brycewang-stanford Submission Preflight (apsr-submission)
The last check before pressing submit on Editorial Manager. APSR is double-anonymous, so the single most common avoidable failure is an under-anonymized manuscript. Verify volatile specifics on the official page before relying on them.
When to trigger
- "Submitting tomorrow" — last pass before upload
- Unsure which files/metadata Editorial Manager expects
- Confirming the chosen track's caps are met and the manuscript is properly anonymized
Process facts (verify volatile items on the official page)
- Owner / publisher: American Political Science Association (APSA) / Cambridge University Press.
- Portal: Editorial Manager (
editorialmanager.com/apsr). - Review model: double-anonymous — anonymize the manuscript; provide a separate title page.
- Tracks: Regular Article (< 11,000 words), Research Note (< 7,000 words — see 待核实 on the exact cap), Replications and Reappraisals, Syntheses, Registered Reports.
- Abstract: ≤ 150 words.
- Word count: put it on the front page; counts include tables, figures, and printed footnotes, exclude the reference list and online appendices.
- Style: APSA Style Manual for Political Science (author-date).
- ORCID: required for the corresponding author (submissions after 1 Jan 2019).
- Fee: no submission fee and no APSA-membership requirement (verified 2026-06-22). Hybrid Cambridge journal; post-acceptance Gold OA APC is optional — Cambridge 2026 standard £2,610 / US $3,655 plus tax (re-verify the current rate before submission).
Anonymization deep-audit (the failure that actually happens)
Under double-anonymous review the manuscript file itself must not identify you. Beyond deleting the byline, sweep these known leak points:
- Self-citations. Keep the citations (omitting them distorts the literature) but voice them in the third person: "as we demonstrated (Author 2021)" → "as Author (2021) demonstrates." Avoid a wall of "Anonymized (2021)" placeholders — a cluster of redactions identifies you almost as reliably as a name.
- Acknowledgments, grant numbers, IRB protocol numbers — move to the separate title page; an IRB number is traceable to an institution.
- File metadata — author fields, tracked-changes and comment names, PDF creator strings. Strip in the source and re-check the compiled PDF.
- Links — replication or preregistration URLs on a named account; use anonymized views until acceptance.
- Prose tells — "our earlier fieldwork," a dataset only one team possesses, thanks to a named RA. Do one full read asking only: could a reviewer in my subfield guess?
Computing the word count
Count the body plus tables, figures, and printed footnotes (captions and cell text included); exclude the reference list and online appendix; print the number on the front page. Leave a few hundred words of headroom — revisions grow papers, and an R&R should not burst the track's cap.
Submission-day sequence
- Freeze the manuscript; run the anonymization sweep above on the frozen file.
- Compile two files: anonymized manuscript + separate title page.
- Log in to Editorial Manager under the corresponding author's ORCID-linked account; choose the track deliberately (caps and reviewer expectations differ by track).
- Enter metadata — title, ≤150-word abstract, keywords — matching the manuscript exactly.
- Proof what the system builds for reviewer view before approving: metadata stripped, no title-page bleed-through, exhibits render.
Preflight checklist
Track & length
- Track chosen and its word cap met (Article < 11,000 / Note < 7,000)
- Word count on the front page (includes tables/figures/footnotes; excludes refs + appendix)
- Abstract ≤ 150 words, states question + approach + finding
Anonymity (double-anonymous)
- No author names, affiliations, or acknowledgments in the manuscript
- No obvious self-references ("as we showed in…"); self-citations neutralized
- Identifying file metadata stripped (document properties, comments)
- Anonymized pre-analysis plan / OSF link if preregistration is referenced
- Separate (non-anonymous) title page prepared as a distinct file
Format & metadata
- APSA Style Manual formatting; consistent author-date citations
- Corresponding-author ORCID ready
- Figures/tables self-contained, accessible (see
apsr-tables-figures)
Compliance & files
- Ethics / IRB / human-subjects compliance per APSA principles
- Original work; preprint status checked against Cambridge preprint policy
- Reproducibility package staged for the APSR Dataverse at conditional acceptance
(see
apsr-transparency-and-data-policy)
Anti-patterns
- Leaving author identifiers in the text, acknowledgments, or file metadata (breaks anonymity)
- Abstract over 150 words; no word count on the front page
- Sending a long paper to the Research Note track
- Choosing Registered Reports after results exist
- Budgeting for a submission fee that is not charged (none as of 2026-06-22; only optional post-acceptance Gold OA APC)
Output format
【Track】Article / Note / Replication / Synthesis / Registered Report (caps met? Y/N)
【Anonymized】text + self-refs + file metadata clean? [Y/N]
【Abstract】word count (≤150)
【Word count on front page】incl. tables/figures/footnotes? [Y/N]
【APSA style + ORCID】[Y/N]
【Repro package】staged for APSR Dataverse? [Y/N]
【Next】await decision → apsr-rebuttal on R&R
Supplementary resources
../../resources/external_tools.md— reference managers, anonymization, repro tooling../../resources/official-source-map.md— official APSR URLs behind every fact in this pack