Journal of Chinese Religions

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Instructions for authors

Thank you for choosing to submit your paper to us. Please take the time to read and follow these instructions, as doing so will ensure your paper matches the journal's requirements.

About the journal 

The Journal of Chinese Religions is an international, peer-reviewed journal, published under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions (SSCR). Since its founding, the Journal has provided a forum for studies in Chinese religions from a great variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philology, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, political science, archaeology, and literary studies. The Journal welcomes original research articles, shorter research notes, essays, and field reports on all aspects of Chinese religions in all historical periods. All submissions need to undergo double-blind peer review before they can be accepted for publication.

Preparing your paper

Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English. It is the author's responsibility to ascertain that the paper uses idiomatic English, including accurate grammar, syntax, punctuation, and spelling. Manuscripts that do not meet this requirement will not be accepted for review.

Word count

Please include a word count for your paper. A typical paper for this journal should not exceed 15,000 words, inclusive of figure captions, references, and tables.

Style guidelines

The style of your paper is not important at the time of submission. However, after acceptance we will ask you to revise your manuscript to Chicago style with full footnotes and a full bibliography, employing American spelling throughout. All Chinese text must be rendered in traditional (rather than simplified) characters. Please refer to a recently published JCR article for further information.

Formatting

Papers need to be submitted in two formats, as a Word document and a pdf. Chinese or other non-Latin based languages should use Unicode fonts.

Checklist: What to include

1. Author details. All authors of a manuscript should include their full name, affiliation, and contact information on the cover page of the manuscript. The main body of the manuscript, i.e., everything after the cover page, needs to be anonymized so as to facilitate double-blind peer review.
2. An abstract of 100-150 words.
3. A list of five to seven keywords descriptive of the paper’s subject matter.
4. Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, table, fileset, sound file or anything that supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. We publish supplemental material online via Project MUSE. Ideas for online materials can be proposed when you submit your paper.

Figures

We require high-quality figures should your paper be accepted. The author is responsible for supplying acceptable permission from third parties.

Using third-party material in your paper

If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to publication.

Submitting your paper

Please submit your paper directly to the editor, Philip Clart, at jcr@uni-leipzig.de.

By submitting your paper to JCR, you are declaring that it is not currently under review by any other journal and that you will not submit it for review by any other journal until JCR's review process is concluded.

Publication charges

There are no submission fees, publication fees, or page charges for this journal.

Color figures can be reproduced in color in your online article free of charge if supplied. If it is necessary for the figures to be reproduced in color in the print version, a charge will apply.

Copyright

Copyright allows you to protect your original material, and stop others from using your work without your permission. The Journal of Chinese Religions normally requires assignment of copyright to JHUP as a condition of publication.  

Open Access

JHUP provides open access options. Please see /journals/author-resources/open-access for further information.

Article reprints

For enquiries about reprints, please see www.sheridan.com/jhup/eoc.

Updated 10-09-2018

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice page.

Peer Review Policy

The Journal of Chinese Religions (JCR) is the longest-standing journal in the field of Chinese religions. It is a peer-reviewed, bi-annual academic journal that publishes studies in Chinese religions from a great variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philology, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, political science, archaeology, and literary studies. The Journal welcomes original research articles, shorter research notes, essays, book reviews, and field reports on all aspects of Chinese religions in all historical periods. All submissions, except invited book reviews, need to undergo double-blind peer review before they can be accepted for publication.

The editor carries out a preliminary review of all submissions to ascertain that they fit the journal’s thematic profile and do not have any obvious quality problems (e.g., in methodology, documentation, or English language competence). If serious problems emerge, the editor may reject a submission outright. Otherwise (and more commonly) he may make recommendations for revisions prior to beginning the double-blind peer review process.

Two reviewers are each provided with an anonymized version of the submission (both docx and pdf) and a review report form asking them to return a formal vote on the submission; the choices given are (1) “Accept,” (2) “Accept with revisions,” (3) “Accept with revisions, but only after I have approved the revised manuscript,” or (4) “Reject.” Furthermore, reviewers are asked to provide detailed comments in the following format:

1. Please comment on the manuscript’s main argument, especially its contribution to the field of Chinese religions:

2. Please comment on the manuscript’s structure. Are the arguments presented coherently?

3. Please comment on the author’s use of primary and secondary sources:

4. Other comments.

If both reviewers vote to “accept” or “accept with revisions,” the editor makes the final acceptance decision on the basis of the revised version submitted by the author. Any reviewer voting to “accept with revisions, but only after I have approved the revised manuscript” will receive the revised version for final approval. If both reviewers vote to reject the submission, then that is the final decision communicated to the author. If the votes and comments of the two reviewers show significant discrepancies, the reviewer may ask a third reviewer to serve as tie-breaker.

The whole review process (preliminary review + double-blind peer review) normally takes a maximum of 2.5 months (two weeks for the editor’s preliminary review, two months for double-blind peer review). The length of the subsequent revision process is variable, as the author is given no firm deadlines and final papers are processed for publication in the order they are received.

Editor:

Philip Clart (Leipzig University, Germany)     
jcr@uni-leipzig.de   

Book Review Editor:

Megan Bryson (University of Tennessee) 
mbryson4@utk.edu

Associate Book Review Editor:  

Dan Lusthaus (Harvard University, USA)    
lusthaus@fas.harvard.edu

Advisory Board: 

Katherine Alexander (University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA)  
Sébastien Billioud (Université Paris Cité, Paris, France)  
Shin-yi Chao (University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA)  
Adam Chau (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)  
Jack Meng-tat Chia (National University of Singapore, Singapore)  
Vincent Goossaert (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, Paris, France)  
Ann Heirman (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium)  
Maria Jaschok (University of Oxford, Oxford, UK)  
Rongdao Lai (McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada)  
Eugenio Menegon (Boston University, Boston, MA, USA)  
Anna Sun (Duke University, Durham, NC, USA)  
Elena Valussi (Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA)

For further information, email Megan Bryson mbryson4@utk.edu.

Please send books for review to:
Megan Bryson
Department of Religious Studies
University of Tennessee
514 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0450
USA
 

The journal does not accept unsolicited book reviews.

Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Association for Asian Studies
  • Bibliography of Asian Studies (Online), 1983-
• Clarivate Analytics
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index
  • Web of Science
• EBSCOhost
  • Academic Search Complete
  • ATLA Religion Database (American Theological Library Association), 1977-1981
  • MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• Elsevier BV
  • Scopus
• ProQuest
  • ProQuest Central
  • Religion Database

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Religion Index One: Periodicals   (Ceased)  (Print) 

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.5 (2024)
0.8 (Five-Year Impact Factor)
0.00024 (Eigenfactor™ Score)

Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor):
Note: While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.

© Clarivate Analytics 2025

Published twice a year

Print circulation: 144

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