For Authors

The editorial team of ZfM highly appreciates your efforts to adapt your text according to the formal requirements of our journal before submission.

General information
* There are no deadlines for the submission of articles. Papers submitted to be considered for publication are welcome at all times. 
* It is part of our policy to keep the time span for the editorial process as short as possible.
* ZfM is a pure online journal, i.e. papers accepted for publication and formatted according to our style sheet will be published immediately thereafter without further delay.
* Any contribution will be published under Creative Commons licence Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
* There are no publication fees or other charges for authors.
* Contributions will be accepted in either English, German or French.
* Papers accepted for publication will not be thoroughly reviewed by a Language Editor. 
* The journal operates in an anonymous peer-review mode. Once a contribution has been received, it will be anonymised and thereafter dispatched to at least two independently chosen reviewers, who also will remain anonymous throughout the process.
* Final acceptance of submitted articles will be decided following consideration of the reviewers’ feedback and rests solely with the editors of ZfM.
* Submissions of articles can be made any time by e-mail attachment in an usual format (Word, RTF, TXT or ODT) to the managing editor Andreas Eckl (zfm-editor@rub.de) or to any of the editors (see Editorial Team).

Formal preconditions
* Articles sent to the journal should be previously unpublished manuscripts, which have not been submitted for print at any other publisher or institution.
* Papers submitted to the editorial team should be in accordance with the publication ethics of the journal.
* The author bears full responsibility for obtaining all necessary permission for publication of any illustration material.
* The author is obliged to sign a non-exclusive license agreement granting the editors the right to use her/his work in all fields of exploitation, without transferring the author’s property rights. An appropriate form – which will be provided to the author after the contribution is approved – should be filled in and sent back to the editors.
* Submissions have to be prepared according to the authors’ guidelines (see below).

Authors’ guidelines
* There are no strict guidelines with regard to the length of contributions. A “standard” article usually has about 8.000 - 10.000 words (not characters).
* Double inverted commas (“xx”) should strictly be used for quotations only, meaning that every use of double inverted commas does ask for a detailed reference.

* Each article should also contain:
- the author’s affiliation (with the official name of the institution, preferably in English), email address and ORCID number (if available).
- an abstract in English and an abstract in the language of publication (max 1000 characters each)
- an English translation of the article’s title (should the original text be in a language other than English)
- 4-8 keywords in English
- a bibliography of all works quoted (for guidelines see below)

Illustrations
* Illustrations should be supplied in an electronic form appropriate for the publication, colour and greyscale images (i.e. photos) in .jpg or .tif format, 300 - 600 dpi.
* Captions should contain a short information on what is represented and information on authorship or source of the illustration.

References
* References should be provided in brackets in the main text using the author/date method.
* Suggested system of quotation for references:
- one author: Name date: page(s), figure(s) etc., e.g. (Brehl 2005: 15-19)
- two or three authors to be separated by a slash: (Brehl/Eckl/Platt 2019:13)
- more than three authors: Name of the first author et al. date: page(s), e.g. (Dabag et al. 2004: 15)
- when more than one position is quoted, please separate them with a semicolon
- several works of the same author with the same date must be marked with a, b etc., e.g. (Brehl 2005a:17; Brehl 2005b: 28). Same applies for bibliography
* All works quoted in the paper must be included at the end of the work in the form of a bibliography.

Websites and online sources
* References for websites and online sources must be provided in footnotes: First name Last name (if authored), Page Title”, date (if indicated), full link (http://www.url.com), e.g. creative commons, “Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)”, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
* All links must be valid by the time of submission.
* All references to websites and online sources must also be included in the bibliography at the end of the paper in a separate section.

Bibliography
* All works quoted in the paper (with the exception of original source texts) have to be enumerated at the end of the main text in the form of a bibliography.
* In the bibliography, all authors/editors of the work should be quoted (also if their number exceeds three names).
* Titles and abbreviations of series, journals, lexica etc. should normally be italicised.
* Place and date of publication must be indicated, whereas publisher’s name is not a must
* Full page numbers are required for any contribution which is not independent (i.e. articles in Journals, edited volumes, lexica, etc.).