Submissions

Author Guidelines

Submission Information

Submissions must be made through the above form, which allows us to better streamline the submission, review, and publication process. If you have any questions or encounter any difficulty, please email constellations,journal@ualberta.ca. Ensure your submission meets the requirements set out below.

ARTICLES
Submissions are accepted from all of the University of Alberta campuses: Main Campus, Augustana and Campus St. Jean, and may be in either English or French. Papers must display high-quality writing. We are looking for senior level papers that received a minimum of an 'A' grade, or independently written papers of equivalent quality. You may wish to consult with the professor who marked the paper or have it reviewed by a trusted peer before submitting it to Constellations.

Subject Matter
Constellations welcomes articles on any topic, as long as they are sufficiently historical or classical in content or methodology. For example, a paper on the history of anthropology is a perfectly legitimate submission.

Length
Constellations is published exclusively online, as we try to promote sustainable resource use and equal access to information. We do not have a required length of article. An average length of paper is 10 pages, but we are open to any well-researched and well-written paper.

Abstract
The article must be accompanied by an abstract. An abstract is a short summary of the thesis and methodology of your article. The abstract should be 3-4 sentences long. Try to make your abstract concise and interesting, as it influences whether people continue to read or skip to the next article. Do not simply copy your introductory paragraph. Abstracts are not necessary for book reviews.

BOOK REVIEWS
Preference will be given to reviews of recent monographs over older monographs.

Length
The review should be no more than 3 pages long.

Header
All reviews must be headed with full bibliographic information, e.g.:
Joy Parr. Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. pp 270. ISBN 978-0-7748-1724-0.

EDITORIAL GUIDELINES AND STYLE

All articles should represent cutting edge research and provide a novel and/or well-researched thesis.

Clear, crisp prose
Articles should be clear and well written. Avoid clichés, jargon, and overly informal prose. Avoid tangents or superfluous information; all points should directly support the central thesis.

Accuracy
Before submitting your article, ensure that there are no spelling and grammatical errors in the article. Reading the article out loud is often the best way to be certain that there aren’t any errors. The accuracy of information is crucial in publication. Misquoting, misinterpreting, and intentionally misinforming through your references is unacceptable. Ensure that places, people, and dates are correct and that your sources are credible. Footnotes must also be correct with appropriate formatting and punctuation. Citations and manuscript formatting must be done according to the Chicago Manual of Style, with footnotes and a bibliography.

Audience
Authors must be aware of their audience. Readers will mostly be undergraduate and graduate students and others with a university-level education. The readership of Constellations is quite broad, and the author must provide sufficient information and context to make the manuscript accessible to individuals outside of their field.

FORMAT

Constellations adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). Citations and formatting must be done accordingly, with footnotes and a bibliography. Please visit the Chicago Manual of Style through the University of Alberta Libraries website for more information, or Purdue Owl's guide to Chicago.

Use 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced. Paragraphs must use standard indentation and spacing. We accept both American and British spelling, as long as each manuscript is internally consistent.

Images and figures that are important to the article are welcome and will be published at the editors’ discretion. Please reference the source of all images and figures.

SUBMISSION POLICIES

Simultaneous submissions

Constellations welcomes multiple submissions from the same author, but only one submission will be published per issue. If more than one submission from the same author is deemed acceptable, we will discuss with the author which article will be published.

Multi-author submissions

Submissions with more than one author are welcome. There will need to be one corresponding author designated to serve as the focal point for communications. All authors will be cited in the publication.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools

At Constellations, it is our goal to encourage young scholars to develop their skills in academic writing, research, and revision. We do not feel AI tools are conducive to the development of those skills, and thus heavily discourage their use in submissions. We follow the lead of fellow journals like Spectrum in our stance on AI use:

Should an author wish to submit a manuscript created with the assistance of AI — including any and all tools, chatbots, or extensions which may generate, summarise, or configure any text, data, figures, images, &c. — the author must disclose all use of those tools. Details must be provided regarding what tools where used, when, by whom, what prompts were given, and what content in the submission originated from these tools. This information would ideally be presented in the form of a complete record of all interactions between the user and the AI tool. We would also encourage the author to include rationale for why AI was used, and to what effect. The author accepts full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of their manuscript, and understands that AI use may be grounds to disqualify their manuscript from publication, at the discretion of the editors. 

Any author who submits an article created with the assistance of AI without reporting its use will have their submission immediately removed from consideration, and all future submissions rejected without consideration.

LEAD TIMES
Constellations is published once or twice a year, usually in December and April. Authors should expect to be involved in the editing process, making revisions in response to reviewer recommendations.

THE PEER-REVIEW SYSTEM
The peer-review system is a method used by academic journals to best ensure the quality of published articles. Once the author submits their paper, a minimum of two reviewers will receive the paper anonymously. This ensures that the reviewing process is as unbiased as possible. After the reviewers review the manuscript, they determine whether the manuscript should be rejected, accepted with revisions, or accepted with few to no adjustments. These reviewed papers are then returned to the author to make necessary revisions. After the articles are revised and returned to the editor, the final publication decision is made. All articles in the issue of Constellations are then copy-edited to ensure stylistic consistency, and the journal is published. The high degree of reviewing and corrections means that deadlines must be respected.

SUBMISSION FORMAT

Please submit your article in a PDF format. The title of the document must be the title of your article. You must ensure your submission has been anonymised. Remove all identifying data, including your name, the name and/or number of the course for which the paper was written, your professor or supervisor's name, your university affiliation, and anything else which might reveal your identity and compromise the double-blind peer review process. Please also strip your submission file of its identifying metadata, such as the names of author(s) or commentor(s). You can find instructions on anonymizing MS Word files here. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the editors by email at constellations.journal@ualberta.ca.