Instructions to Authors
1. Overview
The journal “Diacronia” accepts manuscripts of articles, letters, review articles, essays, and book reviews.
All contributions submitted to the Journal must be original and new. We do not publish material that has already been published (even in a different form or language), or that has been submitted for publication in other journals.
“Diacronia” does not charge publication fees or article processing charges: publishing in “Diacronia” is free. Furthermore, “Diacronia” is an Open Access journal and offers free access to its content, under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY licence.
2. Preparing a manuscript
“Diacronia” is a bilingual journal. The first version of the manuscript should be submitted in either English or Romanian, and the peer-review process will then be performed in that language. Once the manuscript has been accepted for publication, a professional and faithful translation of the final, accepted version of the manuscript in the second language must also be submitted.
For the English version one uses British English spelling rules (in particular, OED spelling and hyphenation, and OUP style), while for the Romanian version one uses the spelling with î and sînt.
With the exception of book reviews, all manuscripts will be accompanied by an abstract and by up to five key words (chosen from the accepted key word list) in the submission language.
The abstract will be based on the 
attached template,
and will be structured according to certain key elements (the context of the author's
research, analysis, or observations; the aim of the paper;
the methods or instrument systems used;
the results and conclusions of the research).
Submitted manuscripts must not exceed the following lengths:
- articles: max. 15000 words;
- letters and book reviews: max. 4000 words;
- review articles: max. 25000 words;
- essays: max. 7000 words.
Abstracts will span between 100 and 200 words in length, and will contain no bibliographical references.
We strongly recommend that authors use the full-Unicode FreeSerif font
(
download, 2.5 MB) or the Unicode version of Times New Roman (v. 5.01).
Their subsets for Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, IPA, etc. characters are preferred to custom fonts such as Greek, BSTGreek, BwHebb, etc., and
will replace them anyway in the final typeset version of the article.
If third-party fonts are absolutely necessary (e.g., handwritten Cyrillic script for Old Romanian),
authors are kindly requested to attach these fonts (in otf or ttf format) upon the submission of the manuscript.
Allowed font sizes are: 14pt for the title, 12pt for the main text, 10pt for indented inline elements, footnotes, and references. The submitted document should use A4 paper size, with all margins set to 2 cm and single spacing. Authors are asked not to format the manuscript in any other way, leaving instead the default settings of a Word document for page, text, and footnote layouts. Please consult the attached template, and if possible use the provided Word document as a starting point (pdf, 
doc).
Manuscripts will be divided into a minimum of four sections (the first being Introduction / Preliminaries / Overview etc., and the last two being Conclusions and References) numbered with arabic numerals starting from 1. Sections may be divided into subsections. Both sections and subsections must be labelled with a short and descriptive title. Subsections may also be organised with further subdivisions, numbered as 1.1.1., 1.1.2., 2.1.2.3. etc.
Paragraphs are to be marked with a newline (“Enter” key), without further formatting. Under no circumstance will the “Tab” key be used anywhere in the document.
Inline notes, containing various comments or remarks, will be delimited by an empty line and left-indented by 1.3 cm.
The authors are requested to use footnotes instead of endnotes, with continuous numbering throughout the document.
Bibliographic references must use the inline author-year notation as shown below; if necessary, additional remarks, comments, etc. on the respective citation will then be made in a footnote:
“[... quotation ...]” (Pătruţ 1969)
Pătruţ (1969) argues that “[... quotation ...]”
For more details, see Pătruţ (1969, p. 25)
For publications with multiple authors, and for multiple publications with the same author and year, the following conventions are in use:
Avram & Sala (1997)
Arvinte et al. (2005)
Avram (1990a) and Avram (1990b)
For quotations one uses “ ”; for quotations within quotations, « »; for quotations within quotations, within quotations, ‹ ›:
“Thy father did command before he died, saying, «So shall ye say unto Joseph, ‹Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil›»; and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father” (Gen, 50, 16-17).
For concepts one uses ‘ ’, and to highlight quoted text one uses, in order, italics and bold:
“Wisdom hath been created before all things”
“Wisdom hath been created before all things”
Citations of Bible verses are given in the following order: 1. abbreviated title of the Bible version, in small caps, 2. abbreviated title of the book, in italics, 3. chapter and verses, with upright arabic numerals:
bb, Mt, 27, 25
kjv, 1Cor, 13, 1-13
Gen, 4, 15
If one mentions or cites a specific version of the Bible, it must be included in the References section.
All inline bibliographical references will be included in the References section as shown below. In addition, all works listed in the References section must have been cited or mentioned at least once throughout the article.
Titles of monographs, articles, reviews, essays, etc. are written in italics, while journal titles are written inside quotation marks “ ”:
Pătruţ, I. (1969). Despre vechimea relaţiilor slavo-române, in “Cercetări de lingvistică”, XIV, p. 23-29.
Pătruţ, I. (1974). Studii de limba română şi slavistică, Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, p. 101-123.
bb = Biblia 1688, edited by V. Arvinte, I. Caproșu, Al. Gafton, L. Manea, N.A. Ursu, 2 vol., Editura Universității “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iași, 2001, 2002.
Figures and tables are only allowed if they are paramount to understanding the main text. If they are included, they will be placed naturally within the flow of the text, will be numbered and captioned with a relevant description, and will be mentioned in the main text in the correct order (Table 1, Figure 1, Table 2, etc.).
3. Submitting a manuscript
In order to submit a new manuscript, one should follow the Submit manuscript link in the author's menu. The menu will only be visible on the right hand side of this website after logging in.
All manuscripts are to be submitted in both raw form (as a Word (doc) or LaTeX (tex) document), and in pdf format.
If the Authors have good reasons (e.g., direct competition, personal conflicts, conflicts of interest) to suspect one or more of the Reviewing Editors of a lack of impartiality, they may ask for their removal from the list of prospective referees during the initial submission of the manuscript. The Authors cannot ask for a certain Referee to be assigned to their paper.
4. Editorial review
All submitted manuscripts are fully read by the Editorial Board (the Editors). If the texts pass a minimum set of requirements (i.e., are or could be publishable in the Journal), they are directed towards members of the Board of Reviewing Editors (the Referees), chosen according to their field of expertise.
All manuscripts are read by two Referees. The Authors and the Referees do not know each other’s identity (double-blind peer-review).
After careful consideration of the Referee’s verdict, the Editors will present their decision to the Author in no more than 60 days from the manuscript submission date. Possible decisions are:
- accepted for publication;
- accepted pending further revision (be it minor or major, the revision must be operated by the Author. For minor revision, the Editors themselves will make sure that the Author complied with the Referee’s recommendations. For major revision, i.e., significant in scope, depth or importance, the cycle of the review process is repeated). If the Editors find that the Authors disregarded the Referees’ recommendations and did not take into consideration the required alterations, they will not submit the text for another evaluation, assuming its rejection;
- rejected.
5. Publication
Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, the Editors send it to the publisher. Once the typesetting process is finalised, the draft is sent back to the Author for final proofreading. At this stage only changes that do not affect the pagination, the structure, or the content are allowed (e.g., correction of typos). If the Editors suspect that other types of changes have been made, the text might be re-sent to the Referees.
The Authors cannot request formal modifications that are in conflict with the format or the style of the Journal.
The final version of the manuscript is sent for publication after the Authors submit a signed declaration that:
- confirms that the text belongs entirely to the Author(s) who sign it;
- confirms that the text has not been published or sent for publication elsewhere.
You can download a template of this declaration:
Once the form is filled out and signed, it can be sent either in pdf format or as a scanned file.
Once the text has been accepted for publication, regardless of the language of the submission (Romanian or English), the Author must provide a faithful and professional translation in the other language (English or Romanian, respectively). The translation must be uploaded to the Journal's website within 14 days from the moment the text has been accepted for publication. The Editors will first verify the translation against the original manuscript, and then submit it for typesetting.
The cycle is completed by the publication of the article in the next issue of the Journal.
If the manuscript is immediately accepted for publication, or accepted with minor corrections that do not require a further intervention by the referee and that are implemented promptly by the Author, one such cycle will not take longer than the time between two consecutive issues of the Journal.
Due to the urgent nature of their content, letters, book reviews, and review articles will be published as soon as they are accepted by the referees and the translated version is submitted. They will then formally be part of the next scheduled issue of the Journal.
