Submission Guidelines

• The University of Colombo Review (Series III) invites submissions for the sections ‘Articles’ and ‘Reviews’. Research articles (including theoretical papers) should be between 7000-9000 words. Research reviews, including review essays, should be 5000-7000 words. Reviews of publications and art forms should be between 1000-1500 words. All word counts exclude References. A more detailed description of these different types of submissions can be found in the ‘Focus and Scope’ section of the ‘About the journal’ page.
• The submission should be anonymized, to ensure successful double-anonymized peer review. Please remove author(s) names, affiliations, acknowledgements/contribution statements, and references to author(s) previous publications from the submitted version. You can find more information on what this entails here.
• All submissions should be in English and follow American spelling. The UCR is meant for a general academic audience, and this should be kept in mind in terms of the style of writing.
• For formatting guidelines (including details of abstracts, keywords, footnotes), please see the dedicated section below.
• All images, if any, should be provided in high resolution together with proof of permission to use them. If the article is chosen for publication, the high-resolution images will be requested as a separate file.
• Submitted articles must not be under consideration by any other publisher. Authors must attest to this at the time of submission in a cover email. It is also the author’s responsibility to abide by academic integrity, research ethics and disclose any potential conflict of interest regarding the submitted manuscript.
• Research funding and grants which supported the research on which the article is based should be duly acknowledged.
• Where research ethics approval has been awarded, the details can be provided in the text or as a footnote.

Types of Submissions

The UCR is published in three sections: articles, reviews and symposia.

• The Articles section publishes peer reviewed articles, which make a new and significant contribution to knowledge. Articles shall be academically rigorous and ethically sound research papers within respective disciplines, as well as multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary articles which are reflective, critical or exploratory. These include concept papers, exploratory essays and research articles based on empirical findings.
• Reviews may include an assessment of the state of knowledge on a given topic, a review of an academic publication or an academic review of artistic work such as a movie, artwork or a play. Peer review of submissions published in the Review section may vary and will be determined on a case-by-case basis by the Editorial Board.

Book Reviews
UCR invites reviews of academic publications. Academic publications are monographs or edited volumes published by an academic publisher. Exceptionally, UCR will consider reviews of books published by non-academic reputed publishers. For monographs published locally in Sinhala or Tamil, the UCR will accept book reviews written in the corresponding local language.

UCR expects a book review to engage with the arguments and/or main contribution of the book under review and comment on its contribution to the relevant field of knowledge or practice.

Reviewers interested in submitting a book review may do so via the submission portal.

Authors who wish to have their book reviewed may contact the Editor of UCR with such requests at editor@ucr.ac.lk

• The Symposium section is meant to engage more broadly with academic debate and discourse with special reference to Sri Lankan scholarship. Examples include keynotes at an academic conference, interviews and debates on a specific theme. Symposia are published at the discretion of the Editorial Board and are not subject to peer review.

• Submissions to UCR should be made via the SLJOL webpage by clicking the “start submission” button.

Formatting Guidelines

Please follow the following guidelines for formatting your submission.

• Submissions should be in Microsoft Word, Times New Roman / Calibri, double spaced.
• The referencing style used by the UCR is the APA style of referencing. For further information on referencing style see APA website  and/or
  Purdue OWL website – APA guidelines
• The abstract should be 250 words maximum.
• Keywords: up to 8 keywords can be included, separated by commas.
• Headings should be in font size 12, numbered in sequence and the style should be as follows:

Heading 1	1	Bold
Heading 2: Sub-headings	1.1	Bold, Italics
Heading 3: Sub-sub-headings	1.1.1	Bold, Italics
Heading 4: Sub-sub-sub-headings	1.1.1.1	Bold

• Capitalization should be consistent throughout the article. Only the first word and proper nouns should be capitalized.
• As per the APA style guide, endnotes are not used. Footnotes are to be used only where it is a necessity.
• Images, graphs and tables should be attached separately, with correct title. The place where the image, graph or table should appear in the manuscript should be shown by including words such as “insert table 1 here”.
• When using quotes or text from a language other than English, the original quote/text should be transliterated into English and a translation should be provided in English.
• Acknowledgements or a contributing statement can be provided when authors need to credit services or support provided. Grants and other such support should be clearly indicated in the Acknowledgements section.
• Authors must include a ‘Conflict of interest’ statement at the end of the article. If the authors have a conflict of interest to declare, that should be provided under this heading. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, the typical wording to provide as “The author(s) have/has no conflict of interest to declare.”