The British Journal of Chinese Studies is a biannual, peer-reviewed, fully open access e-journal published by the British Association for Chinese Studies. We are signatories of an open access manifesto upholding freedom, integrity, and creativity in publishing, striving for scholarship that is collaboratively and responsibly built and shared. We publish research on China, broadly defined, spanning the disciplines of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We are interested in work on all time periods, and encourage contributors to establish contemporary relevance in their arguments. Engagement with Chinese language sources is essential to all research published in the journal. We are particularly committed to supporting gender and ethnic equality in Chinese studies and welcome submissions from PhD students and early career researchers. Until issue 9.1(2019) we published under the name Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies.
We accept submissions in the following categories:
Research articles
Research articles are longer, substantive pieces of academic writing that are based on original primary research and that present well supported and clearly argued findings on a topic related to Chinese Studies. They should be written in English and should usually be between 6000 and 10,000 words in length, including notes and bibliography. All research articles undergo a thorough process of both in-house editorial and external double-blind peer review from experts in the field, who include scholars working in the UK and around the world.
If the editors decide to send out your article for peer review, we expect that the initial review process should take no longer than three months. There are five possible outcomes of peer review: accept with only small editorial revisions; minor revisions; major revisions (reviewed by editorial team); resubmission for another round of peer review; or reject. The total length of time between submission and publication varies according to the amount of revision and editorial work required, but we aim for it not to exceed six months if possible.
Short essays
In addition to full-length research articles, we invite scholars to submit short essays of no more than 1500 words in length that might, for example, present a fresh theoretical or empirical intervention on an particular subject, reflect upon recent experiences of fieldwork, or offer thoughts on methodological issues that have arisen in the author’s own research. Short essays will be subject to editorial review rather than sent out for double blind peer review. It is especially important that short essays are written in an accessible and engaging style that can reach out to scholars across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as readers outside of academia altogether. For examples of short essays that meet these criteria, please see the responses in Vol. 10 to the question “What use is Chinese Studies in a pandemic?”
Please note, research articles and short essays do not represent the views of the British Association for Chinese Studies nor of the BJoCS editorial team. The editors reserve the right to reject any submissions that we deem to be of insufficient quality or otherwise inappropriate for publication. It is the responsibility of individual authors to ensure that the contents of their submission are factually correct and that their research has followed the relevant ethical guidelines in their field.
Book reviews
We no longer publish individual book reviews and are not able to receive physical copies of books from publishers. We are, however, open to submissions of longer multiple book review articles; please get in touch with the editors if you would be interested in submitting a longer review article of this type. We anticipate that review articles would be in the region of 3000-3500 words in length.
Multimodal publishing
BJoCS is published on an open-access, online platform that supports the integration of hyperlinks and multimedia content, and as such, authors are welcome – indeed encouraged – to include supplementary media and digital data in their research articles and essays. These might include static images, audio and video files, and links to material elsewhere on the web. It is the author’s responsibility to acquire the necessary copyright permissions for any media that are not the intellectual property of the author themselves.
Special issues
From time to time, the British Journal of Chinese Studies publishes special issues on specific topics that might be suggested by an editor, member of the editorial board, or that come out of a conference or workshop within the Chinese Studies academic community. If you have an idea for a special issue of the journal that fits our publishing vision and scope, please get in touch with one of the editors. The most recent example of a special issue is Vol. 12, No. 2, published in August 2022, on the topic of games and gaming in China and the Sinophone world.