Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

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 that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS) has not been previously published, nor is it with another journal for consideration.
  • The submission is a Microsoft Word or RTF document file format.
  • We welcome submissions in a wide variety of local Englishes. We do not require the author to conform to standardized British or American English.
  • Manuscripts should use the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (2017), except on the variety of Englishes noted above. Thoroughly check over your bibliographic references to be sure that they are complete, accurate, reconciled with in-text references and formatted properly, according to Chicago Author-Date Style, as in:
    • …. history of technology (Bowker 1994; Hughes 1983).


    • Please attend to proper punctuation of quotations, as follows: She said, “Always put the period inside the ending quotation mark, unless there is a citation at the end.” And, “Use a mix of italics, quotation marks, and parentheses instead of using single and double quotation marks to denote special things,” the editor said. Delineate between single and double quotation marks as follows, but if in doubt look back to other ESTS papers. For example:


      1. Jennifer Denbow (2019): This resulted in a focus on, in Barbara Katz Rothman’s words, “the unique vulnerabilities of the fetus,” which in turn led to an intensified focus on pregnant women’s “‘compliance,’ the willingness of a patient to ‘follow doctor’s orders” (2000, 59).

        https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/238.



      2. Susanna Trnka (2016): Describing the effect that “failing” on her fitness app has on her, she recounted, “there is that moment when you might have a piece of cake, and be like ‘well, I sort of failed, so might as well just have some more cake, because I failed already.’”

        https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/119.



    • Use block (rather than run in) quotations for text comprising one hundred or more words or running into multiple paragraphs.
    • Bibliographic references need to be accurate, complete and formatted as shown below. Please include the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) when applicable.
    • For bibliographic references, please use the following formats:
      Articles: Phan, Thao. 2019. “Amazon Echo and the Aesthetics of Whiteness.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1): 1–39.

      https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29586.



      Books: Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

      Chapters in edited collections: Anderson, Warwick, and Vincanne Adams. 2008. “Pramoedya’s Chickens: Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, Third Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.

      Non-English references: Please provide all references in their native language and provide a translation of that title in English. Capitalize the first letter and any pronouns, and use parenthesis (square brackets) for clarity, unless conventions in the native language demand otherwise (e.g. pronouns would not be capitalized for Danish).

      E.g. Books: Kubo, Akinori. 2018. Kikai Kanibarizumu: Ningen Naki ato no Jinruigaku 機械カニバリズム:人間なきあとの人類学 [Machine Cannibalism: Anthropology after the End of the Human]. Tokyo: Kodansha.

      Same Author and Year: Stengers, Isabelle. 2005a. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review 11(1): 183–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v11i1.3459.

      ⸻. 2005b. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal. In Making Things Public, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: 994–1004. Cambridge: MIT Press.

      Online-only Sources: da Costa Marques, Ivan. 2021. “The Authority of Scientific Knowledge, COVID-19, and Other Challenges.” Backchannels: 4S Blog. Accessed April 1, 2021. https://www.4sonline.org/the-authority-of-scientific-knowledge-covid-19-and-other-challenges/.

  • All URL addresses in the text are activated and ready to click (they will be colored if this is the case).
  • The manuscript length adheres to the word limit targets as specified in the submission guidelines:
      1. Original Research Articles (9k words) including footnotes, excluding references.
      2. Engagements (2k-6k words) including footnotes, excluding references.

      3. Perspectives (2k words) including footnotes, excluding references.

      4. Research Data (2k words) including footnotes, excluding references.
  • We encourage short abstracts of around 250 words, and usually one paragraph in length. The text has had the authors' names removed. There are several aspects of the paper that need to be considered: acknowledgments, headers and footers, authors’ prior research, document research. It is not enough to delete all the authors of the submission by replacing authorship with: (author, year). ESTS editors have changed this practice for 2023 after reflecting on the 2020–22 anonymization process, and the ways in which anonymization slows down the peer review. This following advice draws on the following (OUP Guidance).

      1. Record How You Anonymize. We now require authors to submit a note that details how the submission has been anonymized in your submitted documentation ready for review.

      2. Anonymize Consistently. When authors resubmit revision we also require you to note how you have addressed reviewers’ comments and continued to anonymize the paper in subsequent rounds of revision. The editors will ask you to deanonymize at the copyediting stage.

      3. Document Properties. Authors' names should be removed from the document's properties.

      4. Prior Research. Authors can cite prior research by name if it replicates, extends or contradicts findings in the submission.

      5. Methodology. If however, the citation of prior research refers to methodology then cite this material as an Appendix of material and not by the author name.

      6. Cite in Third Person. Authors can cite themselves in third person. ESTS no longer accepts (Author 2023) or (Author forthcoming) as accepted forms of anonymization. Eliminate “(Author 2023)” if the citation isn’t written in the third person. Replace “(Author forthcoming)” with “(See Appendix A)”.

      7. Anonymize by Location. If necessary, consider anonymizing information such as place names, project names, university affiliations, image credits, etc. in the manuscript which may establish authors’ identity.

      8. Acknowledgments. Do not submit acknowledgements before the final manuscript stage.
  • The manuscript is formatted in a simple way and uses a standard font (e.g. Times New Roman), 12pt, double-spaced, with no special alignment or spacing, with a single space (one line) between paragraphs. Please use a maximum of two levels of headings that are clearly distinguishable (i.e. first bold , second italicized).
  • An Abstract has been submitted. The Abstract should be inputted into the metadata and also included in the main manuscript that is submitted.
  • All notes are footnotes, not endnotes.
  • Please confirm that your submitted manuscript conforms to all of the following principles:
    1. The research being reported should have been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and should comply with all relevant legislation.
    2. Researchers should present their results clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate data manipulation.
    3. Researchers should strive to describe their methods clearly and unambiguously.
    4. Researchers should adhere to publication requirements that submitted work is original, is not plagiarized, and has not been published elsewhere.
    5. Authors should take collective responsibility for submitted and published work.
    6. The authorship of research publications should accurately reflect individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting.
    7. Funding sources and relevant conflicts of interest should be disclosed in the metadata that is inputted as part of the submission process.
  • Additional Information: Authors can provide and revise additional information for consideration throughout the pre and post review process:
    1. Papers with supplementary information contain a statement: “Supplementary information is available for this paper.” Supplementary material may include contact information for correspondence, or files that contain graphs, pictures, images, video, and audio files to be stored on our server.
    2. For providing contact information for correspondence, please start the document with this sentence: "Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to [author].” The author named as corresponding author is not necessarily the senior author, and publication of this author’s name does not imply seniority. Authors may include more than one email address if essential, in which event ESTS will communicate with the first-listed address for any post-publication matters that may arise.
    3. Graphics should be in JPEG, GIF, PNG, or TIFF format. Audio segments should be in MP3, AIFF, or WAV (Windows Audio Wave) format. Video segments should be in Quicktime, MPEG, AVI (Video for Windows), or WMV (Windows Media Video) format. Other audio and video file formats may be acceptable; but please check with us before uploading them to confirm their compatibility with our software and our conversion programs. We encourage authors to obtain appropriate permissions to use materials originally produced by others, but do not require such permissions as long as the usage of such materials falls within the boundaries of Fair Use.
    4. If preprints are posted prior to submission to ESTS, identifying information should be provided during the submissions process. Authors may choose any license for the preprint including the Creative Commons licenses supported by the journal.
  • Revised Manuscript: When revising your manuscript after peer-review rounds, you should maintain ALL anonymity across the document, including when track changes have been used. Repeat the step by securing the document's “Properties,” which in Microsoft Word is found in the “Review” ribbon, by selecting the “Protect” feature and ticking the “Privacy” box to “Remove personal information from this file on save.” “File” menu. Additionally, submit a separate document (also anonymized) stating how each revision has been addressed in the revised manuscript. Please submit the revised manuscript as a revision and not as a fresh submission. This can be done by signing back into your “Author Dashboard” and finding your existing manuscript, and adding your latest version. Note the timestamps for finding the most up to date version.

  • Final Manuscript: All author information previously anonymized such as author and date information as well as place names, project names, university affiliations, image credits, etc. should be added at this stage. For writing that is co-authored, the order of authors must be agreed and finalized between the authors, and confirmed in the final manuscript submission. Acknowledgments should be added to the final submission and not before (During copyediting). At this stage, the managing editor will also provide a template for supplying additional information that can be used in our newsletter and social media channels for promotional purposes. Please submit this document along with the final manuscript.

Author Guidelines

Authors must be registered in the system in order to submit a manuscript. When authors submit their manuscript, they will be asked to tick a Submissions Checklist which appears below on this page and can also be downloaded as a pdf. Prior to submitting, authors may want to make sure that they have read the checklist, but also consider these steps earlier in the submission process. Prospective authors should consult the genres that we publish and the word limits associated with each of them. They should also prepare an abstract consisting of a paragraph of 250–300 words, excluding references, which is required for all submissions. Submissions should not have been previously published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere.

In keeping with ESTS's commitments to foster transnational STS scholarship, we welcome submissions in a variety of local Englishes, i.e. we do not require manuscripts submitted to ESTS to conform with standardized American or British English. Depending on the manuscript, we may ask authors to recommend referees who might be able to evaluate the submission in its proper linguistic context. If the submission is accepted for publication at ESTS, we may also ask authors for some clarifications during the copyediting stage.

Original Research Articles

Original Research Articles (9k words), including notes, excluding references.

Engagements

Engagements (2k-6k words), including notes, excluding references.

Perspectives

Perspectives (2k words), including notes, excluding references. An author can submit audiovisual contributions to this category. For audiovisual contributions, please submit all the metadata including a link and any passwords for access to review.

Research Data

ESTS maintains an open call for Research Data, our term for source data and commentary on supplementary data from which a published ESTS manuscript draws. Research data can include contributions such as interview transcripts and recordings, photographs, syllabi, or numerical data sets that will be published in STS Infrastructures (STS-I) in conjunction with an ESTS commentary.

Thematic Collections

ESTS maintains an open call for Thematic Collections, our term for “Special Issues.” Starting 2023, proposals for Thematic Collections are accepted once annually, typically after the annual 4S conference. An open call for proposals will be circulated widely via various distribution channels.

Thematic Collections can include contributions across genres.

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