Instructions for authors

Manuscripts are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has not been published and will not be published elsewhere without permission of the Regional Science Association International and that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Under no circumstances will the identity of the referees be disclosed to the author(s) or to any orther party not involved in the editorial process.

Exclusive Licence Form
Authors will be required to sign an Exclusive Licence Form (ELF) for all papers accepted for publication. Signature of the ELF is a condition of publication and papers will not be passed to the publisher for production unless a signed form has been received. Please note that signature of the Exclusive Licence Form does not affect ownership of copyright in the material.  (Government employees need to complete the Author Warranty sections, although copyright  in such cases does not need to  be assigned).  After submission authors will retain the right to publish their paper in various media/circumstances (please see the form for further details).  To assist authors an appropriate form will be supplied by the editorial office. Alternatively, authors may like to download a copy of the form here. 

Submission and correspondence

Submissions are now made online using Manuscript Central. To submit to the journal go to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pirs.

If this is the first time you have used the system you will be asked to register by clicking on 'create an account'. Full instructions on making your submission are provided. You should receive an acknowledgement within a few minutes. Thereafter, the system will keep you informed of the process of your submission through refereeing, any revisions that are required and a final decision.

The length of articles should not usually exceed 10000 words including abstract and footnotes. Articles should be submitted in English, but in exceptional instances it may be possible to arrange for translation.

Editor-in-Chief: Professor Jouke van Dijk, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Urban and Regional Studies Institute, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, NL-9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands. Fax: +31 50 363 3901, email: jouke.van.dijk@rug.nl

Editorial Assistant: Sophia Klaassen, MA, Papers in Regional Science, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, NL-9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands, Fax: +31 8 4222 0036, e-mail: pirs@rug.nl

 When preparing manuscripts for the journal, please note the following points:

1. Full articles published in Papers in Regional Science should not exceed 10,000 words (approximately 20 pages in print). Research notes and comments should not contain more than 3,500 words, and book reviews should not be more than approximately 800 words. For manuscripts that are longer, shortening before submission increases the chances of acceptance.

2. The form and content of the manuscript should be carefully checked to exclude the need for corrections at the proof stage. Manuscripts must be typed on one side of the paper only, with wide margins, and double line spacing.

References, tables and figure legends should be typed on separate sheets.

3. The first manuscript page should provide the title, names of all authors, affiliations, any footnotes to the title, address to which proofs are to be sent, a short running title, and the fax number and/or e-mail address of the corresponding author in order to accelerate communication.

4. Each paper is to be preceded by a short abstract, which should not exceed 100 words. Up to five key words should also be furnished as well as The Journal of Economic Literature index number(s).

5. Footnotes to the text should be avoided as much as is reasonably feasible.

6. The list of references should be in alphabetical order and include the names and initials of all authors (see examples below). Whenever possible, please update all references to papers accepted for publication, preprints or technical reports, giving the exact name of the journal, as well as the volume, first and last page numbers and year, if the article has already been published or accepted for publication. When styling the references, the following examples should be observed.

Journal article: Dutta B, Sen A, Vohra R (1995) Nash implementation through elementary mechanisms in economic environments. Economic Design 1: 173–204

Complete book: Sertel MR (1982) Workers and incentives (Contributions to economic analysis, No. 140). North-Holland, Amsterdam

Contribution in a book: Kalai E (1995) Solutions of the bargaining problem. In: Hurwicz L, Schmeidler D, Sonnenschein H (eds) Social goals and social organization. Cambridge University Press, CambridgeCitations in the text should be by author with the year of publication in parentheses, e.g., Sertel (1982). If a work with more than two authors is cited, only the first author’s name plus "et al." need to be given, and if there is more than one reference by the same author or team of authors in the same year, then a, b, c should be added after the year both in the text and in the list of references.

7. Figures are to be numbered consecutively. Preferably, the figures should be professional quality computer graphics, as output by standard office software or plotting packages. If possible encapsulated Postscript graphics should be imported into the manuscript in the places where they are intended to appear. On acceptance, authors will be requested to supply these Postscript files separately. Figures should be captioned informatively, so that they can be understood without referring to the text.

8. Tables are to be numbered separately from the illustrations. Each table should have a short informative title.

9. Formulas should be numbered consecutively on the right-hand side of the page. Matrix and vector symbols should be denoted in boldface type, whereas scalars, elements of arrays, and other variables should be in italics. Abbreviations for mathematical operators (such as in, e, prob, and Max) should be typeset in roman. Ratios and fractions in the main text should be presented using a slash.

10. A PDF file of the page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author by e-mail. The provisional page numbers given in the proofs may be referred to during the correction procedure. However, the final page numbers are inserted by the publisher when an issue is ready to go to press.

11. A PDF offprint is supplied for each author for his own personel use. Orders for additional offprints at the contributor’s own expense can be placed by returning the order form with the corrected proofs.