‘Sport in History’ Contributors’ Guidelines

Sport in History publishes articles on all aspects of the history of sport and recreation. It is published in May and November of each year. It also publishes reviews of books related to the field, review articles and other communications . Our goal is to reach a decision on submitted articles within three months, and to publish those accepted within twelve months of acceptance. Although the editors will give an approximate date of publication when an article is accepted, they reserve the right to change that date at short notice.

The current editors are Professor Jeff Hill and Dr Tony Collins, both the International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester. The reviews editor is Dr Richard Cox

Articles must not exceed 8,000 words. The length of book reviews should be pre-arranged with the reviews editor.

Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyright material and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in the typescript.

The preferred word-processing format is Microsoft Word (Mac or Windows) but other formats can be accommodated if previously arranged. Please indicate the version number of the software used, for example, Word:mac v.X or MS Word 97.

Authors should ensure that these guidelines are strictly adhered to. The editors reserve the right to return articles which do not meet these guidelines.

Titles of articles should be short and plainly descriptive. The heading of the article should include, on separate lines, the title (in capitals and centred), the author's name (in capitals and centred), and the author's academic institution (in italics and centred). The text should be dated or versioned in order to avoid confusion if amended versions are submitted later. Do not forget to paginate at the top of the page.

Copy, including footnotes, should be double spaced, with one-inch margins all round and a ragged right margin.

Please use footnotes, not endnotes.

Paragraphs should be separated by indents, not line breaks. The article’s first paragraph, and any sub-sections, should not be indented.

Sub-sections are useful for breaking an article into manageable chunks. They are desirable but are not mandatory. If you use them, they should be separated by roman numerals or have headings of no more than thirty characters. Sub-headings should centred, in bold type and use sentence case; do not use capitalisation throughout the sub-headings. If acknowledgements are necessary, they should be made at the beginning and marked as footnote ‘1’.

When submitting a single book review the review should have no title other than the title of the book reviewed. Put your academic affiliation and name in capitals at the end. Do not use footnotes or endnotes.

If your article uses tables, graphs or illustrations, please provide them as separate files, not as part of the main text of the article. Make sure that they are numbered in sequence throughout the article and that references to sources and descriptive headings are attached. Please indicate clearly where the material is to appear in the text and ensure that there is a reference to it in the text. Do not forget that you are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyrighted material.

Many tedious hours have been wasted by contributors to journals because they did not follow stylistic conventions and have subsequently had to revise their manuscripts. Do not fall into this trap; follow these guidelines and save your time. Typescripts which do not so will be returned for amendment.

Quotations. Follow the punctuation, capitalization and spelling of the original. For short quotations use single quotation marks (except that quotations within quotations take double quotation marks). Long quotations of fifty words or more should be typed in a separate block with a line space above and below, and double spaced, without quotation marks. Use three point ellipses ( ... ) when omitting material within quotations. Punctuation should be inserted after the closing quotation marks. There are two exceptions to this: 1. where the quote ends with an exclamation or question mark belonging to the quotation; 2. where the quote is, or ends with, a complete sentence that begins with a capital letter.

Spelling. Use British English rather than American conventions. Foreign words and phrases should be italicized, except when they are in everyday English usage. For example, phronesis, ius naturale, status quo, ex officio. Foreign words which have become naturalised English words, such as elite, regime and role, do not have accents.

Titles cited in the text. The titles of books should be italicized. Underlining or inverted commas should not be used. Only use inverted commas if naming a chapter of a book or an individual essay. For example, ‘A full treatment of the question can be found in chapter sixteen, ‘Wage slaves or labour aristocrats?', in Wray Vamplew's Pay up and play the game (1988).’

Numerals. All numbers should be spelt out to ninety-nine, except when used in groups or in statistical discussion, e.g. ‘15 voted for, 27 against, and 13 abstained’. ‘2,000’ takes a comma. Please note elisions: 156-9, but (for number in the teens) 115-16.

Punctuation. The possessive ‘s’ following an ‘s’ should be used as in Stanley Matthews’s or Leeds’s rather than Matthews' or Leeds’. The exception is for people in the ancient world who do not carry the final ‘s’, for example ‘Jesus' disciples’.

Dates. When citing dates in the text of an article use the format 29 August 1895 - note that there are no commas. However, for footnotes use 29 Aug. 1895.

Always place a comma before dates in titles of books and articles. For example, Soccer and society. South Wales, 1900-1939.

Decades should be written 1890s not 1890's; eighties not '80s. ‘Nineteenth century’ (noun, no hyphen); ‘nineteenth-century’ (adjective, use hyphen). ‘From 1919 to 1939’, not ‘from 1919-39' and ‘between 1919 and 1939', not `between 1919-39'.

Abbreviations. Please note the following conventions for abbreviations: ed. eds. vol. vols. 2nd edn Mr Dr St. Those abbreviations which do not use points are contractions where the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the word.

Footnotes. Type double spaced, place at the end of the article and number in a single sequence throughout.

Footnotes should be used to cite sources but not to provide additional commentary or information.

W. Bently Capper, ed., Licensed houses and their management (3 vols., London, 1923), II, pp. 243-54.

Richard Holt, Sport and the British (Oxford, 1989), pp. 32-5, 260-7.

Jack Williams, ‘Cricket’, in Tony Mason, ed., Sport in Britain: a social history (Cambridge, 1989), p. 137.

Mike Cronin, `Arthur Elvin and the dogs of Wembley', The Sports Historian, 22 (2) (2001), pp. 100- 14.

• Lower case is used in titles, except for journals and newspapers. Lower case is also used for `bk', `ch.'.

• The authors' names should be cited as they appear in the original. The place of publication is cited but not the publisher.

• Page references use ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’. Page numbers are elided.

• The volume number, but not the issue number, of journals is given. Volume numbers are given in arabic numerals for journals, but for multi-volume books the volume number is cited in Roman numerals.

• Subtitles should be separated by colons

• The following abbreviations are used: ‘ed.’ and ‘eds.’ not ‘(ed.)’ and ‘(eds.)’; ‘ch.’ not ‘chap.’

Use the author's surname and short title, not author's name alone. For example, Taylor, Proud Preston, pp. 123-7. Williams, ‘Cricket’, pp. 129-34.

Use abbreviations (e.g. for archive repositories) only if the abbreviation has been explained in the initial reference. For example, BBC: T42/40/1.

• Ibid. - when the immediately preceding item is repeated, where only a different page (or

• Idem. - when the immediately preceding author's name is repeated, where only a different book or article title (and page references) needs to be recorded.

• passim. - when a topic is referred to periodically throughout the source cited. Do not use ‘op. cit.’ or ‘loc. cit.’ Only use ‘cf.’ when it really does mean ‘compare’, otherwise use ‘see’.

Use upper case where convention insists, such as in the title of sporting organisations or to avoid ambiguity: the Bank of England, the Football League, the House of Commons, the International Olympic Committee, the Rugby Football League.

Use lower case for historical systems, periods, events, and religions, wherever possible: the British empire, home rule, the commonwealth, folk football, puritans. But use upper case to avoid ambiguity or where convention insists: the First World War, the French Revolution, the Third Republic; Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Quaker.