Author Guidelines

Process and General Characteristics

Zygon is an interdisciplinary journal with readership throughout the humanities as well as the social and physical sciences. Our article submission process and documentation requirement is a compilation of general practices found throughout all of these disciplines so specific details contained within our guidelines may be new or unfamiliar to potential authors. We ask that you thoroughly familiarize yourself with the following guidelines before submitting a manuscript for consideration.

Zygon conducts a double-anonymous peer review process which begins when an author registers with our article submission site on. Our online system asks submitting authors to provide the following:

(1) the names of all authors
(2) an article title of no more than 15 words
(3) between three and ten keywords
(4) an abstract of no more than 160 words (abstracts and keywords are important for indexing services and modern search tools, and thus deserve proper attention)
(5) a file containing the anonymous manuscript text (preferably MSWord but other formats are also supported)
(6) any figures or graphic file(s) to which authors refer in their manuscript text sent as separate files

The files can be uploaded in Word or another common word processing program. 

Our preferred manuscript length is between 5,000 and 9,000 words, including notes and references; the manuscript is less likely to be accepted if it is over 11,000 words.

The online submission system allows authors to track the progress of their manuscript through review. However, it does not allow the authors themselves to directly make changes to the manuscript once it has been submitted. 

Zygon follows the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), with an author-date system for references. Zygon publishes in American English. 

Zygon uses inclusive terms when speaking about humanity and people (both women and men). We also suggest speaking about nature and divinity in inclusive language unless an author intentionally wants to argue for their gender.

Because Zygon is an interdisciplinary journal, many readers may be outside the author’s primary field. To make your article readable for our diverse audience, please define all technical terms, minimize the use of non-English terms (and translate all that remain), and give first and last names of all persons mentioned, even if you believe that they are well known. All quotations, even those you may deem familiar to everyone, must be documented.

References: Author-Date System

Zygon uses the author-date system of documentation. With a quoted passage, place the reference after the quoted material. Here are some examples of common citations:

(1) (D’Aquili and Laughlin 1979, 165). There is no punctuation between the authors and publication year, but there is a comma between the year and the page reference.
(2) (Piaget [1929] 1969, 2:26). This cites a newer edition of an older work with both a volume and page number.
(3) (Johnson 1979, sec. 24.5). This is the form to use for a section, note, and so on.

If the name of the author is integrated in the sentence, it need not be repeated it in the citation. Use semicolons to separate multiple references.

Endnotes are for explanatory purposes only. Please consider whether the note is needed: If the remark is important, why not integrate the remark into the main text? If it is not important, why have the note? References to endnotes are indicated by superscript numbers in the text. Within endnotes, the author-date system is used as it is used in the main text.

The reference list is organized in alphabetical order by last name of the author. If more than one work by an author is cited, the list is then ordered from the earliest to latest year of publication. The 3-em dash followed by a period is substituted for the author’s name in all but the first reference. If more than one work by an author(s) is published in a single year, the list is then alphabetically ordered by the first word of the title, and the letters a, b, c, etc. are placed after the year both in the main text and on the reference page.

The order of individual references is as follows: author (last name first for initial author and first name first for all others in a multiple-author work), year (original publication date, if any, in brackets, followed by date of edition cited in the text), title of work, publication information (place of publication, publisher). Titles of periodicals are italicized and not abbreviated. (The latter requirement is important for our diverse readership who may not be familiar with the literature of every specific discipline or sub-discipline cited by a particular author.)

References (sample list; should be double spaced in the submitted paper):
Burhoe, Ralph Wendell. 1972. “Natural Selection and God.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 7 (1): 30–63.
Chomsky, Noam. 1973. “Conditions for Transformation.” In A Festschrift for Morris Halle, edited by Sam R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky, 199–216. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
D’Aquili, Eugene G., and Charles D. Laughlin Jr. 1979. “The Neurobiology of Myth and Ritual.” In The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis, by Eugene G. d’Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin Jr., John McManus, Tom Burns, Barbara Lex, G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., and W. John Smith, 152–82. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
MacLean, Paul D. 1975a. “On the Evolution of Three Mentalities.” Man-Environment Systems 5:213–24.
———. 1975b. “Role of Pallidal Projections in Species-Typical Display Behavior of Squirrel Monkey.” Transactions of American Neurological Association 100:29–32.
Whitehead, Alfred North. [1925] 1964. Science and the Modern World. New York, NY: New American Library.
Please be sure to provide full author names, except where authors usually publish under their initials. For examples, see immediately above. But NOT:
Burhoe, R. W. 1972. "Natural Selection and God." Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 7 (1): 30–63.
von Hayek, Friedrich August. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ("von Hayek, F. A." should be used here)

Lay Out

Use a single space after all punctuation.

Underline or italicize words when they are referred to as words.

Quotations shorter than seven lines should be run into the text, but longer quotations should be set in block form (keep the typing double-spaced).

Give the full name of the person when that person is first cited in the text, but give only the last name in subsequent citations.

Tables and Figures
Tables should have horizontal lines above and below the headings, and a horizontal line at the bottom—no vertical lines. Be sure to include a table title and a source note indicating where your data came from.

All tables should be placed sequentially at the end of the text, before the reference list. Fgures and artwork must be submitted as separate files. Be sure to include both a caption and a credit line.

Biblical Citations should indicate the version cited (e.g., John 3:16 NRSV). Do not abbreviate books of the Bible or other religious literature.

Unnumbered Endnote/Acknowledgments: Information on any conference or symposium at which the paper has been presented and on any grant that supported work on the article may be provided as a separate file that will not be seen by the anonymous referees. For instance, “A version of this essay was presented at a symposium on ** during the annual meeting of the ** Society, place, country, date.”

Permissions

If Zygon accepts your article, you are responsible for obtaining permission to use copyrighted materials. These include direct quotes of more than 500 words, even a single line of poetry that is not in the public domain, tables, figures, and illustrations.

Open Access
This article publishes all its content as  open access after acceptance.