Instructions for Authors

Authors wishing to submit their manuscripts to Perspectives on Politics must register with Editorial Manager®, an online submission and review system.   

First time users should register and create their profile at www.editorialmanager.com/pop.  You will be able to use the same login information to access any of the APSA journals.  Returning users may log in and continue using their existing profile, and may edit their information at any time.

The system has links for Author Help, an Author Tutorial, and Frequently Asked Questions to assist successful submission of your manuscript.

File Type Restrictions

When submitting to Perspectives using Editorial Manager, do not send Microsoft® Office Word 2007 documents (.DOCX extension).  Please use an earlier version for your submission.  System compatibility with Word 2007 is not yet assured.

Please do not submit your paper as a .PDF document.  The Editorial Manager system will build a .PDF document from the files you submit, which will ensure its anonymity.

Submitting a Manuscript

You will be guided through the submission process and prompted to provide information about your submission.  A checklist at the left of the screen indicates the steps in the submission process.

You will need to provide particular and background information about your submission.  Often, this information can be cut and pasted from an existing document into the comment boxes provided online, such as when providing the manuscript’s abstract. 

Specific Procedures

Keywords and classifications describe the content of your manuscript.  The keywords should designate which subfield(s) of political science your work falls into, as well as any particular aspects of your submission.  The classifications indicate areas of research specialization.  These terms are standard among the American Political Science Association and its journals.  Once you have made the classification selections, choose the Next button to continue.

You will provide further required details on the Additional Information page.  When answering the question about a paper’s anonymity, consider the following:

• Do your names appear on the title page or in the header or footer areas?  If so, remove them before submitting the paper.
  
  
• Does the paper refer to your previous work in the text of the manuscript using phrases such as “in my earlier work (Smith 2004),” or “in our 2003 article on xxxx,7 we… ”?  Such self-references do not comply with the double-blind review structure of Perspectives. 
  
  
• Have acknowledgements been included with the version submitted for review that indicate specific grant numbers, your conference presentations, or other easily recognized background details that would reveal your identity to the reviewers?

Any of these occurrences will trigger your submission being returned before it can be evaluated. 

You can provide the Perspectives Editor with your cover letter text or other background information on your submission using the Enter Comments page.  The text can be copied and pasted into the comment box, or remarks can be typed there directly. 

You also have the opportunity to specify reviewers whom you suggest or oppose.  The Suggest Reviewers page can be filled in naming those who possess the particular background to assess the submission.  The Oppose Reviewers page can be used to point out those who are known to have already seen the paper or who might otherwise be too close to you, such as your dissertation advisor.  Choose the Next button to bypass suggesting or opposing potential reviewers.

Use the Attach Files page to furnish the submission itself.  The title page, abstract and a third-person brief author biography must be sent as separate files, while any tables, figures, or appendix material may be included in your manuscript file, though these too may be attached as separate files.  Select the order in which you wish the manuscript to be viewed; the system then creates an anonymous .PDF file of the entire submission. 

You are required to view the resulting .PDF file.  You will receive a system-generated letter informing you of this.  Likewise, if the system encountered an error while building the .PDF, you will be sent a letter with this information.  When continuing with the submission process as prompted, you might not see these letters until the process has been completed; there is no need to go back into the system if your submission was successfully completed.

Tracking a Submission

You can log in to the Perspectives Editorial Manager site to track each manuscript through the evaluation stages.  The Author Main Menu lists the steps from submission to a decision and provides links to view the submission’s status.  The system generates updates at various points in the review process and sends these to you using the e-mail address you have provided.  You can contact the Perspectives Editor using the Send E-mail link associated with each submission.