Submissions

Author Guidelines

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GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION

Hungarian Cultural Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal with distribution to readers in North America, the Carpathian Basin, and beyond. It seeks to enhance its position as the preeminent journal in the field of Hungarian studies. The articles it publishes are of interest to students, teachers, and researchers. The journal aims to have a significant impact on scholarship in all branches of Hungarian studies. It is an online, open-access journal; no money is made from subscriptions, and authors are charged no page fees. Open access is associated with increased citations by a factor of two to four times for authors and journals when compared to similar work that is not open access.

Hungarian Cultural Studies both solicits contributions and accepts unsolicited submissions. Authors are invited to send preliminary abstracts or whole articles to the editor in chief (editorhungarian@gmail.com) for advice on readiness and appropriateness of the topic for the journal. Articles formally submitted must be uploaded to the journal using the online editorial management system. (Although articles in Hungarian are considered for publication, the “metadata” (title, abstract, keywords, author bios) must be written in English.

Articles, including review articles, should be written in English or Hungarian and are normally restricted to 4,000–7,000 words (excluding bibliography) and must include an abstract (not more than 200 words). Hungarian Cultural Studies also publishes research notes, which are shorter, at 2,500–4,000 words, as well as book reviews, which must be in English and normally 1,000–1,500 words, and book notices, which may be up to 750 words. (Longer articles are occasionally permitted, but only with specific approval from the editors, when the topic merits more length.)

Submissions should follow the guidelines outlined below, or they may be returned to the author for revision before they can be sent for peer review. Contributors are also encouraged to review the detailed style guide of the Slavic and East European Journal.

1. All work must be submitted as a Word file, in 12-point, Times New Roman font, single-spaced (including between paragraphs), and left-justified.
2. Use US rather than British spelling and style conventions (e.g., labor vs. labour, analyze, vs. analyse; toward vs. towards; and the serial comma, i.e., the comma before the last item in a list of three or more items).
3. Avoid metaphorical titles or subtitles, and include keywords in titles.
4. Omit the names of authors or affiliations in the submission file (including abstracts). This will help ensure blinded peer review.
5. Numbers under one hundred should be written out when a part of speech (e.g., “nineteenth-century history,” “thirty-five verses,” but “1,217 verses”).
6. Capitalization and punctuation, including quotation marks, should follow English-language guidelines. For example, nationalities and days of the week should be capitalized; periods and commas are inside quotations. Never use quotation marks below the line or sideways quotation marks, as is the default in European keyboards. (If you are using a European keyboard you must switch to an English-language keyboard to use correct quotation marks.) English-language book title are capitalized, as are titles of journals, which are treated as proper nouns.

MLA style and exceptions, citations

1. We use a modified form of the MLA parenthetical style of citing sources, with works cited in an end bibliography ("Works Cited"). The date of publication should always follow the author's name, and this date should be used—rather than a short title, as per MLA style—for parenthetical citing within the text. A colon should separate the date from the page number (if there is one). (No "p." or "pp." needed for page numbers within the text, but needed in the Works Cited section.) Please be sure to consult articles in the 2024 issue for examples once that issue is published, or check with the deputy editor, Zsuzsanna Varga  (vargazsuzsi@hotmail.com) before then or if in doubt.
2. New in 2023 and going forward: In the end bibliography the date is at the end.
3. As per MLA guidelines, punctuation comes after the parenthetical reference, which itself comes after the quotation mark. For example: “Punctuation should follow the parenthetical reference” (Smith 2014: 34). No bibliographical footnotes are allowed. All bibliographical information should be in the end bibliography.
4. See the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (8th ed.) for directions on how to cite such sources as audio and video podcasts, blogs, and emails, and put the date after the name of the author.
5. All sentence-length citations not in the language of the article should be translated, with the translation first, followed by the original, as per MLA guidelines. Likewise, longer passages in a foreign language, following MLA guidelines, should be indented and preceded by the English translation. Such offset quotations are not enclosed in brackets. On the other hand, individual words, expressions, or titles in a foreign language, located within the text, should be in italics, with no quotation marks, and should be followed by the translation placed in single quotes and within brackets: napló [‘diary’], Erdélyi sors: tegnap, ma, holnap [‘Transylvanian Fate: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’].
6. In Works Cited, all titles in Hungarian or another non-English language must include an English translation. Book and article titles translated by the author into English must be capitalized, even if they are not capitalized in the original language. (See the example above.)
7. It is the author’s responsibility to check that all sources cited in the article are also included in Works Cited. Likewise, Works Cited should only contain sources referenced in the article itself.
8. If there are several places of publication listed, cite only the first. Even when a newspaper or journal is in an electronic database, the issue and volume numbers should be included and not merely the electronic address.

Footnotes

1. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum (as a rule of thumb, no more than an average of one per page), and should only be used for complex citations (in particular for the citation of archival sources) or to provide additional references and/or supplemental informationthat might otherwise disrupt the flow of the text.
2. Footnoted references to additional sources should be given in the parenthetical form—e.g., "see further Jones (1980), Smith (1990), Weber (2010)"—with the full bibliographical citation given in the list of works cited. Excessive use of footnotes will be flagged by our editors, and should be avoided.

Miscellaneous

1. Paragraphs should be of approximate equal length and roughly about two per page. There should be no one-sentence paragraphs.
2. Any dedications or acknowledgments of parts of the research previously published should be cited in a first, starred note. (See examples in some past articles.)
3. Section subheadings should be kept to a bare minimum, with a maximum of five in a 7,000-word paper. Any subheadings should be in bold and capitalized like titles and start on left margin; that is, they should not be indented. Please leave a space between the subheading and the previous subsection, but no space between the subheading and the first paragraph of the new subsection.
4. Give the full name of each person cited for the first time but subsequently use only the last name (unless there are authors with the same last name). When a parenthetical citation has three or fewer authors, list the authors’ last names with ‘and’ before the last author cited. When citing more than three authors, cite the first author’s name, followed by “et al.”
5. Write out full name of authors, not initials only (as is done in some social science styles).

Translations

1. If a non-English-language work you are referencing has already been translated and published in English, you should quote from the existing translation unless you have a specific reason not to do so, in which case you should state the reason and indicate who has provided the edited or new translation.
2. If no English translation of the source(s) you are using is available, please indicate who is responsible for the translation(s) you are providing (e.g., “all translations of X are by the author” or “unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author”).

Last but not least

1. Before submitting your article be sure to resolve that all words, sentences, and other elements of the text that are underlined in waved lines in Word. Such lines generally indicate a wrong or missing word, missing punctuation, missing dashes in double adjectives, or other syntactical problems. Part of final proofreading by the author before submitting the article involves resolving such erroneous passages.
2. Articles, beginning with the 2014 issue, provide examples. Where there is a discrepancy, or where further clarification is needed, contact our layout editors, Katalin Voros <voros@eecs.berkeley.edu>; or Klara Papp <klara.papp@case.edu>.

Rev. August 2022

GUIDELINES FOR BOOK REVIEWS

• Book reviews must be in English and between 1,000-1,500 words. Book reviews are both invited and submitted for consideration. A potential reviewer may propose a book review by sending a one-page proposal and a current CV or link to a biographical page (e.g., faculty bio on a university website) to both the acting editor in chief, Dr. Zsuzsanna Varga  <vargazsuzsi@hotmail.com> and the book review editor via email, who will review the proposal in light of reviews already invited. All book reviews must be written in English but items to be reviewed can be in any language and reviews of books written in Hungarian are encouraged.
• The primary purpose of the book review section is to foster a respectful and rigorous scholarly dialogue. Reviews should be addressed to a broad readership of scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives and who are not necessarily fluent in Hungarian. Reviewers have the responsibility to summarize authors’ arguments fairly and accurately, to locate books under review within a broad scholarly context, and to emphasize theoretical and methodological implications of any given work for future research in Hungarian studies. While reviewers have the right to make normative judgments about books under review, personal attacks, ridicule, and distortion are unacceptable.
• The review should introduce the author and the book’s significance for Hungarian studies.
• In the case of the review of a literary work, a short plot summary is welcome, to be followed by a discussion (not a thorough analysis) of the work's focal aspects, merits, and innovation. We recommend mentioning characters, places, and atmosphere components, as well as quoting from the book, and ending by pointing at the meaning of the book for Hungarian studies.
• Reviews of academic monographs should likewise place the author and work in the context of Hungarian studies, and then proceed to a critical discussion of the work's merits and innovation.
• In the case of edited collections, outline the volume's thematic and theoretical structure and then choose only some articles for more elaborate discussion, particularly in the case of collections where only some articles deal with Hungarian issues.
• The format for reviews is as listed under manuscripts, except that no footnotes or end bibliography are used. However, references may be embedded in the text in parenthesis. Reviews have no titles except for the bibliographic entry for the book under review, as in: Romsics, Ignác. From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Birth of the Third Hungarian Republic, 1988-2001. Translated by Matthew Caples. East European Monographs 722. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2007. 471 pp., illus.