What kinds of texts do we publish?

We publish work by students and professionals, by anthropologists and others with an interest in social and cultural variation. In length, our texts range from short essays to full-scale monographs. (Click here to read about our acceptance policy.)

Examples of texts we publish are:

• Empirical studies of human culture, society and institutions from all over the world. Studies that document little-known empirical settings may be accepted for publication despite analytical and linguistic imperfections. 
• Well-written reviews or overviews of existing literature.
• Independent works (incl. tutorials) on theory, methods, history of anthropology etc.
• Scholarly memoirs, biographies, and interviews that give an impression of "anthropologists at work".
• Chapters from published books. (Click here for details.)
• Conference papers - and entire conferences. (Click here for details.)
• Sample articles from journals. (Click here for details.)
• Collections of student papers. (Click here for details.)
• Out of print editions.
• Articles from informal student journals, in-house departmental newsletters or journals with only local distribution.
• Lecture notes, field notes, newspaper articles and other non-standard texts or materials that are of interest to a wider audience.
• Anything else that is inspiring, quizzical, controversial, or more than simply competent.

What languages do we publish in?

AnthroBase is multilingual, and in principle accepts texts in any language. In practice, however, we can only accept texts that one of our language editors can read. 

As of February 2004, we are able to publish texts in the following languages:

• Danish, English, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish.

Additional languages will be added to this list as soon as proficient language editors volunteer their services. If you would like to be a language editor for AnthroBase, please contact us! 

Click here to see a list of our present language editors.

Do we publish collections of texts?

AnthroBase can create special-purpose collections of texts, containing for example:

• Papers from a conference
• Extracts from a published book (publisher's permission required!) - including additional information if required, and a link to the publisher or to another site where the entire book may be purchased
• Sample articles from a journal
• Student work from a specific course
• Thematic collections

A text collection is accessed from a specially designed AnthroBase homepage. The page may contain additional information, such as links to other pages (e.g. of a conference, a course or a publisher), direct links to online purchasing opportunities (for books), emails, link collections, errata to published volumes, and additional information (on publishers, journals, books, conferences etc.).

Click here to see our collection list.

What is our acceptance policy?

Our acceptance criteria are fairly liberal, and texts are accepted on the basis of what we loosely refer to as their "potential interest for a larger anthropological audience". After review, texts may either be accepted "as is", returned with editorial suggestions, or refused.

Please note that:

• The text submitted must be your own, or you must submit it with the written permission of the author.
• Copyrighted material will not be considered for publication, except with the written permission of the copyright holder / publisher.
• Texts that conflict with the ethical standards of anthropology will not be accepted. See the American Anthropological Association's code of ethics (click here to read it), for a much-used codification of these standards. 

Submitted texts will be reviewed by the editors, who retain the right to suggest changes or refuse submissions.

How should I send my text?

How long will it take for us to publish your text?

The process of reformating and indexing texts is time-consuming, and the editors of AnthroBase are very busy people. It may therefore take some time before your text appears in AnthroBase. At present, we are in no position to commit ourselves to a deadline, but if you have not heard from us for 4-6 weeks, you might try to contact us and ask how things are going. We might at least be able to tell you when we think we will have time to do the job. We are sorry that this is such a problem, and we hope soon to be able to be more specific about publication times.

Should I suggest keywords for indexing?

Texts included in AnthroBase are indexed by the editors according to Author, Title, Regional focus, Thematic foci, and major Citations made in the text. While the first three of these categorizations are easy to make, categorization by Theme and Citation is time-consuming and difficult work.

When you submit a text, we therefore hope that you will suggest keywords yourself, that indicate:

• Which are the most important authors discussed in your text?
• What are its most important themes?

Please note: Only major citations should be included. Themes may be defined either empirically, theoretically, or in terms of genre. See our thematic index for ideas.

Do I retain copyright to the texts I publish on AnthroBase?

• The text may be freely downloaded by anyone browsing AnthroBase. AnthroBase makes its texts available for free download with notes and bibliographical information included.
   
• The text may be distributed in a hard-copy printed version by AnthroBase to anyone who orders the text from us.  AnthroBase will demand a nominal fee for hard-copy publication that covers our real expenses for postage, printing, copying, binding and editing the text. In addition, a 10% overhead charge is included, which will be used to pay for server space, domain name registration and to finance further expansion and refinement of the website. Authors cannot claim royalties from the sale of their texts through AnthroBase. Click here for details on how to order texts from AnthroBase.

Can I remove or change a text I have published?

To change a published text:
You may edit your text after it has been published on AnthroBase and have the online version updated by us. Updating takes time, however, and you can simplify our task by consulting our guidelines for formats, layout and bibliographical standards (click here to see our guidelines). If you are planning a major update, please contact us.

To remove a published text:
You may remove your text at any time. To do so, send an e-mail to:

• In the e-mail, write your full name and the title of the text you want to remove - as they appear in AnthroBase.
• If you do not have access to e-mail, send us a message by post (click here for contact details).

Please note that it will take at least two-three weeks for the text to removed from AnthroBase (at least four-six weeks during summer holidays). If you are in a rush, please notify us!

Retracting a text may be a useful option if (for example) you plan to publish your text in a journal or book, and you or your publisher would like to remove the online version published at AnthroBase.

You might also consider leaving an abstract or exerpt of your work on AnthroBase as a "teaser". Note that your publisher’s permission is required for this. Note also that we demand that "teasers" have substantive content - they cannot simply be advertisements. If you are publishing a book, we can also create a "book page" with links to the text you have left on AnthroBase, as well as other information about - or relevant to - the book (including a link to the publisher, where the book may be purchased online).

Layout and formatting

Please read the following carefully before submitting a text to AnthroBase!

1. Accepted document formats:

• Standard word processing and HTML formats: Texts should be submitted in one of the most common word processing formats: WordPerfect 5.1-8.0 (WPD), Rich Text Format (RTF), MS Word 2.0 or 95/97/2000 (DOC). Mac users should use either MS Word, RTF or WordPerfect 3.x. You may also send us texts formatted in HTML (but if you have the text in WordPerfect or Word format, do not attempt to convert it to HTML yourself!).
• PDF format (Adobe Acrobat): We also accept texts in PDF format, but please send a word processor version if you can! Please note that PDFs are often copy protected, in which case we cannot access the document and reformat it to HTML. If you submit a PDF file, you must therefore take care to remove the copy protection.
• Other formats: If your text is only available in some other format and you don’t know how to convert it, send it anyway, and we will see what we can do.
• Hard copies: If your text is not available in a digital version, but only as a paper copy, we advise you to scan it with Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to a word processing format (e.g. MS Word). We accept such scanned versions, and will (to a limited extent) proofread them. Please do not send us the text as a scanned graphical (non-OCR) PDF file, since this cannot be converted into HTML. But please do include an optical PDF along with the OCR version, so we can use it for reference during proofreading. Normally, AnthroBase does not have the capacity to scan texts ourselves, but we may do so in exceptional instances. Contact us for more information.

2. Layout, fonts, graphics:

• Formatting. Please avoid "overformatting" your text! Fancy text colors and fonts, headers and footers will be removed. We attempt to keep a simple, uniform and easily legible formatting standard throughout AnthroBase, and only include formatting that is essential to the meaning of the text.
• Illustrations are best submitted as separate files (preferably in *.gif, *.jpg or *.bmp formats), with markings within the text at approximately the place where you want the graphic inserted. (Again, if you can’t work it out, send the text anyway. We can usually fix it.)
• Footnotes will be converted to endnotes. Avoid fancy footnote formats (italics, smaller fonts etc.)
• Tables will most often be successfully converted. But again, make it simple.
• Underlining will be removed or replaced by italics. If you do this yourself, you will save us work.
• Paragraphs are normally separated by an empty line, and first-line indented paragraphs will normally be replaced with this standard. Some texts, however, use two kinds of paragraphs: first-line indentation (for minor paragraphs) and empty-line separation (for major paragraphs). Normally, we will disregard this distinction when reformating a text, however, there may be cases when this is distortive of the meaning of the text. If you want us to retain the the distinction between theses two paragraph types in your text, you must notify us about this specifically!

3. Page numbers:

• Texts published in HTML are normally not paginated. For citation purposes this is sometimes impractical, and some authors therefore prefer to insert page separators with page numbers in their HTML texts. It is not AnthroBase’s policy to add page numbers to submitted texts. You may, however, insert the page separators and numbers yourself - in which case we will not remove them. Note that separators and markers must be written in plain text (the "page numbering" feature of standard word processors has no effect in HTML). If you want to include page separators and numbers in your text, please notify us when sending the text. For details on how to circumvent the page number problem when citing texts on AnthroBase, click here.

Please note that we will change the formatting of all texts to conform with the standard "look and feel" of AnthroBase.

Bibliographical standards

Consistent bibliographical standards have not yet been implemented in AnthroBase. If you have a choice of bibliographical formats, however, we prefer a format of the following kind:

Book:
Silverman, D. 1993. Interpreting Qualitative Data. Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Article in book:
Stratton, J. 1997 [1985]. On the Importance of Subcultural Origins. In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (eds.) The Subcultures Reader. New York: Routledge, pp.181-191.

Article in journal:
Cerbone, David R. 1994. Don't look but think: Imaginary scenarios in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Inquiry 37(2): 159-183.

Note on privacy and e-mail

As part of our normal editorial policy, AnthroBase will include your e-mail address in your text when we publish it, thus allowing readers to contact you directly with feedback and opinions. If you do not want your e-mail address published, please notify us! If you prefer to be contacted by other means than e-mail, please notify us of the relevant details (postal address, phone or fax number etc.).