How to submit an article?

If you have a finished article and it fits the announced topic of one of the next issues, please, contact us via email svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com.

If the topic of your article does not fit into the announced issues, please still contact us. Briefly describe the content of your article, and the editors will consider your application. That will be exceedingly valuable for our consideration of the topics for the next issues.

If you do not have an article yet but do have a striking idea / material / research plan in mind, you are welcome to contact us as well. Describe your idea, subject matter and research methods, as well as an approximate structure of a future article. We will let you know if we are interested in such an article and suggest how to work on the idea so that the article fits better into the thematic issue.

If you are interested in crafting a book review / an interview with a researcher / the coverage of a cultural event, we gladly accept new authors to the cultural section of the journal. Email us at svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com, attach samples of your writing and several topics that you are ready to work with.

If the editorial office confirms your topic, your article is going to be double-blind peer reviewed. Successful completion of the procedure ensures the publication of the article.

If you want to write an article, but doubt that it will be accepted, it is worth trying. Double-blind peer review is a common procedure among major scientific journals. Both specialists rarely refuse. Much more often an article gets the "revise and resubmit" status. Anyway, after reviewing you will receive two independent commentaries with recommendations.

You can become a peer reviewer, if you are a graduate or postgraduate student, or a scholar. If you belong to one of these categories — please, contact us via email. If there are any articles that match your academic background and research interests, we will contact you to agree on further work.

If you want to translate different articles for our journal, please, contact us via email svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com. If there are any articles to translate, we will contact you and agree on further work. We accept translations from various languages in English or Russian language.

If you want to translate an article you have found in English or Russian language and to publish it, you should send us a letter with an original article or a link to it. We will contact its author or copyright owner for permission to publish. When there is an answer, we will inform you whether to start your work on it or not.

If you want to take part in the work on the journal, but all the previous ways do not suit you, you should email us at svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com . In the letter, please tell us about your skills and experience. Mostly, we need specialists in the sphere of law (e. g. for copyright), and literary editing of English texts.

Here you can find the editorial standards for submissions.

Do you have any questions left? Email us at svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com.
 

Double-Blind Peer Review 

Double-Blind Peer Review is a procedure of reading and evaluating an article by specialists who have no information about the author. According to this independent assessment, the editorial office decides whether to publish the work or not. 

How does it work?

1. Firstly, the editorial office analyzes the match of  your topic to the issue’s subject. If the topic suits us, we are sending your article to two peer reviewers. 
2. The peer reviewers are your colleagues whose research interests involve your topic. The works by undergraduate students are reviewed by graduates, and the works by graduates — by postgraduates. The assessment may be the following: “Accepted”, “Revise and resubmit”, “Rejected”.
3. The editorial office gets two reviews and decides on the publication. If there are similar assessments, the editorial office agrees on it. If the reviewers’ opinions differ, the decision remains with the editors. 

Why?

The blind peer review procedure is very common  in the academic community. This allows you to get independent reviews of your work. For editors it is a good way to select valuable works to publish. This process of participating is a great experience for further academic career.

Who can become a reviewer?

Graduate and postgraduate students and academics of the humanities can take part in peer reviewing. For each article we choose a reviewer largely experienced with the topic, so we are open to all specialists. Perhaps, you are that narrow specialist who we are waiting for. Write at svoimi.slovami.journal@gmail.com and we will contact you and agree on further work.

Manuscript submission guidelines

The journal accepts articles written by undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students devoted to the research in the fields of language and literary studies, history, anthropology and other humanities. Manuscripts submitted to In your own words (“Svoimi Slovami”) should not be under simultaneous consideration by any other journal, nor should they have been published elsewhere.

Articles selected by the editors undergo a double-blind peer review procedure, according to the results of which the article can be accepted for publication without changes, returned to the author for revision, or rejected.

The article should be written in Russian or English.

The manuscript should be no less than 20,000 and no more than 40,000 characters (including spaces, as well as footnotes and a reference list).

Formatting Requirements

The text editor that must be used is MS Word, the font is Times New Roman, font size is 12, line spacing – 1.5, margins – 2 cm on all sides, indentation at the beginning of the paragraph – 1.25; text is left-aligned.

Example of a heading of an article. You may change the data and copy this heading to the beginning of your article. Please specify separately the information about your supervisor (full namelc; place of work; e-mail address). It will help us to avoid sending him/her your paper erroneously (for the mandatory procedure of the blind peer review).

Please, format the references inside the article according to The Chicago Manual of Style. Below are instructions on how to create a reference list.

All notes are formatted as endnotes. At the same time, the ordinal number is indicated inside the text with numbers in square brackets. An example of a note inside the text: [1]. Example of an end note: [1] — One of the most famous biographical essays about Vietnam War.

If desired, the author can express gratitude to their supervisor in the first note. There the author also specifies any sources of funding (if applicable).

How to format illustrations

Illustrations can be added to the article, while the author himself/herself is responsible for the copyright, including obtaining permissions for publications.

No more than 5 illustrations are allowed in one article.

Also, illustrations must be separately uploaded to any cloud service (Google Drive, Yandex Drive) and you should provide a download link. All images must be submitted in JPG or PNG format with a resolution of at least 300 dpi. In the file names, we indicate only the illustration number: 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. In such a way we can insert your illustrations into the journal without losing quality.

Inside of the text links to illustrations are designated as: (see Figure 1), (Fig. 1), “as shown in Figure 1”, “<...> depicted in the painting/photograph/illustration 1”.

All illustrations are located in the text in the same place where they are mentioned. For example, if an illustration is mentioned in the middle of a paragraph, then in the manuscript it is placed immediately after this paragraph.

All illustrations must have titles; it is a required condition. The title is placed in the manuscript immediately below the image. 

An example of captions for illustrations: Figure 1. A scene from Atlantis (2019).

How to format a References page

A list of sources (including archival materials) is attached to the article in the alphabetic order. Russian-language sources are placed first. For articles on Russian and English languages rules for formatting references differ.

The article is accompanied by a reference list in alphabetical order. 

If your article is written in Russian, consult the Russian version of this webpage. For articles in English, please refer to The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), Author-Date System.

A detailed guide can be found here. An example of the formatted article can be found here.