Author Guidelines
Submission requirements
By submitting their work to Contemporary Musicology, the authors confirm that the materials presented in the manuscript have neither been published previously nor is under consideration by any other journal.
All the co-authors should have approved the submission.
Manuscript handling process
The manuscript and accompanying materials are submitted electronically via i.susidko@gnesin-academy.ru.
Preliminary review of the manuscript is carried out by the Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Musicology and Editorial Board members. At this stage, the editors establish whether the submission falls into the Journal’s thematic scope and meets the Journal’s formatting requirements. The manuscript shall be rejected at the preliminary stage in the following cases: the topic of the manuscript does not correspond the to the Journal’s scope; an article with the same content was previously published in another journal; the submitted text does not meet the necessary level of scientific quality; the submitted materials reveal a fundamental contradiction to the ethical principles adhered to by the Journal (see our Publication Ethics section), including plagiarism.
Following the preliminary review stage, the manuscript is forwarded for peer review (see our Peer Review section).
In cases where the authors disagree with the reviewers’ decision, they are requested to provide a written reasoned response. The Editor-in-Chief may then forward the manuscript to different reviewers for additional evaluation. In cases where the authors fail to follow the recommendations of the Editorial Board and the Journal’s requirements, the manuscript is rejected and the authors are notified of this decision.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
The Journal assigns unique DOIs to all its issues and articles.
Formatting requirements
Manuscript formatting
MS Word text processing program (sheet size – A4; font – Times New Roman; font size — 14; line spacing – 1.5; top and bottom margins – 2 cm; left margin – 3 cm; right margin – 1.5 cm; paragraph indent – 1.25; width alignment). Italics, bold italics, and bold straight can be used. Underlining and Caps Lock are not used. The pages are numbered; no footers are created.
The optimal volume of an article is 15,000–60,000 characters with spaces, excluding metadata (abstract, keyword lists, reference list, etc.), musical score examples, illustrations, diagrams, etc.
Article structure
Metadata
• article title (Caps Lock is not used)
• UDC
• author(s)’ name, patronymic, family name (Caps Lock is not used)
• affiliations (place of work)
• corresponding author’s email
• ORCIDs
• photo of the author(s).
Abstract
The recommended volume of the abstract is about 250 words.
The abstract summarizes the key aims and objectives, the methodology used and the findings obtained. The abstract should be self-contained, without a reader’s having to refer to the entire text.
The Editorial Board reserves the right to improve the content of the abstract and its quality of translation into English.
The title and the abstract should contain the most important keywords.
Keywords
5–10 words or phrases
The keyword list consists of the search terms used by all bibliographic databases to search for research articles by keyword. For this reason, the keywords should reflect the main statements, achievements, results and terminology.
Acknowledgements
In this section, mention is made of people and organizations who helped the author to prepare the article and provided financial support. Expressing gratitude to anonymous reviewers is considered good form.
Article body
Original research articles should follow the standard IMRAD structure (Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion). Articles written in other academic genres (review article, etc.) should contain sections reflecting the research logic.
Footnotes should be placed at the bottom of pages and numbered consecutively throughout the article. It should be remembered that footnotes are additional, not the main material of the article, and the author should limit their number.
References to sources are given inside the text in square brackets (e.g., [5, p. 25]). The sources are numbered in the order of their appearance in the text.
In-text citation
All the sources cited in the text should be included in the Reference list (and vice versa).
The volume of direct citation (appropriate borrowings detected by the Antiplagiat system) should not exceed 30% of the total volume of the article. Review articles that assume higher citation volumes are considered by the Editorial Board individually.
The manuscripts, the content of which corresponds to other publications by the author by more than 30% (dissertations, monographs, previous publications in journals and book collections detected by the Antiplagiat system), are not considered for publication.
When using italics for emphasizing within quotations, additional information is given in square brackets. For example, [italics by the author – I. F.], where I. F. are the initials of the author’s first and family names.
Illustrations
Schemes, tables, photographs, drawings, and musical score examples are numbered and given with captions in two languages (Russian and English). For authors whose native language is not Russian, the editors provide translation support.
Illustrations and musical score examples are created by computer graphics or notography. The typed musical text is converted into the format of drawings with a resolution of 600 dpi. Musical score examples should be numbered and mentioned in the text (Musical score example No. 1, etc.). The example itself, in addition to its number, should indicate the author with initials, the title of the work, its part, etc.
Each borrowed illustration should indicate the original source (museum, private collection, archive, private photo archive, book, website with URL address, etc.). For musical score examples, indication of the musical edition or manuscript source is sufficient.
Reference list
The reference list (References) includes all the sources cited in the text with their DOIs. Ideally, these are articles published in scientific journal in the five previous years. The number of cited sources depends on the genre of the published article. References to archival documents, rare editions, books and other materials are given as footnotes and are not included in the reference list.
References are formatted according to the APA style (American Psychological Association) https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references
Information about the authors
Information about each author, including its name, academic degree and position, place of work, ORCID, email address, etc., is provided. This information can be presented as a short biographical note (about 100 words).