Submission guidelines

Sophia accepts submissions from current or recently-graduated UCL researchers, PhD or Masters students and medical students in their fourth year or above.

Submissions are not subject to peer review but the editorial team expect a high standard of content and writing style. Articles should be concise, engaging and accessible to a wide audience without sacrificing precision. For authors seeking to publish in a peer-reviewed journal or who would like to submit longer articles than accepted by Sophia, we recommend our partner publication, Opticon1826. Opticon was founded in 2006 and also accepts articles from UCL undergraduates.

Contributors to Sophia should aim for readability and enthusiasm in their writing, avoiding the formal style of journal articles. There should be no inline citation or footnotes and, if referencing the work of other academics, the person’s full name, discipline and affiliation should be mentioned in the article, rather than simply a surname. Be creative, try something new, have fun.

Below is a list of suggested formats for contribution. Tailoring your contribution to one of these options will help us in the editing process and successful contributions are likely to be included earlier.

Stub

Suggested length: 200–400 words.

Suggested content: a book review, a short summary of a public lecture, conference or exhibition, or a short opinion piece.

Article

Suggested length: 500–1000 words.

Suggested content: an extended conference or exhibition summary or opinion piece; a popular summary of an article or essay; a popular review of your research area; a novel article which you do not intend to publish in a specialist journal or an account of a project you have recently undertaken. A short list of between one or two 'Further reading' references may be included.

Feature

Suggested length: 1000–2500 words.

Suggested content: an extended popular version of an article, essay or review or a novel article or opinion piece for a general readership. The article may include a list of up to five key references for further reading.

Image

Sophia accepts images for inclusion in each issue. The image content may consist of images generated as part of your research, art or design work (only if this is your subject area) or photographs you have taken which relate to your field or to UCL in general. Image contributions should be accompanied by a short description of up to 200 words. Figures to accompany articles or features may include images which are not your own but permission to use the figure must be demonstrated and the source of the image given.

File formats and style guide

Articles may be submitted to Sophia as a Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LaTeX, Rich Text or Plain Text file. Figures should be attached separately rather than embedded in the article. The choice of typeface, line spacing etc. is not important.

Images should be submitted at a lower resolution with a file size less than 500KB. We will contact successful contributors to obtain high resolution versions at a later time.

We use the Guardian style guide for general style guidelines. A brief Sophia style guide can be downloaded here, which lists more common conventions as well as points which differ from the Guardian house style.