspective on the main ideas developed in the thematic issue.

Proposals for thematic issues are to be sent in Word format and should include:

  • a rationale of no more than 10,000 characters or ca 1,500 words, that explains why the proposed research topic is both original and of special interest. The editorial board will be very attentive to where the proposal is situated within relevant international social science scholarship and to the methods that will be used by each author contributing to the special issue;
  • an abstract of each article that will be part of the special issue;
  • a general bibliography.

The editorial board examines the complete proposal. It checks whether the manuscript is of broad scientific interest and whether it fits within the journal’s editorial guidelines. If the proposal is accepted at this stage, the editorial board will accompany the coordinator(s) throughout phase 2. If deemed necessary, a call for additional articles will be issued. Each of the previously anonymised articles will then be reviewed internally and externally by the editorial board.

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

To submit an article for the section ‘Review of Books, Sounds, Images’

The section ‘Review of Books, Sounds, Images’ offers a space for reviews of original works (regardless of their language of production). These works may include books in social sciences and history, but also reviews of current exhibition, documentaries and other visual material.

The length of the reviews should be between 5,000 and 10,000 characters (with spaces), or ca. 750 and 1,500 words. Reviews may be written in French or English.

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

 

To submit an article for the section ‘Interview’

The ‘Interview’ section gives the floor, via an interview, to a colleague working on and/or from the Arab and Muslim worlds. The aim of this section is twofold: to present the colleague’s research trajectory, scientific approach and scholarship and, in so doing, to present trajectories and scholarships that are sometimes less familiar to researchers in France.

In addition to offering biographical information, the interviews focus on the interviewee’s main research fields and most salient results. It also aims to shed light on the contexts in which this research was conducted, and in which the interviewed colleague works.

The interviews begin with a short headline that broadly introduces the interviewed scholar, followed by a transcript of the questions and answers.

The text should not exceed 50,000 characters (with spaces), or ca. 7,500 words. Illustrations, pictures, and other material can be inserted (within the limits of technical possibilities).

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

To submit an article for the section ‘Fieldwork & Archives’

The ‘Fieldwork & Archives’ section aims to promote empirical research. It welcomes the proposals of researchers reflecting on their research method and protocol, no matter what it is. The proposal must comply with the editorial policy of the journal.

The formats retained can be of 2 types:

  • either the author shares and comments primary sources: transcribed or non–transcribed extracts from field notebooks, photos, interviews, archive fragments, etc. The author analyses the selected extract in an introductory text of maximum 5 pages (not forgetting to specify the exact source);
  • or the author develops a reflective analysis of a precise aspect of their fieldwork. The reflection should focus on an original methodological aspect.

The author must provide documents free of copyrights.

The whole text – including the extracts from field notebooks and archives – should not exceed 50,000 characters (with spaces), including notes and bibliography, or ca. 7,500 words. The text will be accompanied by a title and an abstract (between 500 and 700 characters) as well as 4 keywords, in French and in English.

Each article is evaluated anonymously by three reviewers.

To submit your proposal, please send it to: redaction@mondesarabes.fr

Editorial Norms

Spelling and punctuation should conform to British English.

Referencing norms

Bibliographies must follow the Harvard (in–text) referencing system: the in–text reference uses square brackets [Vidal–Naquet, 1989] (possibly [Vidal–Naquet, 1989, p. 27]). At the end of the article, the full reference section should list only the titles actually used. The references should be in alphabetical and date order, starting from the earliest date.

When preparing bibliographical references, it is important to ensure that:

1) The references should be complete (including the place of publication, which is often forgotten) and presented in the right order (e.g. place of publication, publisher, date, see below).

2) The reference has to be accurate.

3) When referencing journal articles and book chapters, include the page range.

4) Make sure that the bibliography is consistent throughout (e.g. do not use Seuil once and Le Seuil later).

5) Use capital letters according to the journal guidelines (see below).

6) Each bibliographic reference should end with a full stop.

Monography

Name First name (date), Title, Publisher, Place of publication, series ‘name of the series’ [1st ed. year].

Name First name & Name First name (date), Title, Publisher, Place of publication.,

Journal article

Name First name (date), ‘Title of the article’, Title of the journal, n° X, p. …

NB : Don’t forget the page numbers.

Article in an edited volume

Name First name (date), ‘Title of the article’, in Name First name of the editor(s) (ed./eds), Title of the edited book, Publisher, Place of publication, p. …

NB: If there are several editors, list their names separated by commas, except for the last one whose name is preceded by the word ‘and’.

PhD thesis

Name First name (date), ‘Title of the thesis’, thesis in (discipline) written under the supervision of (supervisor(s)), Place of submission, University.

Article in Conference Proceedings

Name First name (date), ‘Title of the presentation’, in Name First name of the editor(s) (ed./eds.) Title of the conference proceedings, Proceedings of the conference held in … on … (Place, date), Publisher, Place of publication, p. …

NB : Don’t forget the page numbers.

Book in a foreign language (other than French or English)

NAME First name (date), Title in transliteration [translation of title], Publisher, Place of publication, series.

General tips

  • When citing French publications, only mention the word ‘Éditions’ when it is part of the publisher’s name; for example, ‘Éditions de l’EHESS’, but ‘Gallimard’ or ‘Hachette’.
  • Do not forget to put the names of magazines or newspapers such as Al–Hayat, Le Monde, The Conversation, Libération, The Guardian, Al–Safir, etc. in italics.
  • Names (apart from the authors’ names) should not be written in capital letters, except for the initial letters (e.g. Paris, not PARIS).

Footnotes and boxes

Footnotes should be kept to a minimum using the Harvard method. Be sure to use commentary notes sparingly: they are allowed when they present an ancillary development, necessary to the main point.

Zotero and Mendeley alert

A particular warning concerns researchers who use Zotero or Mendeley to establish their references. While convenient for creating bibliographies for academic documents, they introduce serious bugs in the style sheets and greatly alter the consistency of the manuscript file (making it very difficult to prepare it typographically on screen). If you have used these programs to establish the bibliographic references of your manuscript file, it is therefore mandatory to remove all the Zotero or Mendeley fields (ADD IN and others) from this file.

Editorial rules to follow

Use of italics

Although italics are not prohibited, they should be used sparingly: too much use of italics, which is used to emphasise certain terms, is considered very counterproductive. It is better to choose the terms you wish to emphasise sparingly.

Italics should also be used for single foreign language words. This rule does not apply to foreign language words that have been accepted into English (such as fatwa for example).

 

Quotes

Block quotations should be indented on the left in a smaller font (11 instead of 12 points).

If a quotation is in quotation marks, do not add italics.

Always specify the pagination in the quotation frame.

When words are left out in the middle of a quote, use […].

Use ‘ibid.’ if the citation reference is the same as the immediately preceding Harvard bibliographic citation [author date] rather than repeating the citation reference.

If the citation is introduced by a colon (:), insert the full stop before the closing quotation mark; if the citation is embedded in the sentence, insert the full stop after the closing quotation mark.

Quotations should not be underlined or italicised.

Use of quotation marks

Always use single inverted commas for quotation marks => ‘the man who spoke these words’.

For quotations within quotations, use double quotation marks => ‘He thought, “I have better things to do”’.

Full stops and commas go after the quote marks. The only exception is for a full sentence or quote after a colon, then the full stop goes inside the closing quote mark.

Acronyms

Do not use full stops for acronyms: U.N. should be written UN.

The first time an acronym appears in the text, place it in parentheses following the full name United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA).

 

Typographical rules

Within the text, cite the author’s first names => ex.: ‘the works of Claude Lévi–Strauss… (rather than ‘the works of C. Lévi–Strauss…’).

Remember to put a dot after the first letter of a first name if it is abbreviated => ‘James L. Gelvin’ and not ‘James L Gelvin’.

Write out dates in full, i.e. ‘9 November 2018’ not 9/11/18.

Put the URLs in italics: their use should be limited to the necessary minimum (on the paper version, keep them only for references that are only available online and use a ‘link shortener’ site, such as for example: https://free–url–shortener.rb.gy/). Make sure that the hyperlink is active. In all cases, also indicate the exact reference of the quoted text to facilitate the search for the source on the Internet.

For works on the BNF Gallica website, it is strongly advised to use the BNF link shortener: http://c.bnf.fr/

 

Headings

A level of headings must be used, if possible, every two or three pages.

The headings should not be numbered.

Avoid headings that are too long.

Never put a full stop at the end of a heading.

Do not use subheadings.

Transliteration Rules for Arabic and Persian

When translating from Arabic and Persian into Latin characters, please refer to the IJMES Transliteration chart.

We choose not to use diacritical marks and we leave it to the author to respect local dialects.

Keep the French spelling (ou/ch) if it suits North African names as commonly used.

The shaddah is rendered in Latin script by duplicating the consonant.

Compound place names must be hyphenated (ex.: Sidi-bel-Abbès).

In the case of proper nouns (names of places or persons), the words bel, ben, beni, bou, ma, mta, ou, oum are rendered with a lower case, followed by a hyphen (ex. Sidi-bel-Abbès), except when they come at the beginning of the noun (ex.: Bel-Keïtar / Ben-Bechir).

In the case of proper nouns (names of places or persons), the articles al- and el- (or esh-, ed-,
en-, er-, es-, et-, ez-) are rendered with a lower case followed by a hyphen (ex.: Ash-Sharq-al-Awsat / Bab-el-Mandeb / Ouerz-ed-Din / Abd al-Aziz), except when they come at the beginning of the noun (ex.: Al-Din / Ed-Dis / El-Oued / El-Ghazali)

Names of persons: Ibn starts with a capital letter.

Titles or functions such as sheikh, imam, khan, pacha… are generally rendered with lower case (ex.: the pacha Ali / Gengis khan / Lamine bey)

Place and country names as well as proper nouns should conform to the most common spelling in English, e.g., Jeddah, Mecca, Muscat, Ras al-Khaimah, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Bashar al-Assad.

Examples of preferred spellings: Abd al-Aziz; Abd al-Rahman; Al-Din; Basra; shah; Shatt al-Arab; Farouk; Hassan al-Banna; Hosni; Hussein; Ibn; Kemal; Khomeini; majlis; Najaf; Najd; Pasha; raïs; Riyadh…