Submissions

Submission
Pre-evaluation & Peer Review
Proofreading
Liability and copyright
General style guidelines
Critical apparatus (APA)
Examples

Submission

Papers submitted to the Comillas Journal of International Relations must be sent in electronic support, in a .docx file (template), and they will be sent through this same web, through which communication between the journal and the authors will be established.

The work to be submitted must be original, not having been published or accepted for publication in the same or another language nor being in the process of being published or assessed by another journal. The original work must be submitted completely finished and must be adapted to the instructions given by the journal, which you will find in this section.

The metadata and the first page of the articles must include:

1. Title of the article in the original language and in English.
2. An abstract (150 words maximum) in the original language of the article and in English. It must stand on its own because it is the most accessible part of your article and the part that determines interest in it. It should be synthetic and allow the readers to know the most important points of your research and reflect why it is important to your field of research. It is recommended to repeat the words of the title in the abstract so that they carry more weight in search engines. In addition, a good abstract can speed up the peer review process as reviewers only receive the abstract before accepting the review.
3. A list of keywords in the original language of the article and in English. Keywords are a tool to help search engines, so they should represent the content of the article and be specific to the field of research.

The metadata of the article (fields in the web submission form) must state:

1. Name and surname of ALL authors. Authors are encouraged to use their standardised signature to facilitate citation counting and retrieval of their entire output throughout their career.
2. Institution (or establishment, if any), in its standardised form, without abbreviations and in the original language to avoid variants of non-approved names.
3. E-mail, ORCID (full URL) and, if available, personal website. The e-mail address and ORCID will appear on the first page of the article.

In case the article has been written by several authors, all those who have made a substantial contribution to the article should be included in the submission form. It should be taken into consideration that the order of appearance will reflect the responsibility of each one in the elaboration of the research, bearing in mind that the first author will be the main author and the following authors will appear in order according to their involvement.

The journal does not impose any limit on the number of authors, as long as this number is justified by the complexity of the study. The journal will not accept subsequent amendments or add new authors.

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Pre-evaluation & Peer Review

Once the manuscript has been received, a pre-assessment of the text will be carried out to analyse whether the subject of the article is of interest and appropriate to the scope of the journal and whether it meets the minimum quality requirements, as well as the formal submission specifications (see above) and style guidelines (see below).

Rejected originals will not enter the assessment process. Those originals that have aspects that can be corrected will be returned to their authors before proceeding with the review. In this case, authors should complete them and make the appropriate formal adjustments. Otherwise, these works will not continue with the review process.

Once the pre-assessment phase is completed, the formal evaluation process will begin and will be sent anonymously to two external reviewers, experts in the field, who will issue an opinion based on the originality, relevance and methodological rigour of the manuscript.

This opinion shall state the grounds on which it is based, indicating whether they recommend accepting the original, a modified version or rejecting it. The reviewers' opinions are not conclusive, but they are decisive. Ultimately, the final decision will be made by the directors. In some cases a third opinion may be requested, in particular where there is a significant divergence of opinion between the assessors.

By submitting the manuscript, the authors accept that it will be subject to the opinion of the reviewers and editors, adjusting the final wording of the text to the indications given by them. To this end, they shall include all amendments deemed essential and, as far as possible, shall also take account of their suggestions.

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Proofreading

The journal will send authors a galley and they will have ten days to correct it. If there has been no response, it will be understood that no changes are desired.

The author/s should understand that these proofs are not sent for the article to be rewritten, but for mistakes (if any) to be corrected. Changes may affect the structure and organisation of text and may slow down the publication of the article.

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Liability and copyright

The author, by submitting the manuscript, guarantees to the journal the authorship and originality of the manuscript, assuming exclusive liability for it.

The journal and its editors do not necessarily endorse the content, assessments and conclusions of the articles published. Neither shall they assume any responsibility for the consequences of the possible use by third parties of the information and criteria incorporated in these works.

Authors of articles accepted in Comillas Journal of International Relations preserve all intellectual property rights over their work and grant the journal the necessary distribution and public communication permissions to publish them under a licence of  Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-Attribution 4.0 International.

Authors must be able to prove that they have the necessary permissions for the use of the photographs and graphs included in their research, bearing in mind that permission from the copyright owner is required to reproduce or adapt original tables and figures and that they must be properly cited. When a figure or table has been created by the author, it is not necessary to add the reference; it is understood that everything that is not referenced is the author's own work.

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General style guidelines

It is recommended to follow the usual structure of a research paper: presentation and purpose of the work, description of the sources and methodology, presentation and discussion of the results, conclusions and list of references.

Use of bold, italics, and inverted commas

Bold type should be avoided and used only for headings and titles of figures, graphs or tables.

Italics (in the body of the article) should only be used to emphasise words or short phrases if they are foreign words, Latin words, are part of slang, take an incorrect form or are not being used in the proper sense of the words.

The main functions of inverted commas are to express irony, to indicate to the reader that it is a vulgarism, that the author cannot find a more appropriate word or that it has connotations with which they do not identify. Inverted commas shall be used. They may also be used to reproduce verbatim an excerpt from another work of less than 40 words in length. If you are quoting text within text, double inverted commas will be used first, followed by single inverted commas.

Punctuation marks and note calls always follow the closing quotation mark. If a quotation ends with a punctuation mark, it is removed.

Use of capital letters

Excessive use of capital letters should be avoided, limiting their use.

The following are some examples that may be of use:

• Proper nouns
• Names of divinities
• Geographical areas. Continents, countries, cities, seas, rivers, geopolitical areas, cardinal points: América, Perú, la Rioja, la Mancha, Picos de Europa, Occidente, Oriente Medio, Cono Sur, Magreb, Norte, Sudeste.
• Entities, institutions, bodies, departments: Universidad Pontificia Comillas; Real Instituto Elcano; Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Unión Europea y Cooperación.
• Proper names of official documents Acuerdo de Comercio y Cooperación; Real Decreto-Ley 38/2020, de 29 de diciembre de 2020.
• Names of subjects and scientific disciplines: Política Exterior y Seguridad Internacional; Economía y Negocios; Diplomacia.
• Historical events: la Revolución francesa; Segunda Guerra Mundial.

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Critical apparatus (APA)

A very important part of the writing process is to contextualise the work by citing those sources that have directly influenced the research.

References to sources cited should follow the APA style, which states that parenthetical quotations should be used, inserted in the text, and a list, with the references in alphabetical order, at the end of the article. Each reference quoted in the text must appear in the final list.

Parenthetical quotations

In the text, the transcription of the ideas that we quote can basically appear in two ways: by reformulating the idea in the wording of the article (paraphrasing) or by reproducing literally the words of the author we are quoting (direct quotation).

The main elements of a parenthetical quotation are the author's surname(s) and year and, if the citation is verbatim, the page(s) on which it appears. Depending on the number of authors of the referenced work, the standard establishes the following indications.

One author

When the source we are citing has one author, the standard establishes that the author's surname, the year of publication and the page or pages should be put in brackets next to the text.

Two authors

If the source has two authors, the surnames of the two authors separated by "&" followed by the year of publication and the page or pages where it appears in the source will appear in brackets.

Multiple authors

If the source has three or more authors, include the name of the main author plus "et al.” (in round) in each quotation, including the first, unless it creates ambiguity. In order to avoid ambiguity, write as many names as necessary to distinguish the references and abbreviate the rest.

"[...] la responsabilidad social de las empresas y el impacto comunitario de la actividad empresarial (Flores-Guerrero et al., 2013).

When several works have one or more authors with the same name(s) and the same date, enter a letter after the year. This combination is used both for in-text quotations and for the reference list.

[...] en el Puerto del Pireo o al adquirir una participación mayoritaria en NOATUM, una de las principales operadoras de puertos de España (Izquierdo, 2018c, p. 122).

Institutional author or group of authors

When the responsibility for authorship falls on an institution, organisation, research group or corporate author, the first time they appear in the text, the full name must be stated. For the following quotations we can use abbreviations or acronyms if the abbreviation is known. In the list of references, do not abbreviate the name of the group of authors.

[...] En 2017 ya se había logrado mitigar la emisión de 5.3 millones de toneladas de CO₂eq (Secretaría de Medioambiente de la Ciudad de México, 2017).

La Ciudad de México fue elegida como una de las ocho ciudades piloto para este proyecto (SEDEMA, 2017).

If the author's name is part of the reasoning in the writing, only the year and pages shall be included:

Para Janne Nijman (2016), se podría decir que la globalización, urbanización y descentralización actuales remodelan la estructura de poder del Estado y reconfiguran su estructura de autoridad y responsabilidad.

If the quotation is based on the text, the author, year and page(s) are included at the end:

[…] Estas dos últimas películas diseccionan, de manera premeditadamente cruel, a la familia entendida como una estructura social anacrónica y disfuncional (Santos, 1999, pp. 359-371).

When the reproduced extract is longer than 40 words, it should be indented, in a smaller font, without quotation marks and in a separate paragraph.

Coaldrake (2013) comenta cómo de hecho la tradición japonesa ha tendido a la unidad de las artes y no a una clasificación taxonómica de las mismas:

El genio del arte japonés ha sido históricamente la manera en que objetos prácticos tales como cajas y biombos fueron elevados a los niveles estéticos más altos. Históricamente no existía una distinción entre lo bello y lo decorativo: el arte japonés era melifluamente ambos al mismo tiempo. (p. 177)

If the quotation is based on the text, after a full stop, the author, year and page(s) are included at the end.

[...] refleja el grado de conocimiento que se tenía en la década de los 70 del siglo XIX sobre el arte japonés:

[…] me encantó una fuente [de porcelana] de cerca de un metro de diámetro, con una alegoría de las cuatro estaciones y una preciosa cenefa de ligeras mariposas junto al borde. La finura de los esmaltes y la viveza de los colores eran dignas de los mejores tiempos del decadente arte. Los abanicos eran muy originales y sus pinturas de un gusto tan extraño que han logrado los favores de la versátil Moda, insaciable Diosa del contraste. (Navarro, 1875, pp. 555-556)

List of references

The list of references at the end of the article provides the necessary information to identify and retrieve each source. The APA style establishes that the list only includes the references cited in the article, unlike the bibliography, which includes all the sources that have been consulted for the research. All the complete references of the works cited in the text of the article must appear, regardless of the type of source, leaving only the list, without including their classification titles, in alphabetical order and with French indentation. Any reference with a DOI number (Digital Object Identifier) shall include it at the end of the reference.

Pay special attention to this list, if the elements of the references are not complete or there are inconsistencies in the rules it may affect the extraction of citations by the databases in which the journal is indexed.

Components of the references

Each reference usually contains the following elements: author, date of publication, title and publication details (all the information necessary for the unique identification and bibliographic search of the source).

Author and publisher

Reverse the order of the author's name (surname(s), first initial), the list should be sorted alphabetically by the first author's surname. If several works by the same author(s) appear, the name shall be included in both the first and the following references, even if it is repeated, and they shall be ordered by date of publication.

In the case of a co-authored work, all authors up to 20 shall be cited. If there are 20 or more, the first 19 are listed, ellipses are added and the last one is added.

If the reference does not have an author, the title followed by a full stop is placed in the author's position, before the date of publication.

If we are citing a book in which the publisher, coordinator, director, compiler or organiser appears instead of the author, the name or names of the author should be placed in the author's place and the responsibility for the publication should be put in brackets (ed., eds., coord., coords., dir., dirs., comps., comps., or org., orgs.). The full stop is placed after the closing parenthesis.

Alcántara, M. (ed.). (2013). Sistemas políticos de América Latina: América del Sur. Tecnos.

In the case of referencing a chapter of an edited book, the name and surname of the authors of the chapter are inverted, but not the name of the publisher, which must be preceded by the preposition "In". For book chapters without a publisher, simply add "In" before the book title.

Soeya, Y. (2015). The evolution of Japan’s Public Diplomacy: Haunted by its Past History. En J. Melissen y Y. Sohn (eds.), Understanding Public Diplomacy in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137532299_5

Date

Information on the date of publication is given in brackets after the author information.

If a newspaper or bulletin is being cited, the exact date of publication (month and day) is included.

Meléndez, J. (2013, 12 de septiembre). Panamá se alía con Colombia en la pugna regional contra Nicaragua. El País. https://elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/12/actualidad/1379003003_514586.html

When there is no information on the date of publication, it can be indicated by the abbreviation n.d. in brackets.

For those articles that have been accepted for publication but have not been published, the date (and probably number or volume) will not be known until they are published, so the reference [in press] should be included in square brackets instead.

Title

The title of articles and chapters of a book are written in round, while the title of books and journals are written in italics.

When the work has a subtitle, it is written after the title followed by a colon.

Egenhofer, C., Alessi, M., Núñez Ferrer, J. y Tubiana, L. (2010). Greening EU Cities: The Emerging EU Strategy to Address Climate Change. Centre for European Policy Studies.

Publication information

Add in brackets the necessary information to identify the work and do not add a full stop between the title and the brackets. The issue number of the second edition onwards shall be indicated:

Gill, S. (2008). Power and Resistance in the New World Order (2.ª ed.). Palgrave.

If the work has several volumes, the title of the volume is treated as a second part of the title, in italics, including the number and separated by a colon. If the volume has no title of its own, only the number in brackets is added. Series or collection information is not included to avoid confusion.

If both edition and volume information is included, separate both elements by a comma, placing the edition information first.

It may be necessary to provide further information to retrieve the resource we are citing (e.g. special number), in which case it is enclosed in square brackets right after the title.

For periodicals, the volume information is written in italics separated from the journal title by a comma. The abbreviation Vol. is not used. The number information (if available) is followed by the volume in brackets, without italics and without space, and the range of pages it occupies in the publication separated by a comma. End with a dot at the end of the element.

Do not include the city in which the publisher is located, an internet search by the reader makes the work easy to locate. Information on the place of publication may not be clear in the case of international publishers, publishers with offices in different countries or publishers that only publish in digital format.

Smith, S., Hadfield, A. y Dunne, T. (2008). Foreign Policy. Theories, actors, cases. Oxford University Press.

Digital identifiers

Include any information that will allow retrieval of the resource in case you have a digital version.

Do not write a full stop after a URL. Do not include information about the database in which the resource is located, as the coverage of a journal in a specific database may change. To avoid noise in the information, do not include unnecessary phrases before the link such as retrieved from, accessible at, DOI, online, etc., as well as consulted on and the date of consultation or access, unless the content is subject to change or it is a legal resource where the date of consultation is relevant information.

Include the DOI whenever the resource has one. The full URL must be included.

Finnemore, M. y Sikkink, K. (1998). International Norm Dynamics and Political Change. International Organization, 52(4), 887-917. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550789

The DOI uniquely identifies the resource, allows retrieval by readers and facilitates citation counting.

DOI information usually appears on the first page of the article. Crossref has a search tool to complete this information https://search.crossref.org/references

Not only articles have DOIs, but books, book chapters, images, etc. can also have a DOI.

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Reference examples

Periodicals

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of the article. Title of Periodical, volume(number), 00-00. https://doi.org/xx.xxxxxxx
Author, A. A. [in press]. Title of the article. Title of Periodical. https://doi.org/xx.xxxxxxx

Books

Author, A. A. (Year). Title. Publisher name.
Author, A. A. (ed.). (Year). Title (X ed.). Publisher name.

Multivolume works

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the work : Vol. X. Title of the volumen. Publisher name.

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the work (X ed., Vol. X). Publisher name.

Book chapters

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of the chapter. In E. Editor & F. Editor (eds.), Title of the book (pp. xx-xx). Publisher name.

Dictionary / Encyclopedia / Reference Works

Title of the entry. (Year, month day). in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/xxxxxx

Editor. (n.d.). Entry. In Title of the dictionary, encyclopedia. https://dictionary.org/entry

Reports / Working paper

Author, A. A. (Year). Title (Report No. xxx). Publisher name.
Author, A. A. (Year). Title (Working paper No. XXX). https://doi.org/xxxxxx

Thesis

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of Thesis (Doctoral Dissertation). Name of Institution, Location.

Conference sessions

Presenter, A., Presenter, B., & Presenter, C. (Date). Title of contribution [Type of contribution]. Conference name, Location. https://XXXXX

Law

Name of law, title # U.S.C. § section #.

Newspaper

Author, A. (Year, month day). Title of the article. Title of Newspaper. https://url.com/noticia.html

Blog

Autor, A. (Year, month day). Title post. Webpage. https://blog.es/post.html

Video

Author, A. (Year, month day). Title of talk [Video File]. TED Talk. https://ted.com/xxxx
TED. (Year, month day). Title of video [Video File]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/xxxxxxxx
User. (Year, month day). Title of video [video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/xxxx

Webinar

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of webinar [Webinar]. Institution. https://url.com/xxxxxxx

Podcast

Author, A. (Host). (Date-present). Title of Podcast [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/xxxxxxx
Author, A. (Host). (Year). Title of episode (Season No., Episode No.) [Audio podcast]. In Title of Podcast. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/xxxxx

Social Network

Author, A. [@username]. (Year, month day). Content of the post up to the first 20 words [description of audiovisuals] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/xxxxx
Author, A., Name of group. [@username]. (Year, month day). Content of the post up to the first 20 words [description of audiovisuals]. Facebook. https://facebook.com/xxxxxxxx