Instructions to Authors

General:

Mail 3 copies of manuscript to:

Africa Today
221 Woodburn Hall
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405

The paper may not be submitted to another journal while under review by Africa Today.

Preparation of Manuscripts:

Review process

Manuscripts accepted for evaluation will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. As a journal with topical content, Africa Today is pledged to reviewing manuscripts as rapidly as possible.

Manuscripts will be accepted on the understanding that their content is original and that they have not been accepted for publication or review elsewhere. Once a manuscript has been accepted for publication in Africa Today, its copyright resides with the publisher. Manuscripts will not be returned.

Format

Authors should submit 3 copies of their manuscript, which must be typed, double-spaced, and printed on one side only of good-quality 8 (omega) × 11 white paper, in a 12-point font and with 1-inch margins. Manuscripts should not exceed 25 pages (6250 words) in length (excluding endnotes, references, tables, etc.). Alternatively, manuscripts may be submitted electronically: E-mail the manuscript as an attachment (preferably in Word for PCs) to afrtoday@indiana.edu. In all matters of spelling, abbreviation, punctuation, grammar, etc., manuscripts should conform to the latest editions of The Chicago Manual of Style and Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Because these references allow room for variation and interpretation, we include here our preferences concerning some common grammatical and stylistic issues:

• insert commas between all items in a series, e.g., "Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi"
• there should be one space only between a period, comma, semicolon, or colon and the next character.

Order

Manuscripts should be organized in the following order:

1. cover page 2. abstract 3. text 4. endnotes 5. references 6. tables 7. figures

Cover Page

State title of paper; author name; institutional affiliation; name, address, and email address of author to whom correspondence should be sent; acknowledgment (if any) of financial or other assistance.

Abstract

On a separate page, summarize the article in 125 or fewer words. Do not include citations in the abstract.

Endnotes

Endnotes should be used only for substantive comments on the content of the article. Print on a separate sheet of paper, double-spaced, and numbered consecutively starting with 1.

References

References should follow the author-date format described in The Chicago Manual of Style:

Author's Surname, First Name. Date. Title. City: Publisher.

See examples below.

Format of References

References within Text

Citations of sources should be made within the body of the text, following the author-date system from The Chicago Manual of Style (see The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, ch. 16):

When the author's name already appears in the text, the date of cited work should appear in parentheses, e.g., (1988). When the author's name does not appear in the text, the author and date of source should appear in parentheses, e.g., (Smith 1988). When a specific page number or page numbers are to be cited, the page number(s) should follow the date, after a colon, e.g., (Smith 1988:17).

Use "et al." for more than three authors; the complete list of names must be given in references cited.

When there is more than one work by the same author from the same year, use small-case letters with the date, e.g., 1988a.

Original publication date should precede later publication dates in brackets within parentheses, e.g., (Smith [1896] 1969).

A series of references should be separated by semicolons within the parentheses, e.g., (Jones 1989; Jones and Smith 1998; Smith 1977).

Reference list at end of Manuscript: References Cited

Follow TheChicago Manual of Style author-date format (see The Chicago Manual of style, 14th edition, ch. 16); capitalize titles of books, articles, journals using headline-style capitalization, e.g., The History of Africa.

Examples:

Book

Rodney, Walter. 1982. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C. Howard University Press.

Chapters from Books

Trapido, Stanley. 1980. "The Friends of the Native": Merchants, Peasants and the Political and Ideological Structure of...