Author Guidelines

19 operates on a special issue, guest editor system, and thus does not accept general submissions. Please only submit an article if you have been invited to do so by the guest editor of a special issue or one of the 19 editorial team.

Intern System 

19 is proud to work alongside the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership to provide editorial internships to two PhD students working on projects which intersect with the journal's interdisciplinary focus on the nineteenth century. As an author working on an upcoming issue of 19 you will be assigned to one of our interns, who will serve as your first point of contact for any questions which you may have about the publication cycle. If you require clarification of any of the points below, please feel free to contact them.

Style Guide and Referencing System

19 uses the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) style and referencing system for all of our published articles and reviews. While we do not reject manuscripts which do not conform to this style, to aid us during the peer review and copy-editing processes please, where possible, ensure that your manuscript adheres to MHRA standards, particularly with regard to references. Full details of the current MHRA style guide can be found here.

Ensuring a Blind Review

When preparing your manuscript for submission we ask that you take the following steps to help us ensure the integrity of the blind peer review process. These steps are also taken by your manuscript's editors and reviewers at each stage of the review to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other.

1. As the author, please ensure that your name is removed from the text and any references to your own work are replaced with "Author" and year in the footnotes, instead of your name, article title, etc.

2. Remove author identification from the properties of the manuscript file before it is uploaded.

For Macintosh versions of Word:

  1. Under Tools menu select: Protect Document > Remove personal information from file on save > Save.

For Windows versions of Word:

  1. Under the File menu select: Check for Issues > Inspect Document
  2. Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal Information"
  3. Run the document inspector, which will search the document properties and indicate if any document property fields contain any personal information.
  4. If the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information it will notify you and give you the option to "Remove all", which you will click to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.

Competing Interests 

The Open Library of Humanites, of which 19 is a part, is committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible, all authors, reviewers, and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict, or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the reader's trust in the research data.

Please declare any competing interests that you have at the point of submission. A conflict of interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organizations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived by other people as influencing objective data or decision-making. Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review, and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.

Competing interests can take the form of both financial and non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigour is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation.

Examples of competing interests:

  • receipt of payment, in any form, from an organization or individual related to the subject matter
  • ownership of stocks or shares in organizations directly related to the subject matter
  • receipt of grants or funding
  • membership of relevant boards
  • related patents/applied for patents
  • gifts
  • known relationships that will hinder impartiality (e.g. colleagues, family, mentor, previous supervisor/student)
  • political, religious, ideological interests
  • commercial interests

Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous five years, e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD then their professional relationship should have ended over five years ago. This is a minimum requirement, and individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organization relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence the decision-making.

Article Images 

Authors are encouraged to submit images along with their manuscript and to indicate in their manuscript where each image should be placed (Fig. 1, etc.). At the minimum, authors are required to provide an image to be used as the thumbnail which will appear beside their article on the journal's homepage, and which will also be used in our publicity cycle on Twitter and other online platforms. As a general guide, images taken by the author themselves, which are copyright free due to being in the public domain due to their copyright expiring, or which have been released into the public domain under a creative commons licence are fine to use; for other images, permission must be granted by any copyright holders for the images to be reproduced and shared. We are happy to advise on this where needed.

The following details should be provided for each image to serve as its caption in the completed manuscript (per. MHRA Style Guide): the name of the artist (if known), the title of the work in italics, its date (where known), and the medium of composition. Depending on the medium, the dimensions of the piece (in cm) and its current physical location may be included.

For example: Julia Margaret Cameron, The Kiss of Peace, 1869 (photographed), albumen print, 49 × 37.2 cm (including mount), currently held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.