Congratulations, your manuscript has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Political Science! As you prepare your accepted manuscript to become a published article, please follow these guidelines very carefully. Failure to adhere to any of the following guidelines will delay your article’s publication online in AJPS Early View and in a print issue of the Journal.
Replication Files and Article Verification Process
The author of an accepted manuscript must provide replication materials that are sufficient to enable interested researchers to reproduce all of the analytic results that are reported in the text and supporting materials. The document titled “American Journal of Political Science Guidelines for Preparing Replication Files” provides useful information about what information is needed and how it should be organized. All replication files must be stored in a Dataset within the AJPS Dataverse, located on the Harvard Dataverse Network. The document titled “American Journal of Political Science Quick Reference for Uploading Replication Files” provides information about creating a Dataset on the AJPS Dataverse and depositing materials into it. Note that authors also can make their replication files available elsewhere (e.g., their personal website, other data repositories, etc.) as long as all of the necessary files are included in the Dataset on the AJPS Dataverse.
The author should prepare and upload replication materials before submitting the final draft of the accepted manuscript. The “American Journal of Political Science Data Verification Checklist” is designed to help authors ensure that they have provided all necessary files. When the final draft is submitted, the replication materials will be verified to confirm that they do, in fact, reproduce the analytic results reported in the article. The verification process is carried out by the Archive Staff at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Immediately after successful verification, the Odum staff will release the Dataset for public access and the AJPS Editorial Staff will forward the final draft of the manuscript to the publisher for copyediting, production, and publication.
Sections of the Manuscript
The final draft of the manuscript must begin with a title page containing:
The article title (which should be short and concise)
A short title for the running header in the published article.
Several keywords or phrases to facilitate online searches.
The e-mail address and postal address for each author, listed in the order that the names should appear in the published article. Note that accurate e-mail and postal addresses are necessary for authors to receive page proofs.
An unnumbered footnote listing any sources of research support and funding for the article, along with acknowledgments and expressions of gratitude.
The abstract page follows immediately after the title page and it must contain:
The article title.
The word “Abstract” followed immediately by a very brief (150 words or less) summary of the manuscript’s content. The abstract should cover the background, hypotheses, methodological approach, findings, and conclusions. In most cases, the abstract should not include references to other works.
The following text (which should appear after the abstract):
Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/XXX.
The “XXX” in the preceding text should be replaced with the actual Digital Object Identifier (DOI) provided by the AJPS Dataverse.
The word count for the final draft of the manuscript. The word count should include the main text, all notes and references, any print-edition appendices, and the headers for all figures and tables. It should not include the title page, abstract page, and any supporting information intended for online publication only.
Page numbering for the manuscript should begin on the first page of the main text (although the page number can be omitted from that page). Either footnotes or endnotes can be used, but footnotes are strongly preferred.
If an appendix is intended for inclusion in the print version of the article then it should appear on a new page that is placed immediately after the main text and before all notes and references.
The list of references should begin on a new page after the main text (and print-version appendix or endnotes if either is used in the manuscript) under the heading “References” (not “Bibliography”). Entries in the list of references should not be numbered. Authors’ full names should be used (not merely the first initial, unless the name appears that way in the original work). References should be checked carefully against citations in the text, and for spelling, journal, publisher, title, and page numbers. Note that initial citations to works by three or more authors should list all authors’ names; subsequent citations to the same work should list the first author’s name followed by “et al.”
All figures, tables, and supporting information must be placed at the end of the manuscript. One figure or table should appear per page. Markers should be placed in the text to indicate the locations of figures and tables (e.g., “Figure 1 about here”, etc.).
Furthermore, all numbers in tables should be rounded to the same decimal place throughout the entire paper. For example, if the numbers in one table are rounded to the nearest hundredth, then all the numbers in all of the tables should be rounded to the nearest hundredth.
Supplemental information (SI) should appear immediately following the last figure or table, or following the reference section if tables/figures are embedded in the manuscript text. The SI file should begin with a title page that includes a Table of Contents (with page numbers), and that indicates that the material is intended for online publication only. Page numbering should start over (i.e., at “1”) on the first page of the SI file. All material included in the SI file must be referred to in the body of the manuscript by page number. Note that the SI file is not copyedited; authors should be careful to provide it in a form that is ready for immediate posting.
The manuscript should follow the style guidelines of the American Political Science Association’s Style Manual for Political Science (Revised, 2018) which is based on The Chicago Manual of Style (Seventeenth Edition). The guidelines include, but are not limited to, matters of text style, citations, appendices, notes, references, and tables and figures.
The final draft of the manuscript must be in MS Word. The author must also submit a separate PDF version of the manuscript. The contents of the PDF version must be identical to the MS Word version of the manuscript.
Submission Process for Final Draft
Prior to submitting the final draft of your paper on Editorial Manager, please re-run the code for your analyses that you will be posting to Dataverse. If it is possible, please use a different computer from the one on which you originally conducted your analyses. Once you have completed this step, please send the output, the log file, and a description of your computing environment to Julia Salvatore at ajps@ajps.org. We appreciate that this takes time and effort; however, spending the additional time preparing verification materials at the outset can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes a manuscript to complete the verification process.
Once you have completed this step, please submit the final version of your manuscript online through Editorial Manager. Note that it will appear in the system as a revised version of the paper. After the verification process is completed and the Editor approves the final version of the manuscript, the AJPS Editorial Staff will transmit the relevant files to Wiley and to the AJPS Copy Editor, Irwin Zucker (izucker@wiley.com). He will manage your article through the production process.
Your article cannot be published until Wiley has received the appropriate signed license agreement. A few days after the replication files have been verified, you (as the corresponding author for this manuscript) will receive an email from Wiley’s Author Services system asking you to log in and complete the appropriate license.
The corresponding author will receive the page proofs of the article in PDF format from Wiley. S/he has 48 hours to review the proofs and return any corrections that must be made to the proofreader. Corrections should be limited to copy editing errors only; this is not an opportunity to make major revisions to the manuscript. The proofreader will make sure that all changes from the first-stage proofs were made by the compositor. The second set of proofs is not sent to the contact author.
Authors can track accepted articles through production by registering for Author Services at the Wiley Online Library.
Revised January 13, 2020