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).

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