Research articles
Every research article published in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory passes through double-anonymous peer review before publication. The process is as follows.
Authors first send a 500-word abstract and a curriculum vitae to [email protected] (see Submissions). The editors assess the abstract for fit with the journal’s aims and scope and, if it fits, invite the full manuscript. Manuscripts are checked on receipt for completeness, formatting, and originality.
Each manuscript is then sent to at least two reviewers who are experts in its subject and who are not members of the journal’s editorial team. Reviewers do not know the identity of the author, and the author does not know the identity of the reviewers. Reviewers are asked to assess the originality and significance of the argument, the rigor of the scholarship, the handling of sources, and the clarity of the writing, and to recommend acceptance, revision, or rejection. Author-suggested reviewers may be consulted but are never the only reviewers of a manuscript. Reviews are not published and reviewers remain anonymous after publication unless they choose otherwise.
The Senior Editor and Executive Editor make the final decision on the basis of the reviews. Acceptance is never guaranteed at submission. Authors receive the substance of the reviewers’ comments with the decision. If the process is delayed, authors are told the reason and may withdraw the manuscript.
Special issues and guest editors
Special issues fall within the scope of the journal and are subject to the same double-anonymous review as regular articles. The Senior Editor is responsible for the content of the entire journal, including every special issue. Guest editors’ credentials are checked and approved by the editors before an issue is commissioned, and the editors oversee the guest editors’ work throughout. A manuscript authored by a guest editor is handled by the journal’s editors under an independent review process in which the guest editor takes no part, and such manuscripts make up no more than a quarter of any issue. Special-issue articles are labelled as such on the issue’s table of contents.
Religious Theory and book reviews
Essays, commentary, and conversations published in the Religious Theory feature, and book reviews, are reviewed editorially by at least two members of the editorial team rather than by external peer review. They are not counted as peer-reviewed research articles. A Religious Theory essay later republished in a regular issue is peer-reviewed at that point.
Editors as authors
Members of the editorial team may submit to the journal. Their manuscripts are handled by an editor who is not the author, undergo the same double-anonymous review, and the author-editor is excluded from every stage of the decision. The journal keeps the proportion of articles by editors and board members below a quarter of each issue.
Plagiarism and originality
Submissions must be original work not previously published and not under consideration elsewhere. Manuscripts are checked for overlap with published work; suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, or fabrication is handled under the journal’s publication ethics policy, following the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Automated tools and generative AI
Authors must disclose, in the manuscript, any use of generative artificial intelligence or other automated tools in preparing the work beyond routine language correction, editing, and formatting. Authors are responsible for checking the accuracy of any output produced by such tools and for the whole content of the manuscript. An automated tool cannot be credited as an author, and generative AI cannot be cited as a source. Reviewers and editors do not use generative AI to produce their assessments, and manuscripts under review are never uploaded to such tools. Any routine automated check the journal itself uses, for example text-similarity screening, is verified by a human editor before it affects a decision.
Timing
Articles display their date of publication. The journal aims to reach a first decision within [twelve] weeks of receiving a full manuscript; the average time from submission to publication is [xx] weeks.