Instructions for reviewers
Reviews are to be solicited by Samlaren’s review editor. If you would like to write a review for Samlaren, please contact tim.berndtsson@littvet.uu.se.
Instructions for submitting manuscripts
Unless other arrangements have been made, review manuscripts must reach the review editor no later than September 1. The length of reviews is flexible, but the absolute maximum is 30 000 characters, including spaces. (Most reviews are between 10 000 and 20 000 characters in length.) The language of the text must have been scrupulously scrutinized. Drafts will not be considered. Reviews must not feature headings, subheadings, or endnotes. Samlaren publishes reviews in Swedish, English, Norwegian, and Danish. Manuscripts should be submitted in digital form (Word) to tim.berndtsson@littvet.uu.se.
Reviewers will be sent a free copy of the journal. To ensure receipt of a free copy, authors should inform the editor of their current postal address.
Directions for language and formal aspects
The following are guidelines for the presentation of reviews, along with information about the journal’s standards for manuscripts. These standards also apply to language, that is, texts should be adapted to the Samlaren house style. As a rule, spellings and inflections should reflect those advocated by the Swedish Academy Glossary.
Quotations
Quotations must be justified by the review’s argumentation. Quotations inserted merely for vaguely illustrative purposes should be avoided. Lengthy quotations (more than 3–5 lines) are to be set off as blocks, without quotation marks.
Ellipses
Ellipses should be marked by square brackets: […]. In some cases, it may be necessary to indicate that the deletion comprises more than one sentence; use dashes for such ellipses: [– – –].
Italics
In the text, titles of books, journals, and films are italicized. Names of newspapers are also written in italics, for example, Dagens Nyheter, Clarté, Månadsjournalen. Titles of articles or chapters are placed within quotation marks.
Italics should also be used for concepts or general phrases in foreign languages.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations like e.g. and i.e. should be expressed in words in the running text. The exception is etc., which should be abbreviated also in the running text. See Svenska skrivregler for standard Swedish abbreviations.
The abbreviations f. and ff. may be used for page references (f. = plus one page; ff. = plus 2–5 pages). However, instead of ff., more precise page references are preferred: pp. 55–58 instead of p. 55 ff. Please note the space separating the abbreviation and the number.
Dates
In the article text, write dates in full in the language of the article: for example, Swedish – 2 oktober 1902; American English – October 2, 1902; British English – 2 October 1902.
Titles
For reviews written in Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish, use a period and a space between a main title and a subtitle, even for English, French, and German titles: Raketsommar. Science fiction i Sverige 1950 till 1968; Silence and Subject in Modern Literature. Spoken Violence; Wortgewalt. Peter Weiss und die deutsche Sprache. For reviews written in English, use a full colon and a space instead of a period and a space.
For titles in English, capitalize main words: Black Riders. The Visible Language of Modernism. For titles in French, do not capitalize main words, with the exception of titles starting with an article: La Comédie humaine. This also applies to subtitles.
Other rules for text style
Here are some rules that should be observed in preparing a manuscript:
- Write complete names of years: 1814–1823.
- Use a dash (–), not a hyphen (-) for page intervals or spans of years: pp. 35–40, 1793–1866.
- Use forward slashes to quote lines of poetry in the running text, with a space before and after the slash: ”Barnet är snällt / och katten är snäll / och krukväxterna är döda”.
- Numbers expressed by one word should be written out as words in the running text, unless they represent statistics to be readily compared in the text. Other numbers should be written as numerals: 9.5 %, the year 2000, 794 variants.
- In Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, avoid apostrophes unless they are necessary for understanding: Jens Lapidus roman (not Jens Lapidus’ roman), Anders bok, Caroline Haux avhandling, Karl Marx Kapitalet, Schweiz alper.