Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor). The submission is not currently available online or in print.
  • We can accept electronic submissions in any format, including TeX (e.g., LaTeX, XeTeX), Microsoft Word, Open Document Format (e.g., odt files from OpenOffice and LibreOffice), HTML, XML, RTF and PDF. However, with PDF, we need to extract text from the document. So if the sources used to make the PDF are made available, we are all the more happy.  A list of typical common formats can be found at Wikipedia.  The journal is typeset using TeX, so TeX or LaTeX are our preferred format types.
    Experimental feature: Please consider using one of the online writing environments such as
    Authorea, Overleaf or even Google Docs. Using one of these environments for writing will speed up production and lead to a more accurate publication.
  • Where available, you have provided the URLs and DOIs for the references in your bibliography (look them up in crossref.org).
  • In your file, please use the standard features of your document preparation system, such as italics, bold, and footnotes.  Use your word-processor's styles for formatting section headings, indented quotations, etc. Please place illustrations, figures, and tables within the text at the appropriate points, not at the end or in separate files.  In short, use your writing program in the most natural way, and avoid special tricks or peculiarities as much as possible.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
  • For transliterating Indian-language words, please use IAST, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, that is described in
    Wikipedia. Write "Vāgbhaṭa, Śrīdhara, Kṛṣṇa" not "Vagbhat, Shreedhara, Krishna."
  • If you use a bibliography manager such as BibTeX, Zotero or Endnote, then please also send us your database file for the items you cite in your contribution, e.g., the .bib or an "exported" file, containing just the subset of items that you refer to.
  • Please use a Unicode font and type your document using Unicode encoding.  If this is a new idea for you, Wikipedia has some initial guidelines. Please use a font such as Sanskrit 2003, that provides a rich set of both accented Latin characters, as well as Devanagari if you need it.  Other excellent fonts and keyboard utilities are available at Bombay.indology.info.

Author Guidelines

History of Science in South Asia invites contributions on the history of science, technology and medicine, primarily in South Asia but also in other geographical areas in so far as they have a bearing on the developments in South Asia. In addition to original reports of research and theory, HSSA welcomes also feature articles that reflect on methodological issues, especially in the context of non-Western sciences.

Contributions should focus on questions relevant to the field of the history of science in South Asia. These questions should be pointed and may also have implications for broader history of science problems, regionally or globally. Contributions should show an awareness of the contemporary state of international academic research in the field that they address.

Types of Articles

Research Articles

Contributions reporting original research using qualitative and/or quantitative historical data related to the history of science should include a literature review and/or theoretical/conceptual framework, methods, and analysis sections. The methods need to be clearly outlined and should match the research question or stated purpose of the contribution. Please include a brief description of any methodologies that are less familiar to the history of science research community.

Features

HSSA welcomes feature submissions that report on, or present opinions about, topical issues in the history of science in South Asia; present analyses of debates and controversies in the field; present new ideas or theories about the history of South Asian science, in short essay form; or present reflections on the history of South Asian science in the context of current issues. Feature articles are meant to be different from traditional research contributions. Therefore, features need not contain literature reviews or extensive descriptions of methodology. However, feature articles should do much more than just present personal anecdotes and opinions. Features should demonstrate well-informed and factually sound interpretations of educational issues that advance knowledge in the discipline and/or improve practice in the field.

Book and Media Reviews

HSSA publishes reviews of books and other media related to the field. Books and other media for review (one copy each) should be sent to the editor.

Criteria for publication

Significance and Impact

Contributions should focus on questions relevant to the field of the history of science in South Asia. These questions should be pointed and may also have implications for broader history of science problems, regionally or globally. Contributions should explicitly state their contributions, whether theoretical or historical.

Advancement of the Field

The contribution should push existing theory in a new direction, and/or extend or bring a new perspective to current literature.

Clarity and Style

Contributions should be well written in clear, concise language and be as free as possible of technical jargon. HSSA strives for all articles to be widely accessible to non-experts with university-level skills in other fields. Previously published HSSA articles can serve as examples of the style of writing appropriate for our audience. We understand that the specific organization of a contribution may differ according to discipline and the author’s aesthetic sense.
External Proofreading Services

If, before you submit, your paper needs more style correction than the you are able to provide, or for multi-author papers that need harmonization, we recommend that you use a commercial editing services.  The following companies are mentioned only as examples:  we have no experience with them, and there are many other companies that provide similar services.

 

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's  published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

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