Formatting styleguide

Eludamos Style Guide for Submissions
Last updated: April 2025

 

As a diamond open-access journal, we run primarily on volunteer labour. We therefore greatly appreciate it when authors pay careful attention to the submission guidelines and house style. This speeds up copy and layout editing should your article be accepted.

 

Title page

Alongside your article submission, include a title page document. While the article should be anonymised, the title page should not. You must include the following:

  • Article title
  • Author name(s)
  • Author affiliation(s)
  • Author ORCID iD(s)
  • Abstract (maximum 300 words)
  • Keywords

You may also include the following if applicable:

  • Acknowledgements
  • Conflicts of interest (if you are unsure whether something constitutes a conflict of interest, contact the editors)
  • Funding statement
  • Ethical approval statement
  • Data availability statement
  • AI statement (if you have used AI tools in your article, you should explain this according to our AI policy)
  • Co-authorship statement (if you are more than one author, you should explain how each author contributed to the paper according to our authorship criteria)
  • Any other information that the editors should have

Article

Submissions to Eludamos should follow this style guide. Submissions which do not may be returned to the author before they will be considered for peer review. The style is roughly based on APA 7th edition, so if in doubt refer to that.

Basic requirements

  • Up to 8,000 words (excluding references), unless the call for papers specifies otherwise.
  • Submit as a Word document (.docx) or similar (.rtf, .odt, etc.). Do not submit as a PDF or TeX file.

Formatting

  • Times New Roman 12-point font for normal body text.
  • 5 line spacing.
  • Headings should be cleared distinguished for each level. E.g., H1 16 pt bold; H2 14 pt bold; H3 12 pt bold; H4 12 pt italic. Do not skip heading levels in the hierarchy.
  • Quotations longer than 40 words should be formatted as a block quote.
  • Footnotes rather than endnotes, and only sparingly.

Style

  • Use whichever English convention you are comfortable with, but be aware that many readers will not be familiar with forms of English other than British or American.
  • Remember that Eludamos is an interdisciplinary journal and so has readers from many different fields. When you use field-specific terminology, consider whether it should be briefly explained.
  • Use the singular ‘they’ when appropriate. Do not use “he/she”, “(s)he”, “he or she” and so on. E.g.: “When the player opens the door, they find the boss waiting for them.”
  • Use italics for non-English words that are uncommonly used, for introducing key terms and, sparingly, for emphasis. Do not use bold or underlined formatting without good reason.
  • Use acronyms sparingly. Introduce acronyms in parentheses the first time they are used. For example, “This paper explores dynamic difficult adjustment (DDA)”. For very well-known acronyms (such as NASA, EU, USA, etc.), you do not need to write them out in full first.
  • You may use ‘scare quotes’ when appropriate. These should use ‘single inverted commas’ rather than double to distinguish them from “quotations”.
  • If you quote from non-English-language sources, either paraphrase rather than quoting directly, or provide a translation following the quotation.

References and citations

Eludamos follows the APA 7th Edition referencing style. If you use a reference manage like Zotero, set it to use APA 7 and there should be no issues.

You can find the citation and referencing guidelines along with examples on the APA website (https://apastyle.apa.org/). At the end of this style guide there are many random references you can look at as examples.

  • Following APA 7 style, citations are provided in-line and follow an author-date
  • Aim to be clear and thorough with your citation. Readers should be able to see precisely which arguments or parts of your text are attributed to someone else. They should also be able to follow them up easily. To that end, include page numbers (or equivalents such as paragraph, line or section numbers) whenever possible. For example:

John Smith (2015, pp. 12–13) argues that the invention of videogames was a big mistake. However, Jane Doe notes that “videogames are, in fact, good” (2016, para. 2). Both views run counter to prevalent arguments that videogames are instead neutral (Simpson, 1995; Thomas, 2003, sec. ‘Videogames’).

  • When you include multiple works in an in-text citation, order them alphabetically, not chronologically (Doe, 2014; Simpson, 1995; Williams & Li, 2004).
  • Always include a DOI for journal articles. If a DOI is not available, provide the URL. Only in rare cases will neither be available (e.g., old print journal articles).
  • Following APA 7 guidelines, do not include the publisher’s location. Nobody cares where Routledge’s offices are.

Accessibility

Eludamos is committed to Septentrio’s accessibility guidelines. Help us to adhere to these by ensuring the following in your submission:

  • If you use images in your article, please include alt-text for those images.
  • If you use graphs or other visualisations, ensure that information is not only conveyed through colour. For example, if you use a line chart, as well as distinguishing lines by colours, make one solid, one dashed, one dotted, etc.
  • Do not skip levels in the heading hierarchy.