Submissions

Author Guidelines

FORMAT. All submissions must be in Microsoft Word format and conform to the Review's Style Guide. Guides for preparing articles and commentaries are available in PDF format or as a Word document. Guides for preparing book reviews are available in PDF format or as a Word document.

A file containing citation entries for Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006) through Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2 (2020) of Empirical Musicology Review is available for authors using BibTeX to manage citations. Additionally, any EMR BibTeX entry may be found by entering the citation DOI at https://doi2bib.org/.

Alternative text, also called "alt text" must be included for all images, charts, graphs, and figures. Alt text should be limited to 150 characters, and can be added to Word documents easily. Alt text should:

• Be descriptive and concise: Describe the image clearly but keep it brief. A few words to a short sentence for a simple image or illustration is ideal, and one to two sentences is appropriate for more detailed graphs and charts. See examples below.
• Add context: Include information that conveys the image's purpose and relevance within the article. Avoid simply describing what the image looks like.
• Avoid redundancy: Do not start with phrases like "image of" or "picture of." Avoid repeating any information that is used in the figure caption or text. Screen readers will announce the figure as an image, then read the alt text, and then read the figure caption, and the user will ideally be able to gather the information of the whole image from all three elements.
• Include relevant information: If the image contains relevant text, include it in the alt text.

Examples: We have included two generic cases in which an author would need to provide alt-text.

• Photograph/illustration: Describe what is shown. (Examples: A woman smiling with short brown hair and glasses from the shoulders up. OR A dog sits on the foreground with a sign that reads “No loitering” with a forest in the background.)
• Graph/diagram: Say what kind of graph or diagram is being shown (if applicable) and describe what is being measured/compared. Reminder, if the details of the graph/diagram are already described in the figure caption, it doesn’t necessarily have to be repeated in the alt-text. (Examples: A bar graph titled “Average cats per city” comparing the number of cats per household on the y-axis and the names of different cities on the x-axis. The cities include Columbus, Phoenix, Toronto, and Sacramento.)

LANGUAGE. Submissions are accepted in English, including an English-language abstract. At the author's discretion, additional abstracts in other languages may also be submitted.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE. Submissions must be electronically "uploaded" using the appropriate web page.

FORMAT REJECTION. Submissions are subjected to an automated screening process that checks to ensure conformity with the EMR Style Guide. This includes checking font type and size, margins, and other layout information. Only those submissions that conform fully to the EMR Style Guide are forwarded to the Editor. You will be notified automatically by e-mail if your submission fails to meet the technical specification for submission. Ensuring conformity to the Style Guide will help avoid delays.

DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIERS. To comply with the terms of the publisher's Crossref membership, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) must be included with references when they are available. To check for DOIs, you can use the Free DOI Lookup form on the Crossref website.

DATA REPORTS. Data Reports describe datasets useful for empirical music research, such as musical metadata, annotations of musical corpora in symbolic or audio formats, automatically extracted musical features, data from psychological experiments, etc.

• In the spirit of Open Science, we particularly invite submissions of reports on datasets in open formats, such as TXT, CSV, XML, JSON, etc. Proprietary formats are not excluded per se but researchers are encouraged to transform/export their data into open formats.
• A Data Report should not contain elaborate analyses of the data but only include basic statistics summarising the size and structure of the dataset (e.g. number of observations and variables, basic descriptive statistics of each variable where appropriate and useful). The report should be written in a concise manner, providing information about file formats, any licenses, data sources, data generation and collection, pre-processing, and potential applications. This information may also to be summarized in a tabular format. A small number of figures can be included.
• Data Reports also need to contain instructions on how to obtain the data by providing a link to a public repository (e.g., OSF, Zenodo, GitHub, figshare). Please note that the datasets themselves should not be submitted to EMR.
• Data Reports should generally describe recently created datasets but may exceptionally also cover older datasets if they have not been described elsewhere yet.
• In the case of multiple authors, the role and specific contribution of each author in relation to the data should be made clear in the report (e.g. transcription, data cleaning, annotation, preprocessing, feature extraction). Authors of Data Reports are responsible for ensuring that the legal and ethical conditions for publishing and distributing the data are met.
• The template for Data Reports is the same as for articles and commentaries, but be mindful of the word limit: Data Reports should generally not exceed a limit of 2000 words.
• Data Reports will be assigned a DOI and are therefore citable just as common research articles.