Submissions

Author Guidelines

Authors are invited to make a submission to Buried History. All submissions will be assessed by an editor to determine whether they meet Buried History's aims and scope. Those considered to be appropriate will be sent for peer review before determining whether they will be accepted or rejected.

Before making a submission, authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any material included with the submission, such as photos, documents and datasets. All authors identified on the submission must consent to be identified as an author. Where appropriate, research should be approved by an appropriate ethics committee in accordance with the legal requirements of the study's country.

An editor may desk reject a submission if it does not meet minimum standards of quality or the journal's scope. Before submitting, please ensure that the study design and research argument are structured and articulated properly. The title should be concise and the abstract should be able to stand on its own. This will increase the likelihood of reviewers agreeing to review the paper. 

When to submit 

Buried History publishes one issue per year. Submissions can be sent throughout the year, however, editorial deadlines are:

• For research articles: July
• For reports and brief communications: September

Article types

Papers 
Research articles are fully refereed. They should describe the aims, processes, outcomes and application of unpublished, original research. They should make a distinctive contribution to knowledge and understanding of the subject matter and should be supported by relevant figures and tabulated data. Research articles should be normally no more than 7,000 words in length (including references).

Reports
Research updates should introduce a new research project or present an overview of research in progress. Preferably, no more than 3000 words (including references).

Tributes
Tributes to colleagues should be 3000 words but can be extended by agreement with the Editor. Relevant images should be included.

Reviews
Book reviews should be about 3000 words but may be longer by agreement with the Editor, if substantive issues are being addressed.

Manuscript preparation

Authors are requested to follow the specific instructions outlined herein. It is the responsibility of the contributing author to ensure adherence to the style specified below. Buried History does not charge processing fees but does expect authors to submit content in a form that does not require editorial reformatting.

Buried History operates double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are unknown to each other during the review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review. The word count should be clearly indicated. All submissions must be in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format to facilitate the peer-review process.

Formatting

It makes a significant difference to the ease of production if submissions adhere to the author guidelines when preparing your manuscript. If submissions do not follow these guidelines they may be returned for modification.

Title page
The title page must include all the information below, in the same order. No further information should be included:

• Title of the manuscript
• Full name(s) of contributing authors, including their institutions/affiliation and address, and their institutional email address (including ORCiD IDs).
• The corresponding author should be clearly identified and include their contact email address.

Abstract
The Abstract should provide an overview of the article in up to 250 words, giving a summary of the contents and major themes. It will form part of the metadata that will be used by search engines, and it will be seen first by people searching for information.

Keywords
All articles must list a maximum of up to ten keywords.

Main text
The body of the submission should be logical and easy to follow. A clear introduction section should provide non-specialists in the subject with an understanding of the topic and a background to the issue(s) involved. Methods, results, discussion and conclusion sections may then follow to clearly detail the information and research being presented. Figures and Tables must be referenced where they will be placed. A single space should be left between sentences. Do not indent paragraphs.

Headings and sub-headings
Up to three level headings may be present and must be clearly identifiable using different font sizes or italics.

Citations
References should follow the Harvard convention with in-text citations, for example (Smith 1997: 32). Multiple citations should be listed in chronological order and separated by a semi-colon. Citations with two authors can be listed, separated by an ampersand, otherwise use the name of the first author and ‘et al’.  Endnotes may be used for additional notes that clarify information that is not directly relevant to the argument. These appear at the end of the paper after the References.

Acknowledgements
The Acknowledgements should refer everyone who has contribution to the work.

Funding information (if applicable)
Should the research have received a funding grant then the grant provider and grant number should be detailed.

Declarations and conflict of interests
Clearly state the following in the article:

• Consent from all authors for publication and their contributions.
• Clearly declare any possible conflicts of interest, financial and non-financial competing interests. Where there are no conflicts of interests or competing interests, authors must clearly declare this to be the case.
• Ethics approval statement (where applicable). Including any research involving human subjects, human material or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Journal Editorial Policies.
• For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).

Authors' contributions
A sentence or a short paragraph detailing the roles that each contributing author played. Authors listed must comply with the definition of an author in the Journal Editorial Policies.

List of abbreviations
If any abbreviations have been used, please define and list them accordingly under the heading Abbreviations, prior to References.

References/bibliography
A full references list should contain all the sources cited in the text. Format used should be as follows:

• Lambert, W.G. & A.R. Millard, 1969 Atra-Hasis: the Babylonian story of the flood, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dever, William G., 1995 The Death of a Discipline, Biblical Archaeology Review 21 (5), 50–55.
• Meyers, C. & E.M. Meyers, 2013 Sepphoris, in Daniel M. Master ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology, Oxford: Oxford University Press Vol 1, 336–48.

URLs and DOIs should be included. List all authors, do not use ‘et al.' 

Bibliographic entries referring to online resources (web pages etc.) should always be appended with a ‘last accessed’ date in the following format: [Last accessed numeric date text month numeric year].

Figure and Table Captions
Captions for all figures and tables should follow the References and the Endnotes.

Transmission

The full manuscript, author CV and abstract should be attached to a transmission email to the Editor. Images and illustration too large to email should be sent using WeTransfer, DropBox or similar facility as described in the transmission email.

House style

From 2024, the Australian Government Style Manual, will be applied generally, except as indicated herein.

Spelling
Authors should adopt British spelling conventions, except in quotations from other sources or names, where the spelling convention of the original should be retained.

Personal names
If possible, include the forename of a person the first time they are mentioned; thereafter use only the surname.

Punctuation
Authors should follow British conventions, except in quotations from other sources, where the punctuation convention of the original should be retained. Use single inverted commas, except for quotations within quotations, which have double inverted commas. Punctuation should follow closing inverted commas, except for grammatically complete sentences beginning with a capital.

Hyphenation
Please consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for guidance. Hyphenation must be used consistently throughout the text.

Dashes
Spaced en dashes – not em dashes or hyphens – should be used. Use en dashes, not hyphens, for page ranges, eg 11–12, 22–29.

Contractions and abbreviations
If used, write in full at the first appearance with the abbreviation in brackets. You may repeat an abbreviation if it reappears later in your article. Abbreviations are usually expressed without full stops, eg GNP, USA, PhD.

Contractions should have no full points, eg Mr, St, edn, vols, eds, though abbreviated words, which do not end with their final letter, should end with a point, eg vol., ed. .

Capitalisation
Keep capitalisation to a minimum and use only for proper nouns and formal names of organisations, etc.

Numbers and dates
Spell out numbers up to, but not including, 10. Elide numbers to a minimum of 2 digits, eg 233–34; dates, eg 1993–94. Do not elide in titles and headings.

Centuries may be written as numbers, eg 18th century. Hyphenate if used as an adjective, eg 18th-century masterpiece. Dates should follow British usage: 18 August 2015.

Italics and bold
Use both minimally. Use italics and not bold for emphasising words within the text.

Use italics for the following: book and journal titles, newspaper titles, film titles, play titles, stage directions, foreign words/phrases that are not in common usage, song titles, etc.

Quotations
Quotations should be indicated by single quotation marks but use double quotation marks for quotations within quotations. Quotations of more than 50 words should be in a separate paragraph and printed in italics.

Quotations should remain exactly as they are in the original.

Commas
Commas should be omitted before the final ‘and’ or ‘or’ in lists, unless the meaning is ambiguous.

Acceptable language
Please be sensitive in use of terms that might cause offence or be interpreted as racist or sexist and avoid gender-specific pronouns where possible.

Revisions

Should your manuscript be requested for revision to raise the acceptability for publication in the journal, please ensure that you follow the points below when revising your manuscript and responding to peer-review comments. Please provide your timely revisions, along with a response letter to any reviewer reports, within the specified revision period to the handling Editor.

• You should aim to address all points raised by the editor and reviewers, preferably sequentially and in a bullet point list.
• Outline what revisions you made to your manuscript in your response letter.
• Where applicable, perform any additional analyses or experiments the reviewers recommend (unless you feel that they would not make your paper better; if this is the case, explain why in your response letter).
• Provide a polite objective rebuttal to any points or comments you disagree with. Clearly show and/or highlight the revisions you have made in the text. This can be accommodated by making use of either a different colour text, highlighting the text, or by using Microsoft Word's Track Changes function.

ORCiD
ORCiD helps researchers record and report their work by providing researchers with a personal unique identifier that can be kept throughout their career. Many journals now implement ORCiD in publications and authors are encouraged to register with ORCiD and enter their ORCiD details on submission. To register, follow the instructions on the ORCiD web pages at https://orcid.org/, or for UCL authors please visit the UCL Open Access pages, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-access/ORCID.

Reproducibility

Open data
Buried History strongly encourages authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This should be linked to a Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. If data is not being made available with the publication, then ideally a statement from the author should be provided within the submission to explain why. Data obtained from other sources must be appropriately credited.

Structured methods
As the traditional Materials and Methods section often includes insufficient detail for readers to wholly assess the research process, the journal encourages authors to publish detailed descriptions of their structured methods in open, online platforms such as protocols.io. By providing a step-by-step description of the methods used in the study, the chance of reproducibility and usability increases, whilst also allowing authors to build on their own works and gain additional credit and citations.

Open code
If research includes the use of software code, statistical analysis or algorithms then we also recommend that authors upload the code into Code Ocean, where it will be hosted on an open, cloud-based computational reproducibility platform, providing researchers and developers with an easy way to share, validate and discover code published in academic journals.

Preprint Policy

Buried History allows authors to deposit draft versions of their paper into a suitable preprint server, on condition that the author agrees to the below:

• The author retains copyright to the preprint and developed works from it, and is permitted to submit it to the journal.
• The author declares that a preprint is available within the transmission letter presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint.
• The author acknowledges that having a preprint publicly available means that the journal cannot guarantee the anonymity of the author during the review process, even if they anonymise the submitted files.

Should the submission be published, the authors are expected to update the information associated with the preprint version to show that a final version has been published in the journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.