Guidelines for Contributors

REVIEW OF DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE

This webpage gives key guidelines for submitting your manuscript. For complete guidelines, please visit the SAGE website.

Please read the guidelines below and submit your manuscript at https://peerreview.sagepub.com/rdc

Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Review of Development and Change will be reviewed.

There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal.

By submitting a contribution, you warrant that

you are submitting your original work,
you have the rights in the work,
you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere, and
you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.

Aims & Scope

Review of Development and Change aims to examine diverse aspects of the changes taking place in society, the Global South in particular.

It encourages multidisciplinary theoretical and applied scholarship that perceives problems of development and social change in depth, documents them with care, interprets them with rigour and communicates the findings accessibly.

The journal recognises that Development crosses disciplinary boundaries, and hence it encourages a holistic understanding of how Development works.

Current focus areas are issues of agriculture, environment, industry, poverty and inequality, social sector and urbanisation.

Article types

Articles should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words including tables, charts, notes and references. Book Reviews should be 800 - 1,000 words. Book Review Articles (reviewing 2-3 books on a theme) should be 1,500 to 2,000 words. But discretion rests with the editors. The articles should be typed in Times New Roman 12pt and 1.5-line spacing.

Structure

The manuscript should be structured as follows:

Cover page, showing title of the paper, name of author, author’s affiliation and institutional address with postal code, email address and a 150-word abstract. To preserve anonymity, authors’ names and references should not be used in the text (e.g., avoid ‘as the author has written elsewhere’). If there are two or more authors, the corresponding author’s name and address details must be clearly specified on the first page itself.
The contributors should also provide 4–5 keywords for online search.
Text should start on a new page and must not contain the names of authors.
References should come at the end of the manuscript.
Tables and figures should be provided in editable format and should be referred to in the text by number separately (e.g., Table 1) not by placement (e.g., see Table below). They should each be submitted on a separate page following the article, numbered and arranged as per their references in the text. They will be inserted in the final text as indicated by the author. Source citations with tables and figures are required irrespective of whether or not they require permissions.
Figures, including maps, graphs and drawings, should not be larger than page size. They should be numbered and arranged as per their references in the text. All photographs and scanned images should have a resolution of minimum 300 dpi and 1500 pixels, and their format should be TIFF or JPEG. Permissions to reprint should be obtained for copyright-protected photographs/images. Even for photographs/images available in the public domain, it should be clearly ascertained whether or not their reproduction requires permission for purposes of publishing. (The Publisher is a profit-making endeavour.) All photographs/scanned images should be provided separately in a folder along with the main article.
Mathematical formulae, methodological details, etc. should be given separately as an appendix, unless their mention in the main body of the text becomes essential.

Language

The language and spellings used should be British (U.K.), with ‘s’ variant, e.g., globalisation instead of globalization, labour instead of labor. For non-English and uncommon words and phrases, use italics only for the first time. Meaning of non-English words should be given in parenthesis just after the word when it is used for the first time.
Articles should use non-sexist and non-racist language.
Spell out numbers from one to nine, 10 and above to remain in figures. However, for exact measurement (e.g., China’s GDP growth rate is 9.8 per cent) use numbers. Very large round numbers, especially sums of money, may be expressed by a mixture of numerals and spelled-out numbers (India’s population is 1.2 billion). Follow thousand, million, billion number metric system instead of lakhs and crores.
Single quotes should be used throughout. Double quote marks are to be used within single quotes. Spellings of words in quotations should not be changed. Quotations of 45 words or more should be separated from the text.
Notes should be numbered serially and presented at the end of the article. Notes must contain more than a mere reference.
Ibid. should not be used.
Use 'per cent' instead of % in the text. In tables, graphs, etc., % can be used. Use ‘20th century’, ‘1990s’.
Number ranges should not be truncated.
Initials with full points and no spaces.
The journal does not encourage frequent use of capital letters. They should be used selectively and consistently. Only the first word of title and subtitle should start with capitals. Although proper names are capitalised, many words derived from or associated with proper names, as well as the names of significant offices are lowercased. While the names of ethnic, religious and national groups are capitalised (the Muslims, the Gurkhas, the Germans), designations based loosely on colour (black people) and terms denoting socio-economic classes or groups (the middle class, the dalits, the adivasis) are lowercased. All caste, tribe and community names (the Santhals, the Jatavs) are to be capitalised but generic terms (the kayasths) are to be lower cased. Civil, military, religious, and professional titles (e.g., the president) and institutions (the parliament, the united nations) are to be put in lower case, but names of organisations (e.g., the Labour Party) are to be capitalised. The names of political tendencies (the marxists, the socialists) should remain in lower case.
Abbreviations are spelled out at first occurrence. Other commonly used abbreviations (am, pm, cm, kg, ha) can be used in lower case, without spaces.

Peer review

Review of Development and Change adheres to a rigorous double-blind reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are always concealed from both parties.

Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two referees. All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, and an editorial decision is generally reached within 10–12 weeks of submission. Authors are requested to suggest the names, affiliations and contact information of up to six individuals who may be suitable to serve as referees, but the Editors are under no obligation to use all or any of these individuals as reviewers. All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Editors and only those papers that meet the editorial standards of the journal, and fit within the aims and scope of the journal, will be sent for outside review.

Authorship

All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.

Please supply any personal acknowledgements separately to the main text to facilitate anonymous peer review.

Individuals who provided writing assistance, e.g. from a specialist communications company, do not qualify as authors and so should be included in the Acknowledgements section. Authors must disclose any writing assistance—including the individual’s name, company and level of input—and identify the entity that paid for this assistance. It is not necessary to disclose use of language polishing services.

Declaration of conflicting interests and funding

Review of Development and Change encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

Review of Development and Change requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Plagiarism

Review of Development and Change and SAGE take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors, and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.

Artwork, figures and other graphics

For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit SAGE’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in colour in the printed version. For specifically requested colour reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from SAGE after receipt of your accepted article.

This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g., datasets, podcasts, videos, images, etc.) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to the Guidelines on submitting supplementary files.

Reference style

Review of Development and Change adheres to the APA reference style (7th edition).

Submitting your manuscript

All manuscripts should be submitted at https://peerreview.sagepub.com/rdc

Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information, including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the SAGE Author Gateway.

Further information

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process may be sent to the Review of Development and Change editorial office: rdc@mids.ac.in.