Barnett Papers guidelines

Formatting guidelines for submitted Barnett Working Papers

Papers

The Barnett Working Papers in Social Research offer staff, research students and academic visitors the opportunity to pre-publish high quality research on the department's website. As such they are an important part of our dissemination work, and should be well presented in a consistent format.

Editor

The current editor of the Barnett Working Papers in Social Research is Erzsébet Bukodi. Submissions should be sent to the Editor via erzsebet.bukodi@spi.ox.ac.uk in Word format. The Editor acts as a reviewer, but may consult experts.

Staff and research students are welcome to submit a Working Paper to the series at any point during the year. The Editor will review it and will provide comments within two weeks of submission, and, once the paper has been approved, will arrange for it to be uploaded to the website.

Many Working Papers will subsequently appear, perhaps in revised form, as articles in academic journals. But it is important to keep in mind that some journals will not accept any submissions that have previously appeared as working papers.

Sample working papers

Working Paper 2013-01 is formatted as a sample submission following the guidelines outlined below. It is released as a Word document and may be used as a template for submission.

Length

There is not a minimum or maximum length. We expect, however, that most papers will be between 5,000 and 12,000 words (including abstract, tables, notes and references).

Language

All Working Papers should be in British English.

Abstract

You should include an informative abstract of around 200-250 words at the start of the paper.

Keywords

You are welcome to add up to seven key words or phrases.

Acknowledgements

You should acknowledge all sources of assistance in production of your paper. Please include the project number for funded research projects. Acknowledgements should appear on the same page as the abstract/keywords.

General layout and set-up

Margins
Please use margins of 2.5 cm all round.

Page numbers
Page numbers should be centred at the bottom of the page.

Running head
Please insert a running head of about 5 words as a header. The header should start on the second page, be right justified, in Times New Roman, 10 point, italic. Please do not alternate left and right headers.

Text and paragraphing
You should use “Normal” text format for the text. This should be Times New Roman, 12 point, justified with no indent at the beginning of a paragraph. Please submit your paper with double spaced text.

Do not insert a line break between the section heading and the first line of text, but please insert a line break between paragraphs and before each new section heading.

Headings, sub-headings
Please do not number headings and subheadings, and try not to use more than four levels of headings.

Figures and tables
Any figures and/or tables should be included in the body of the paper, rather than at the end, and immediately after the paragraph in which they are first introduced. Leave a blank line both before and after the figure or table.

All figures and tables should fit within the 2.5cm margins of the paper.

Each figure and table must have a number and title. Figures should be numbered together in a single sequence with the prefix 'Figure'. Tables should be numbered in a single sequence with the prefix 'Table'. The figure or table title should appear on the same line as the associated figure or table number. Avoid titles that are longer than one line. Do not put a full stop at the end of the title.

Within the text, an appropriate reference must be made to the figure or table number, e.g. 'See Figure 2'. 
Figure numbers and titles should appear immediately below the figure. Table numbers and titles should appear immediately above the table. The figure or table number should be in italics while the title should be in normal text (e.g.: Table 1. Title).

If you include notes to figures or tables, they should appear immediately below the figure or table in Times New Roman, 10 point, not justified. They should be preceded by the word 'Note' or 'Notes' as appropriate, in italics, followed by a full stop (e.g. Note. This is an example of how to format a note to a figure or table.).

Numbers in text
Unless your field has a different practice, please follow the general rule of writing numbers
less than 10 in full (e.g., 'five' rather than '5') when they appear in the text, except when they
are part of a mathematical expression. Percentages should always be expressed as the number
plus the word 'per cent‟.

Notes

Avoid using notes unless necessary. If you decide a note is necessary, please use footnotes
rather than endnotes. Notes should be numbered sequentially.

References

Every reference cited in the paper should be included in a reference list at the end of the paper. The reference list should be headed 'References', and contain only those references that are cited in the paper.

We have not specified a referencing style. However, all references should be complete, and the same referencing style should be used throughout the paper. Commonly used general guides to referencing are, for example, the APA Style Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style.

If possible, please use reference management software to manage your references.

Appendices

You may include appendices to your paper. The appendices should appear after the references. If you have more than one appendix, please number the appendices sequentially (Appendix 1, Appendix 2, etc.) and make sure there is an appropriate reference from within the text to each appendix.

This Guidance is also available as a PDF.