Information for Authors

Aim

The primary aim of the Journal is to publish papers relevant to the geology of Scotland and adjacent areas including the surrounding seas. Papers of general or specialist interest as well as short communications, letters to the editor, and discussions of earlier papers are welcome, together with reviews and thematic sets publishing the results of relevant meetings and conferences.

Submission

All contributions must be original. Papers, including figures and references should not normally exceed 12 printed pages. A pdf or Word file of the typescript should be emailed to sally.oberst@geolsoc.org.uk

Format

A pdf of the paper may be submitted for review purposes. On acceptance MS Word files of the text, figure captions and tables are required along with a complete copy of the full manuscript.

Title

The title should be brief and specific. Name(s) and address(es) of author(s) (including an e-mail address for the corresponding author). Synopsis: must be intelligible without reference to the paper and should not exceed 200 words. Main body of paper, subdivided into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order headings (see recent issue for styles). Acknowledgements. Appendices. References: NAME, A. B. Year. Title. [In: Name, C. D. & Name E. F. (eds) Title. Publisher, place, pages] Journal, vol, pages. Tables. Captions for figures. Figures

Text

Authors should ensure consistency in their use of capitals, hyphens and punctuation. Underlining should be used only to indicate words in italics, e.g. fossil names. Footnotes should be avoided. References in the text should separated by a semicolon and appear in chronological order (Hutton 1795; Hutton & Smith 1805; Werner 1874). Reference in the text to papers with more than two authors should be made thus: (Smith et al. 1975) but cited in full in the references list.
References: List all references cited in text, figures and tables. They should be double spaced, in alphabetical order of the authors' names with 'et al.' entries listed chronologically. Repeated author names and journal titles should be given in full. Unpublished material and manuscripts submitted to a journal but not yet accepted should not be cited. Personal communications are preferable to inaccessible unpublished reports.

Figures

Page size is 245 x 176 mm; column width is 85mm. Figures should be prepared to fit either a page or column width leaving space for the caption. They must be numbered consecutively and referred to in the text in that order. Make sure that scales and north arrows are included where appropriate. Please provide print outs that are exactly the same as the material on the disc. Acceptable graphics packages are Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand. Ensure that fine lines are saved as actual line widths of at least 0.5 pt. Do not use fine-line default settings (minimum width or hairline) or fine shading; on a high-resolution output device such as a film-setter they may be too fine to show up in print. This problem cannot be detected in proofs, which are produced with a laser printer. No letters, after reduction, should be less than 1mm high

Figures should be supplied as EPS files with fonts embedded and a tiff preview. If EPS files are not an option, we can accept high resolution (1000 dpi) bit map TIFFs (or JPEG, GIF).

Photographs or halftones can be provided as EPS or greyscale TIFF files (recommended resolution of >300dpi). A scale bar should be used on photographs.

Colour

Colour may be used, but authors wishing to do so must contact the editors. Authors are expected to contribute towards the cost of colour reproduction. Similarly, folded figures are expensive, and editors must be consulted. Colour must be saved as CMYK (not RGB).

Tables

Tables should go across single or double column width. Vertical and horizontal rules should be avoided limited to the top and bottom of the table body. Tables must be provided as Word, Excel or .rtf files.

Supplementary publication scheme

Detailed material such as locality lists and analytical data, will be made available as Supplementary Publications. These files hosted on the Society’s website. Acceptable formats for the online repository are: .rtf, .csv and .pdf. Maximum size is 5 MB per paper (can be zipped if necessary).

Offprints/pdfs

Offprint copies of papers will be provided at cost if ordered when the corrected proofs are returned to the publisher. Copies are normally distributed soon after publication. The Scottish Journal of Geology is available online via the Lyell Collection at http://sjg.lyellcollection.org. Authors will be sent instructions on how to obtain pdfs.

Copyright

The Scottish Journal of Geology is the joint property of the Geological Society of Glasgow and the Edinburgh Geological Society, in whom the copyright rests. Queries regarding copyright should be directed to the secretaries of the Societies. Papers accepted for publication are deemed to be the property of the Editorial Board acting on behalf of the Societies unless specific arrangements are made to the contrary.

Book reviews

As space permits, the Journal will publish independent reviews of printed works that have a clear relevance to the geology of Scotland