Types of contributions

Publications will include regular submissions as well as invited articles, reviews and essays solicited by members of the Editorial Board. A prerequisite for publications in this journal is that papers need to be presented in simple language and written in an integrative fashion. Being an interdisciplinary journal, the presentation of content is critical. Conservation professionals who come from a wide array of disciplines should find the content comprehensible and stimulating. For example, to provide a very general perspective, natural scientists should take care to use and explain mathematical equations and statistics meaningfully and social scientists should attempt more concise manuscripts with some graphical outputs. Authors should take care to explain terminology that is restricted to their discipline. For contributors whose first language is not English, we are willing to provide reasonable assistance to improve the written style of manuscripts. All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

Length - Manuscript length limits refer to all pages (including cover page, abstract, text, tables and figures). Each figure will count as a page.

Reports – 5000 words
Articles – 12000 words
Reviews – 10,000 - 15000 words
Comments – 1000 - 2000 words
Book Reviews – 1000 – 1500 words
Special Features – Perspectives, Debates & Essays (of variable length – to be decided by the Editor)

Reports – Reports are short papers that communicate new work. The results should contain data and ideas that support interesting advances in a particular discipline. Reports are not news items. They should be supported by sufficient data and a logical framework. Reports should not exceed 5000 words. Reports will get priority for review, processing and publication.

Articles – Articles should present significant work in any of the journal’s broad areas of interest. Submissions of articles that break new ground or advance our understanding of a particular conservation issue are particularly welcome. The ideal word limit for an article is 10,000 words.

Comments – Readers are encouraged to submit replies or comments on articles that have already been published in the journal. These could be with regard to factual errors, different viewpoints, analyses or interpretation of results. Comments will be peer-reviewed.

Special Features - Debates, perspectives and essays on certain themes or paradigms can be of varying length and are intended to promote discussion on important topics. They are different from reviews that may have exhaustive surveys of literature. These are normally solicited by the Editorial Board, but one can contact the Editor with respect to submissions or new ideas.

Reviews – Reviews of work carried out on a particular topic can be published as longer papers. Reviews normally contain a larger number of citations and hence the longer word limit (10,000 to 15,000 words).

Book Reviews – Book reviews are concise evaluations of books on topics provided by invited experts. Book reviews are solicited by the Editorial Board, however, books may be suggested or submitted to the Book Reviews Editor after consultation

Submit a Book for Review

If you would like to submit a particular book a review of which would be of interest to our readers, please check with the Editor. We do not publish unsolicited book reviews.

Please address all queries regarding book reviews to one of the following editorial board members:

Sudha Vasan, Book Reviews Editor (sudha . vasan @ gmail . com)

Ghazala Shahabuddin, Book Reviews Editor (ghazalafarzin @ yahoo . com)

Kartik Shanker, Executive Editor (editor @ conservationandsociety . org)

How to Submit a Manuscript

Outlined below are the submission procedures for new as well as accepted manuscripts:

Manuscripts
All articles should be in English and typewritten using Times New Roman, size 12 font and double-spaced throughout, including tables, references, and notes. There should be ample margins, do not use alignments or justification. The manuscript should be accompanied by a soft copy of the text, identical with the hard copy submitted.

Kindly submit all material at http://conservationandsociety.org/submitarticle.asp.

Overall style
The main paper should be divided into sections, each clearly indicated by a heading. The paper should contain an abstract followed by the introduction, methods, results and discussion. Do not insert notes in the title. The abstract should provide a brief summary of the manuscript and should not contain references or notes. The introduction should be short and succinct without too many references. The introduction should not be used for lengthy reviews of literature, rather it should state the purpose and motivation behind the research and a very brief background of the topic. Brief articles, especially reports do not usually require a label for introduction. The methods section should talk about design of the study and sampling, statistical procedures, descriptions of study sites, sources of information and so on. The methods should be given in sufficient detail so as to enable replication of the work. Results should be stated without interpretation and with relevant references to figures or tables. The discussion should focus on the interpretation of the results of the study. Comparisons with previous studies, the possible inferences one can gain from the results as well as reasonable speculations based on the results can be accommodated in the discussion.

Organisation of a manuscript
All pages (beginning from the title page to the last page of the appendices) should be numbered consecutively even if they are submitted in different files.

Title page (12 to 15 words / 125 characters including spaces)
An abstract (between 150 and 200 words typed on a separate page) - mandatory
Keywords (up to 12 keywords / 100 characters)
Introduction
Materials and Methods
Results
Discussion or Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
List of Figures
Tables
Figures
Appendices
Notes (insert using the endnotes option, and not by manually inserting numbers in superscript)

Details to be included on the title page

Manuscript type
Title
Name(s) of the author(s)
Affiliation(s) of author(s) (including current affiliation and affiliation where the work was primarily carried out)
Postal address of corresponding author
Email address(es) (in order of authors)
(all of the above should be typed on the title page)

Length

Reports - 5,000 words
Articles – 12,000 words
Reviews – 12,000 - 15,000 words
Comments – 1,000 - 2,000 words
Book Reviews – 1,000 – 1,500 words
Special Features – Perspectives, Debates & Essays (specified by the editor)

Three pages of double spaced manuscript pages correspond to a single printed page. Manuscript length limits refer to all pages (including cover page, abstract, text, tables and figures). Each figure will count as a page.

Language and spellings

Manuscripts must be in English and use British spelling conventions (‘-ise’ spellings instead of ‘-ize’; ‘programme’ not ‘program’; ‘labour’ not ‘labor’ etc.).

Headings

Limit the level of headings within each article to two (e.g.: 1, 1.1; 2, 2.1). Please number the headings in the manuscript explicitly. The main heading should be highlighted in bold letters, sub headings are to be italicised. In the finished journal, headings will not be numbered and will only be distinguished by the printed style.

Quotations

Use single quotation marks, reserving double quotation marks only for quoted words within a quotation. Ensure that the spellings are reproduced exactly as in the source. All quotations of 45 words or more are to be set apart from the text and indented. Please obtain permission to reproduce any quotation beyond the limits of ‘fair dealing’.

Hyphenation

Pay attention to consistency in the hyphenation of words. Do not alternate, for example, between ‘macro-economic’ and ‘macroeconomic’. A distinction is however made between noun and attributive adjective: ‘the middle class’ but ‘middle-class ethics’

Abbreviations

No stops are needed between capitals: e.g., CPI, INTUC, MP. Short forms likely to be unfamiliar to the reader should be spelt out in full the first time they occur. Include a final full stop in abbreviations (words shortened by omitting the end), such as, p., vol., and ed., but not in contractions (words shortened by omitting the middle), such as Mr and Dr.

Numbers

Write numbers in figures (not words) for exact measurements, quantities and percentages. Use thousands, millions, billions, not crores and lakhs. In text use ‘per cent’; in tables ‘%’. In more general descriptions, numbers below 100 should be spelt out in words and above 100 in figures. Use the International System of Units (SI) for measurements.

Dates

Give specific dates in the form ‘22 December 1999’. Decades should be referred to as ‘the 1990s’. Please spell out the ‘nineteenth century’ etc.

Photographs

It is important that you obtain permission to reproduce any photographs that are not your own specs.

Figures and Tables

Tables should be typewritten, each on a separate page and numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals. Distinguish between figures and tables (statistical material) and number them in separate sequences. Each table/figure should have a brief and descriptive title. All tables/figures should be as self-explanatory as possible specs.

Place Names

Spellings of place names should correspond to the usage in standard modern atlases, such as the National Atlas of India. However, the spellings of names in quotations should not be changed.

Diacriticals

Use of diacriticals is optional but must be consistent throughout the article. Where diacriticals are not used, the word should be spelt phonetically—example ‘bhut’ and not ‘bhoot’ (unless used in a quotation where the original spellings should be retained).

Italics

Italic type will be used for titles of books and journals referred to in the text and notes, Latin names of species and for less familiar foreign words.

Notes

Notes should be consecutively numbered and presented at the end of the article (using the endnotes option) not at the foot of the page. Note at the foot of the first page of the article (author addresses)sentence seems incomplete . Endnotes should contain more than a mere reference. They should be referred to in the text by numerical superscripts.1, 2, 3, etc. Please include notes only in the main body of the text. Do not insert notes within the abstract or the title of the manuscript.

References

Avoid excessive citations and include only those that are referred to in the manuscript. List in-text citations chronologically, then alphabetically. If there are two publications of the same year for the same author, the reference in the text should be: ‘Sharma 1960a, 1960b’ and the two publications should be dated accordingly in the references. Page numbers are essential when quoting or referring to some aspect or information from a report, book, article, etc. A complete reference list, typed double-spaced, should be given at the end of the article, beginning on a separate page. They should be in alphabetical order, unnumbered and follow the samples below:

Articles from journals
Pomeroy, M., R. Primack and S.N. Rai. 2003. Changes in four rainforest plots of the Western Ghats, India. Conservation and Society 1:113-136.

Books
Forman, R.T.T. and M. Godron. 1986. Landscape Ecology. John Wiley, New York, USA.

Edited volumes
Gaston, K.J. (ed.). 1996. Biodiversity: A Biology of Numbers and Difference. Blackwell Science, Oxford, UK.

Articles from edited volumes
Lakshman, W.D. 1989. Lineages of Dependent Development: From State Control to the Open Economy in Sri Lanka. In: The Challenge in South Asia: Development, Democracy and Regional Cooperation (eds. P. Wignaraja and A. Hussain), pp. 105-163. Sage Publications, New Delhi, India.

Unpublished works
Sandee, H.1995.Innovations in Production. Ph.D. thesis. Amsterdam: Free University. Netherlands.

Book Reviews
Book reviews must contain the name of the author and title/subtitle of the book reviewed, place of publication and publisher, date of publication, number of pages and price. Please use the following style:
Ric Shand (ed.). 1999. Economic Liberalization in South Asia. Macmillan, New Delhi, India. 536pp., Rs 550.

Format of Submission

Manuscripts for publication are accepted in electronic format and may be sent by e-mail to editor @ conservationandsociety . org with a copy to cs . editor @ gmail . com, Kartik Shanker (Executive Editor) kshanker @ ces . iisc . ernet . in and Hetal Hariya (Managing Editor) hetal . hariya @ atree . org as a safeguard against loss of mail.

Authors are required to submit a mandatory manuscript submission form along with each new manuscript. Text should be submitted as MS Word documents. We suggest you use jpeg format for photos and gif for graphs and compress such files before sending them to us. Please do not use PDF files for submitting manuscripts. Figures, tables, graphs and photos may be submitted as part of the main manuscript or as separate files. The file name format - first author surname_date of submission_type (for example brown_22dec04_manuscript.doc, brown_22dec04_figures.jpg, etc) is to be followed. Mention ‘MS – FIRST AUTHOR SURNAME’ in the subject line of the e-mail. All authors will receive an acknowledgment within five days of the receipt of the manuscript along with a manuscript number.

If you are unable to send manuscripts by e-mail please mail them on a CD to

Hetal Hariya, Managing Editor, Conservation and Society,
Royal Enclave, Srirampura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore 560064, Karnataka, India
Phone: 91 80 23635555, Fax: 91 80 23530070
Please notify us of changes in address, affiliation and other relevant details.

Correspondence
All editorial correspondence, manuscript submissions and queries should be addressed to:
Hetal Hariya, Managing Editor, Conservation and Society,
Royal Enclave, Srirampura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore 560064, Karnataka, India
Phone: 91 80 23635555, Fax: 91 80 23530070
Email: hetal . hariya @ atree . org