Submission process

Submission

All manuscripts (articles, forum articles, special issue articles) have to be submitted online via the Submission Portal.

We put together a simple check list to make sure your manuscript will go out to review:

  • The manuscript deals with an issue of international security with ramifications and/or relevance for more than a single country/conflict. It should speak to the wide CSP readership, which includes students, academics and policy professionals from all the corners of the world;
  • The manuscript deals with a contemporary topic, that is, the empirics or question at hand fall roughly within the past five years.
  • The manuscript has a research question that is presented early on and which is embedded in an academic debate (presented in a literature review).
  • The manuscript combines conceptual/theoretical debates with methodologically sound empirics.
  • The findings are clearly communicated in a way their relevance for policy-makers is immediately evident.
  • The language is sufficiently clear for a broad readership not necessarily familiarized with highly specialized debates.

When preparing manuscripts for submission, please also check the following points:

  • The manuscript is written in accessible, high-quality/native-level, English. It is concise.
  • The manuscript follows the general guidelines, style and references formatting of CSP. When in doubt, the formatting of previously published articles in CSP is the guideline.
  • The manuscript should follow the highest ethical standards:
    • All manuscripts will be checked against plagiarism;
    • At the request of the Co-Editors, authors will immediately make original data, including in exceptional circumstances anonymous interview data, available for replication.
  • The manuscript should be anonymous. It should not be possible to identify the author(s). Self-references are allowed, but they should be treated like all other references. Avoid: “as I have previously argued (author 2007, 2015).
  • When submitting a manuscript for review, authors agree that – in the future – they may act as reviewers for submissions within their fields of expertise. CSP does not consider manuscripts from authors who repeatedly fail to act as reviewers themselves.

Initial decision by the Co-Editors

The Co-Editors seek to make an initial decision within two weeks. Submissions that do not fully comply with the points made above will be automatically unsubmitted. Submissions that do not fall in the aims and scope of the journal or that are unlikely to pass peer-review will be rejected at this stage. The majority of submitted manuscripts is rejected at this stage, oftentimes because manuscripts remain underdeveloped with regard to argumentation, contribution to the literature, writing style, or speak to a too-restricted audience. Only manuscripts for which there is a good chance of eventual acceptance move to the next stage.

Peer-review process

All manuscripts will be subject to anonymous double blind peer-review. They will be reviewed by 2-4 reviewers. Reviewers will advise the editors on the suitability and potential of manuscripts for CSP and will provide comments to the authors for improvement.

Final decision by the Co-Editors

On the basis of the peer-review process, the Co-Editors will jointly make a final decision normally within six weeks after initial submission. This can be accept, reject, revise-and-resubmit or minor revisions. In the case of revise-and-resubmit, authors are requested to make changes to their original manuscript along the lines of the reviewer reports prior to resubmission. They should submit (1) a cover letter discussing the revisions made, (2) a manuscript with track-changes and (3) a clean manuscript without track-changes. All resubmitted manuscripts will be again sent out for peer-review.

Conditional acceptance

Any acceptance/minor revisions/revise-and-resubmit decision will likely come with one of the following conditions:

  • The author(s) might be asked to improve the quality of the language, including by retaining a professional language editor;
  • The author(s) might be asked to make the manuscript shorter and more concise;
  • The author(s) might be asked to gear the manuscript towards a broader audience, including by amending the title, abstract and introduction;
  • All authors will be asked to write a short 800-1000 word blog post (for the CSP website) geared towards the general audience, in which they should reflect on their findings in layman’s terms and possibly include policy recommendations. This blog post should not simply be cut-and-paste or a short summary of the article. It should be an accessible short note: a ‘teaser’ to increase the readership of the full article. This blog post can also be promoted through social media.

The conditional acceptance stage includes detailed copy-editing by the editors, who can still raise comments and recommend textual edits. Manuscripts are only accepted and send to production once they are in an optimal state.