1. Nominations
Students have to be nominated by their lecturer in the first instance.
If you are a student and would like to see your work submitted, please discuss with your lecturer whether your work is eligible and ask them to nominate you.
If you are a lecturer with a student who has the potential to be published in Diffusion, you will need to discuss with the student whether they would like to be nominated.
If so, please download and complete a Reader’s Report (download here).
2. Peer Review
These submissions will then be reviewed by the
editorial board for inclusion in the next available issue of the journal using
the Reviewer’s Report (download here).
This process (plus the original lecturer’s
Reader’s Report) is called Peer Review and is a normal process that all
journals go through before publishing articles. It ensures that at least two
members of staff have judged a student’s work and found it acceptable for
publication.
3. Revisions
If the Reviewer and Editorial Board feel that
changes need to be made the report and original submission (which may have
track changes to show areas that need revising) will be sent to the lecturer
who nominated the student, and the student, who can work together to complete
any revisions. The revised document will then be sent back to the journal.
4. Permission to Edit
As soon as the Editorial Board decide that a
piece of work is worth publishing they will send the student author a
Permission to Edit document which must be filled in and returned. This enables the
Board to see what edits the student author is happy for them to make and which the
student author would like to do themselves (under the guidance of the Editorial
Board and the lecturer who nominated the piece of work). You can see a Permission
to Edit form here (download).
As part of the submission process, student authors and the lecturer who has nominated their work are required to check off the submission’s compliance with all of the following items. Submissions may be returned that do not adhere to these guidelines.
- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently with another journal or other publisher waiting for consideration.
- The submission file is in Word format.
- Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
- The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Style Guide below.
- The submission is accompanied by a Reader’s Report which has been completed by the nominating member of staff.
- Submissions should be presented as a Word document.
- 12pt Times New Roman, double line-spacing, left-hand alignment only.
- Please use British (OED) spelling, not American.
- Do not use italics except for Book, Journal and Newspaper titles, and Foreign words (unless their are italics in the original quotation).
- Do not use bold type except for headings and subheadings.
- Do not underline words, phrases, titles or headings.
- Quotations should be set in single inverted commas. Double inverted commas are used only for quotations within a quotation or speech marks in creative writing.
- When longer quotations are indented, no quotation marks are required. Use single inverted commas for a quotation within a quotation.
- When longer quotations are indented, no quotation marks are required. Use single inverted commas for a quotation within a quotation.
- Any additional notes, which cannot be incorporated into the body of the work may be included at the end before Works Cited.
- Notes should be kept to a minimum.
- Enter notes manually under the subheading Notes. Do not use automatic referencing.
- Notes should be numbered (in the list as in the text) using Arabic, not Roman numerals.
- Editors reserve the right to adjust style to certain standards of uniformity.
- Please use Harvard Style referencing without footnotes, i.e. sources identified by Author, year of publication, plus page number (where applicable) and placed in brackets after the quotation or citation, e.g. ‘the quotation’ (Walter 2004, 478), or citation (Sorimachi et al. 1997).
- If the author is mentioned in the sentence itself, only the Year (or the Year followed by page number for quotations) is needed. When repeatedly quoting from the same literary text (such as a novel), the italicised book title (or shortened italicised title) plus page number may be used instead of author, year, page, e.g. (White Teeth, 496). When the title is mentioned in the sentence, page number only is needed.
- All works / texts referred to should be listed at the end of the article, alphabetically according to the author’s surname, as follows: Name. Year of Publication. Publication details.
- Important works consulted, but not cited, may be listed separately under the sub-heading ‘Further Reading’.
- Titles of Books, Journals and Newspapers should be set in italics throughout.
- Titles of articles or chapters in journals and books should be set in single inverted commas throughout.
- When referring to an old text, but using a modern edition, please provide the date of first publication either in the article itself or in the References.
- Figures should be numbered consecutively throughout the article, and referred to in the text as ‘Figure X.’ Tables should be numbered separately from figures, and referred to in the text as ‘Table X.’ Ensure that each figure or table has a caption.