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Author Guidelines

CRITERIA FOR PUBLICATION

Significance and Impact

Contributions should focus on questions relevant to the wider field of yoga studies. These questions should be pointed and suitably contextualised. Articles should explicitly state their contributions, whether theoretical or of other kind.

Advancement of the Field

Contributions 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. JoYS strives for all articles to be widely accessible to non-experts with university-level skills in other fields. Previously published JoYS 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.

Word limit

Articles should be 5,000–9,000 words in length, including any footnotes but excluding the list of references. Longer articles will be considered, provided that the length is justified by the contents.

External Editing Services

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

ProofReadMyDocument (Australia)
Scribendi (Canada)
Proof-Reading-Service.com (UK)
Academic Proofreading (UK)
ISIS Editorial Services (UK)
Academic Proofreading Service (UK)
Content Concepts (India)
Manuscript Edit (USA)

Your institution and colleagues may also be able to recommend reliable editing services.

FORMATTING AND STYLE

For general questions of style, grammar, punctuation, referencing, bibliographies and general formatting, the authors should refer to the (freely downloadable) MHRA Style Guide, in particular to sections 11.2-3, according to which full bibliographical details are given in a footnote when the item is first referred to, and later notes contain a shortened form. This is sometimes called, “the Oxford referencing style.” The Chicago Manual of Style calls this the “notes and bibliography” style. Contributions which do not follow this style may be considered for review purposes, but will eventually require revision by the author and will take longer to publish. Although the “Oxford” system is preferred, the “Harvard” or “author-date” style will also be accepted, as long as it is applied accurately and consistently.

Authors are encouraged to use one of the many excellent bibliography management and referencing software tools that are available today, such as EndNote, JabRef, BibLaTeX, Mendeley, Zotero, citeulike or Reference Manager. A useful guide and comparison chart is available at Wikipedia. These tools greatly assist authors with accuracy and consistency, as well as saving much time.

All references in the bibliography must include a DOI, if one exists. You can fetch this from crossref.org.

ABSTRACT

The article should be introduced by an abstract summarising its key orientations, questions and conclusions. There are no strict guidelines about its length, but it could be just a few lines long, and would normally not exceed 150 words, or up to 250 words in case of longer and particularly complex contributions.

KEYWORDS

Please supply a list of keywords (between four and ten words) that closely reflect the content, main themes and topics, in the article. These keywords will be used for Internet search engine identi cation and search categories within JoYS.

TEXT REFERENCES

Specialist editions of non-English language texts may not be readily available to readers. Therefore, citations from original texts should be given in full, in a standard system of transliteration (if applicable), together with a translation in English. We recommend the following formats:

Example 1.

If the text is translated in the main part of the article:

[main text]

The Amanaska's second definition of Rājayoga relies on the metaphor of the supreme Self (paramātman) being a 'king' (rājan), which is found in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat:

      This very Self is also the ruler of all beings, [that is to say,] the king of all beings.37

[footnote]

37 Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat 2.5.15 (sa vā ayam ātmā sarveṣāṃ bhūtānām adhipatiḥ sarveṣāṃ bhūtānāṃ rājā).

In this example, the footnote number is at the end of the translation. The footnote begins with the name, chapter and verse number of the text, and is followed in parentheses by the text in original language.

Example 2.

If the text is translated in the footnotes of the article:

[main text]

The Amanaska's second definition of Rājayoga relies on the metaphor of the supreme Self (paramātman) being a 'king' (rājan), which is found in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat.37

[footnote]

37 Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat 2.5.15: “This very Self is also the ruler of all beings, [that is to say,] the king of all beings” (sa vā ayam ātmā sarveṣāṃ bhūtānām adhipatiḥ sarveṣāṃ bhūtānāṃ rājā).

In this example, the footnote number is at the end of the relevant statement in main part of the article. The footnote begins with the name, chapter and verse number of the text, and is followed by the English translation and by the text in original language in parentheses.

Example 3.

In cases where the author is using more than one edition of the same text, the year and page number of the edition from which the citation is taken should be added as follows: 

[main text]

In the internal terms of the Carakasaṃhitā, Vimānasthāna chapter 8, it would be classified as a friendly debate (sandhāyasaṃbhāṣā) whose aim is to establish the truth.99

[footnote]

99 Carakasaṃhitā, Vimānasthāna 8.16 (Ācārya 1941: 264): “There are two kinds of debate with experts, friendly debate and inimical debate” (dvividhā tu khalu tadvidyasaṃbhāṣā bhavati sandhāyasaṃbhāṣā vigṛhyasaṃbhāṣā ca).

In this example, the footnote number is at the end of the relevant statement in main part of the article. The footnote begins with the name, chapter and verse number of the text, and is followed by the specific edition and page number from which the citation is copied. After that comes the English translation and the Sanskrit text. Other formats are acceptable as long as the above four components – text-location, edition location, text in original language, English translation – are presented.

 

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 accept electronic submissions via upload to the JoYS website in PDF format. If the submission is accepted for peer-review, the source used to make the PDF will need to be made available (on request) by the Editor.
  • We would prefer that the source be in one of the following formats: Pages, Microsoft Word, Open Document Format (e.g., odt files from OpenOffice and LibreOffice), TeX (e.g., LaTeX, XeTeX), HTML, XML and RTF. For articles that do not require complex footnotes for critical editions, the JoYS is typeset using Pages software, so this is our preferred format for source files. For articles that include multi-layered footnotes and/or critical editions, TeX, so TeX or LaTeX are our preferred format types for source files.
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, please ensure you have followed the instructions to 'Ensure a Blind Review'.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the 'Author Guidelines'.
  • In your submission file, please use the standard features of your document preparation system, such as italics, bold, and footnotes. Please place illustrations, figures, and tables within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end. In short, use your writing program in the most natural way, and avoid special tricks or peculiarities as much as possible.
  • Where available, you have provided the URLs and DOIs for the references in your bibliography (look them up in crossref.org).
  • Transliteration of Indian languages:
    For transliterated Indian languages, please use the 'International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration', that is described in Wikipedia. Write "Vāgbhaṭa, Śrīdhara, Kṛṣṇa" not "Vagbhat, Shreedhara, Krishna”.
  • Bibliography:
    Please refer to the 'Author Guidelines' for formatting and style. If you use a bibliography manager such as BibTeX or Endnote, then if you can, please also send us your database file for the items you cite in your contribution, e.g., the .bib or an exported XML file, containing just the subset of items that you refer to.
  • Unicode:
    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.
  • If you are writing with LaTeX, please observe the following guidelines:

    • use Unicode input (i.e., for XeLaTeX or LuaTeX)
    • use the standard features of LaTeX as documented in the standard manual, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System by Leslie Lamport.
    • use logical markup, not presentational markup. That means you mark things as \chapter{xxx}, \footnote{xxx}, \sanskrit{xxx}, \title{xxx}, etc., rather than \textbf{xxx}, \vspace{5ex}, or \emph{xxx}.
    • do not use \newcommand or \def to make private commands. If this appears to be unavoidable, please contact the journal editor before proceeding.
    • provide your bibliography entries in BibTeX format. The journal uses BibLaTeX, which is flexible. So please do not
    • use any special formatting commands or non-standard bst files. Just use \cite{xxx} etc. in the simplest manner.
    • if you have tables, keep them simple, and don't spend time putting in many horizontal and vertical lines. They will be reformatted for the journal, in any case.

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