Prepare your manuscript

Thank you for considering submitting your work to Medicine Anthropology Theory. We are not presently accepting new submissions; we will issue an announcement when the submission portal reopens.

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All submissions must be original material and cannot have been published or be under review elsewhere. If a submission is suspected of being plagiarised, the MAT Editorial Collective will follow the COPE guidelines for suspected plagiarism. 

We use Open Journal Systems (OJS) for the submission of manuscripts. Submissions will not be accepted by email correspondence under any circumstances.

The submission process

As part of the submission process in our publications system, you will be asked to provide basic information in several text boxes, including contact details for each author, up to five keywords, and an abstract (150–200 words). Secondly, you will then be required to upload several documents, including a version of your manuscript, which should be saved as an anonymised Microsoft Word .docx, Open Office or RTF file and be formatted in double-spaced 12-point Arial font. Please use footnotes only.

The manuscript ought to be completely anonymised in order to be considered for blind peer review and move forward in the process. In order to not delay the screening process, we ask authors to check the document does not contain any reference to author names, including in the text and the reference list, the first page nor the software user names (see herefor guidance on anonymising authorship in Microsoft Word).

The manuscript should also include images, figures and tables (with captions and legends) in their preferred location so that these may be considered as part of the manuscript during the review process. Please do not include these as separate materials. Please gather information on any copyright requirements for the images used. These details as well as the original, good quality images will be requested by the editorial team upon acceptance of the publication. 

Thirdly, we will require the submission of a second document (you can list it as 'Other' in the type of documents in the publications system), where you provide a short note on author(s)' contributions and an ethics statement (see our Authorship policy). These details will be screened by the journal's editors during the review process. They will also be used for the preparation of the final version of the manuscript should it be accepted for publication. Only at the stage of production should authors provide a biographical note for the authors of the publication and any acknowledgements; these will be requested by our staff upon acceptance.

Note that any submissions that do not submit these two separate documents following the journal's guidelines may experience some delays in the review process, as resubmissions may be requested.

As a last step in the submission process, you will be asked to agree to our copyright policy, which grants copyright to the author and allows for the sharing of the text with attribution (Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license).  

Citations and references   

The journal uses Chicago Style internal citations, also known as ‘author/date’ style (AuthorLastName YEAR, page), and reference lists. Please format your citations and references according to the examples found at this website http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html (click ‘Go to Author-Date Style’). Please include DOIs (following this format: https://doi.org/10…) and URLs wherever possible. Note that MAT has no need for ‘accessed on DATE’ information for references to online sources. Please name each author in full in your reference list; avoid use of ‘et al’ and first name initials (unless there are more than seven authors). 

Please keep footnotes to a minimum (no more than 10) and include note material in the text whenever possible.    

House style   

For almost all matters of style, MAT follows the Oxford Style Guide (Hart’s Rules) and Collins English Dictionary for spelling (please use British English). Excerpts from fieldnotes written in other varieties of English will be reproduced verbatim. Where Oxford offers different guidelines depending on context, please choose the ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ option. Note in particular the following key points:  

• Punctuation
  • Please use the serial/Oxford comma.
  • Square brackets are used for brackets within brackets and to denote a translation, missing words, or authorial addition within a quote. 
  • Closed em dashes (—like so—) for dashes to indicate a puase or parenthetical matter; closed en dashes for ranges of numbers/dates (e.g., 1999–2004), to link concepts (e.g., ‘The German–Polish non-aggression pact’), and to link joint authors/creators (to differentiate from hyphenated names) (‘Deleuze–Guattari’); and hyphens for hyphens. 
  • Use single quotation marks as standard for quotation and speech. Use double only within a quote. Punctuation should be placed outside quotation marks. Quotations of 50 words or longer should be formatted as indented block quotes.    
• Dates. Please style dates following this example: 12 May 2010.   
• Hyperlinks. Please leave all URL addresses visible so they can be read in PDF versions of articles.   
• Avoid use of ampersands (&).  
• Acronyms and initialisms. Use full title for first mention and follow with bracketed acronym/initialism (e.g., ‘In 2009 the World Health Organization [WHO] published . . .’). Reset for each new section. 
• Use footnotes rather than endnotes. These (footnotes) should not be used for referencing purposes, but should instead be used sparingly for additional notes, explanations, translations, and tangents that do not belong in the main text. 
• Times. Use the 24-hour clock for all times (with colon), except for rough or inexact times, in which case say, for example, ‘around 4 p.m.’ 
• Numbers. As per Oxford/Hart’s Rules for technical contexts, numbers between one and ten are spelt out. For large round numbers, use a mix of numbers (incl. decimals) and words; e.g., 6 million, 1.5 billion. 
• Percentages. Following Oxford for technical contexts, use ‘%’ (not spaced), not ‘per cent’ or ‘percent’. 
• Non-English words. Non-English words and phrases (except those that have entered the English lexicon, e.g., ‘rendezvous’, ‘gateau’) should be written in italics where possible. 
• Lists. Unless bulleted/numbered points consist of complete sentences, each item carries no end punctuation and each can usually begin lowercase (except for proper nouns). If individual points are in complete sentences, capitalise the first word of each point and end on a full stop. 
• Pronouns. For non-gendered/non-binary pronouns, MAT defaults to the singular ‘they’, but is receptive to author requests. 

Image specifications   

All submissions should be accompanied by a thumbnail image which will appear next to the article on the journal website. Thumbnail images will be requested by the editorial team when the accepted submission reaches the copy-editing stage.  A descriptive line of no more than 125 characters will also be requested at said stage and will serve as ALT text for accessibility purposes. Thumbnail cover images should be JPG format for photographs and PNG format for illustrations, and of larger width than height (we recommend 160x320 pixels).  If the article contains images, one of these can be selected as the cover image.

Any images included in the text of the article should be placed in the desired location within the manuscript and accompanied by caption text. At the copy-editing stage, the editorial team will request a good quality version of the photographs, as well as caption and copyright details for each of the images.

Authors are responsible for acquiring permission for any copyrighted images prior to submission. Otherwise, images should be in exception to the general copyright statue (e.g., public domain, fair use, open access, etc.). Authors are responsible for providing these details to the editorial team before the production stage.