Submissions

Author Guidelines

Author Guidelines

These guidelines tell you how to prepare and submit a manuscript to Peer Academics. They apply to every submission, in every discipline the journal covers. Read them together with the Submission Checklist, which you confirm item by item in the submission form, and with Manuscript Structure, which sets out what belongs in each section.

Submitting costs you nothing. Peer Academics charges no article processing charges and no submission fees; see Article Processing Charges.

Before you submit

• Check that your topic and approach fit the journal, as described in the Aims and Scope.
• The manuscript must be your own original work, must not have been published before, and must not be under consideration at another journal. Posting your work as a preprint does not disqualify it; see the Publishing Model.
• Everyone listed as an author must have contributed substantially to the work, approved the submitted version, and agreed to be accountable for it. Anyone who does not meet that standard should be thanked in the acknowledgments instead. The author list cannot be changed after submission without a written explanation signed by all authors; the editor decides whether to accept the change.
• One author must act as corresponding author. That person handles all communication with the journal, confirms the submission on behalf of the co-authors, and is expected to supply an ORCID iD.
• If your study involved human participants, personal data, animals, or sensitive fieldwork, obtain the necessary approvals and consents before you submit. You will be asked to describe them.

Article types, length, and abstract

Word counts cover the main text and footnotes. They exclude the title page, abstract, tables, figure captions, reference list, and appendices. Ranges are limits, not targets; a shorter manuscript that does its job is preferred to a padded one. If your manuscript falls outside the range, write to [email protected] before submitting and explain why.

A structured abstract uses the headings Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. Where those headings would misrepresent the work — doctrinal legal analysis, historical, philosophical, or other argument-based scholarship — submit an unstructured abstract of up to 250 words instead and say so in your cover letter. The editor decides which form is published.

Language

Peer Academics publishes in English. Use either American or British spelling, but use one of them consistently throughout the manuscript. Quotations keep the spelling of the source. If English is not your first language, have the manuscript read by a fluent colleague or a language editing service before you submit: the journal does not provide language editing, and an editor may return a manuscript whose language prevents reviewers from assessing the argument.

What you upload

A complete submission consists of the following separate files, uploaded under the matching file type in the submission form:

1. Anonymous manuscript — the full text, including abstract, keywords, references, tables, figure captions, and appendices, with every identifying detail removed. Accepted formats: DOCX, RTF, or ODT. Do not upload the manuscript as a PDF. If you write in LaTeX, upload a PDF of the anonymous manuscript for review and supply the .tex source and any class files if the manuscript is accepted.
2. Title page — a separate file containing the identifying information listed below. This file is never shown to reviewers.
3. Figures — one file per figure, at publication quality. See Figures and Tables.
4. Supplementary material — optional; questionnaires, coding schemes, interview guides, additional tables. Supplementary files are published as submitted and are not copyedited or typeset.

Name your files by content, not by author or institution: manuscript.docx, title-page.docx, figure-1.tif.

Anonymizing your manuscript

Review at Peer Academics is double-anonymous. Anonymizing the manuscript file is your responsibility, not the editor's. Before you upload it:

1. Remove all author names and affiliations from the text, the headers and footers, and the abstract.
2. Remove the acknowledgments, funding statement, grant numbers, and the names of funding bodies.
3. Remove institutional ethics approval numbers and the name of the approving committee. Write instead: "The study was approved by the research ethics committee of the authors' institution (details withheld for anonymous review)." The full details go on the title page.
4. Refer to your own earlier work in the third person, exactly as you would to anyone else's: write "As Ionescu (2021) showed" and not "As we showed previously". Do not delete or blind the self-citation; leaving it out distorts the record and makes the reference list inaccurate.
5. Remove identifying information from the file's document properties (in most word processors: File, then Info or Properties, then remove personal information). Track-changes and comment attributions also identify you — accept or reject all changes and delete all comments.
6. Check links and file names. A link to a repository record, a personal website, or a shared drive that carries your name identifies you. Where a data or code repository must be cited, use an anonymous review link if the repository offers one, and give the full citation on the title page. See Research Data.

If a manuscript still identifies its authors, it is returned to you for correction before it enters review. Nothing else happens to it in the meantime, so the delay is entirely yours to avoid.

Title page

The title page is a separate, non-anonymous file. It contains the article title; the full name of every author in the agreed order; each author's affiliation at the time the work was done; each author's ORCID iD where available; the corresponding author's email address and postal address; the acknowledgments; the funding statement with grant numbers; the conflict of interest statement; the ethics approval and consent statements in full; and the data availability statement. The same identifying information must also be entered in the submission metadata in the journal system, because that metadata — not the title page — is what is used to publish the article.

Text formatting

• Single column, double-spaced, 12-point serif font, with margins of at least 2.5 cm.
• Continuous line numbers and page numbers. Reviewers refer to them.
• No more than three levels of heading, numbered or unnumbered but used consistently.
• Use footnotes for substantive remarks only, and use them sparingly. Source citations belong in the text in APA form, not in the footnotes. Legal scholarship follows the same rule: a substantive footnote may discuss a provision, but the citation itself is given as described in Referencing Style.
• Set equations with the word processor's equation editor or in LaTeX; do not paste them as images. Number displayed equations consecutively in parentheses at the right margin, and refer to them as Equation (1).
• Define every abbreviation at first use in the abstract and again at first use in the main text.
• Report units in the International System of Units (SI). Give statistics in the form your discipline expects, with exact p values, effect sizes, and confidence intervals where they apply.

Declarations

Every submission carries a Declarations section immediately before the reference list, covering author contributions, funding, conflicts of interest, ethics approval and consent, the use of generative artificial intelligence, and data availability. In the anonymous manuscript these declarations appear in anonymized form; the full versions go on the title page. Manuscript Structure gives the required content of each.

References

Peer Academics uses APA 7th edition for all article types and all disciplines, including legal scholarship. Every in-text citation must have a matching reference list entry and every reference list entry must be cited in the text. Full rules and worked examples, including legislation and case law, are in Referencing Style.

After you submit

An editor screens the manuscript for scope, completeness, anonymization, and compliance with these guidelines, normally within two weeks. Manuscripts that pass screening are sent for review; a first decision normally follows within ten weeks of submission, though this depends on reviewer availability. You will be told if it will take longer. Decisions are taken by an editor, who may accept, request minor or major revisions, or reject; reviewers advise but do not decide. If you are invited to revise, you submit the revised manuscript with a point-by-point response to each reviewer comment. Accepted manuscripts are copyedited and typeset, and you check the proof for errors; the proof stage is not an opportunity to rewrite the article.

If your manuscript does not meet these requirements

A submission that is out of scope, is not anonymized, lacks a title page, is far outside the length range for its type, has an unusable reference list, or is missing required declarations is returned to you without review, with a note saying what to fix. You may resubmit the corrected manuscript; it keeps no priority from the earlier attempt. Repeated failure to correct the same problem may lead the editor to decline the manuscript.

Questions

Editorial questions, including presubmission inquiries about scope, go to [email protected]. Problems with the website, with uploading files, or with your account go to [email protected]. How the journal handles your personal data is described in the Privacy Statement; data protection requests go to [email protected].