Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage

GUIDE FOR AUTHORS

 

GENERAL
There are no page charges.  All contributions must be written in English, in 10pt Times New Roman, with single-spaced text that is left and right justified.  All pages must be numbered sequentially.  S.I. units should be used throughout, and dates must be listed in the form ‘16 September 1857' or ‘September 1857’.

A space should be left before and after headings, between paragraphs, and before and after indented quotations.  First lines of each paragraph should be indented except for those immediately under a heading. 

The first page of the paper should include the title; the author's name, postal address and e-mail address; an abstract; and up to five keywords that can be used for indexing.  The abstract should not be longer than 300 words, and must be intelligible by itself without reference to the rest of the paper.

Papers should be e-mailed as a WORD attachment (or failing that as an ASCII file and where possible with an accompanying pdf file) to the Editor, Dr Wayne Orchiston, at:

Wayne Orchiston <wayne.orchiston@jcu.edu.au>

For those without e-mail facilities, one hard copy of the paper plus an electronic version on diskette or CD should be sent to:

Dr Wayne Orchiston,
Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage,
Centre for Astronomy ,
James Cook University,
Townsville,
Queensland, 4811, Australia

HEADINGS
Sections should be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals (i.e. 1, 2, 3 etc.) and the headings capitalized and bold.  For Subsections use bold lower case second-order headings, numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.  Third-order subheadings should be lower case and numbered 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, etc.  Here is an example from the ‘Discussion’ Section of a hypothetical paper about astronomical spectroscopy:

3          DISCUSSION
3.1       Important Developments in Astronomical Spectroscopy
3.1.1     Kirchhoff’s Contribution

All headings should be left-justified.  Apart from the Abstract, all headings (including ‘Acknowledgements’, ‘Notes” and ‘References’) must be numbered.

TABLES
Tables should be placed together at the end of the paper.  All tables should be numbered consecutively, and should be referred to in the body of the text.  Every table should have a title, and if the table is reproduced from a published source that this should be identified in parentheses at the end of the title.  Column headings should be brief with the units indicated in the line below between parentheses.  Zero should be placed before the decimal point in all values less than 1.0.  If references are used in tables, be sure to include them in the list of references.

FIGURES
‘Figures’ include line drawings and half-tones (black and white photographs).  Figures should be scanned at 300 dpi, saved as separate jpg or tif files, and submitted as clearly-labelled individual e-mail attachments (e.g. Blogs Figure 1, Blogs Figure 2, etc.).  Do not embed the figures in the paper.  All figures should be numbered consecutively, and must be referred to in the body of the text.  With maps, plans of observatories, etc., make sure that a scale and North arrow are included in order to indicate size, distance and direction. 

Where relevant, it is up to you to obtain copyright release for images used and to pay the appropriate reproduction fees.  You must obtain written documentation of this from the instititution holding the original images, and include this information when you submit your manuscript. 

Finally, do not forget to include a list of figure captions at the end of the paper (after the References section and any tables).  The source of each figure should be mentioned in the caption.  If from an archive, some other repository or a private collection then use the following style: ‘(courtesy: Joe Blogs Collection, A4/24)’; if the figure has been reproduced from a published source then use: ‘(after Blogs, 1998: 48)’.  Make sure to include this latter reference in the References section, or the ‘Blogs Collection’ in the Acknowledgements section.

EQUATIONS
Equations should be numbered sequentially at the right hand margin.  Make sure that you indicate clearly the difference between similar letters and numbers, e.g., the letter ‘l’ and the number ‘1’; the letter ‘o’ and zero (0); the letter ‘u’ and mu (m); the letter ‘n’ and eta (h).  Give the meaning of all symbols immediately after the equation in which they are first used.  Indicate clearly subscripts and superscripts.  For fractions that are not listed on your version of Word use the solidus (/) instead of a horizontal line.  Use standard symbols and notations whenever possible.

QUOTATIONS
Quotations of about 30 words or less should be set in the text within double quotation marks.  Longer quotations should be indented (left and right), without the use of quotation marks.  A half-line space should be left before and after all indented quotations.  All underlining, italics, superscripts and subscripts that appear in the original should be faithfully reproduced (where possible) in the quotations.  If you wish to place an insert within a quotation then this should be shown in square brackets.

TEXT REFERENCES
These should be cited by author’s name and date of publication, and where a quotation is given followed by the relevant page number(s).  Hypothetical examples are:

After reviewing the North American observations, Dick (1992:15) concluded that “On the basis of the accumulated published evidence, this value of the solar parallax appears problematic …”, and subsequent research (Dick, pers. comm., 1994) has only served to confirm this suspicion (c.f. Batten and Stephenson, 1997; Kochhar, 1996; Warner, et al., 1993). 

Note that when more than one reference is involved, these should be listed alphabetically.  Note, also, that publications written by more than two authors are referred to by the first author plus ‘et al.’ (as in Warner et al., above), even though the names of all authors must be listed in the References at the end of the paper (unless there are more than five of then, when ‘et al.’ should again be used).

LIST OF REFERENCES
This must include all published, Web-based or manuscript sources used, listed in alphabetical order by author, or if no author by title.  Unpublished ‘personal communications’ should not be included here—simply list these people in the Acknowledgements.

Use the following examples as a guide.  They include books and chapters of books, research papers in journals, newspaper articles, and manuscript sources.  Note that the names of periodicals should be given in full; this avoids confusion and ambiguity since some history of astronomy papers are published in non-astronomical (e.g. historical or history of science) journals.

For periodicals

Andrews, A.D., 1997. Cyclopaedia of telescope-makers. Part 7: T-Z. The Irish Astronomical Journal, 24, 125-192.

Chapman, A., 1983. The accuracy of angular measuring instruments used in astronomy between 1500 and 1850. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 14, 133-137.

Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, 24(4), 16 (1948).

Obituary: Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 81, 261-266 (1921).

For newspaper entries

Tebbutt, J., 1861. The comet. The Empire, June 26.

The Comet. The Empire, June 28 (1861).

For edited symposia, proceedings, etc.

Jeffery, P.M., Burman, R.R., and Budge, J.R., 1989. Wallal: the total solar eclipse of 1922 September 21. In Blair, D.G. and Buckingham, M.J. (eds.). Proceedings of the Fifth Marcel Grossman Meeting. University of Western Australia, Perth. Pp. 1343-1350.

For monographs, books and chapters of books

Colonial Astronomer: Copies of all Correspondence Between the Governor General and the Secretary of State Respecting the Appointment of the Rev. W. Scott as Colonial Astronomer. Sydney, Government Printer (1857).

Howse, D., 1989. Nevil Maskelyne. The Seamen’s Astronomer. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sullivan, W.T., 1988. Karl Janksy and the beginnings of radio astronomy. In Kellermann, K., and Sheets, B. (eds.). Serendipitous Discoveries in Radio Astronomy. Green Bank, National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Pp. 39-56.

For unpublished sources

Airy, G., 1857. Letter to P.P. King, dated October 30. Mitchell Library, Sydney (AR 4216).

Berendzen, R., 1968. The career development and education of astronomers in the United States. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University.

Tebbutt, J., 1860-61. Astronomical Observations. MS, Mitchell Library, Sydney (AR 3647).

Tebbutt, J., 1874. Untitled journal of transit of Venus observations. MS, Mitchell Library, Sydney (AR 3682).

For second-hand references

Lassell, W., 1847. Discovery of a new planet. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 8: 83. Cited by J.L. Perdrix in Journal of the Astronomical Society of Victoria 33: 86-92 (1980).

FOOTNOTES
Footnotes should be avoided if at all possible, but if essential they should be indicated by superscript numbers in the text and placed in a separate ‘Notes’ section near the end of the paper, between the ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘References’.  All Notes should be kept as short as possible, and if they include references be sure to include these in the list of References.

CHECK LIST AND ORDER
Title; Author’s name, affiliation and e-mail address; Abstract; Keywords; body of the text; Acknowledgements; Notes (optional); References; Tables; Figure captions (all as one e-mail attachment).
Figures (as separate e-mail attachments).

FURTHER INFORMATION
Any enquries should be directed to the undersigned at

E-mail:              Wayne Orchiston <wayne.orchiston@jcu.edu.au>
Fax:                  +61 7 4781 5880
Phone:              +61 7 4781 4815   

Dr Wayne Orchiston,
Editor.

3 March 2006