Guidelines

Doctoral Researcher Prize 2010/2011

Deadline: Friday 7th January 2011

The submitted paper must have been presented at one of the ESPAnet conferences, workshops or seminars in 2010. The author(s) must, at the closing date of January 7th, 2011, not yet have been awarded a doctorate.

Criteria for assessment

The judges are particularly looking for exciting, innovative and scholarly work, which challenges existing perspectives; poses new research problems, and develops answers to them; which offers sophisticated or subtle insights and interpretations from empirical evidence; and/or which develops new methods, or applies old methods in new ways to illuminate our understanding.

Judges are specifically requested to assess and rank the submitted papers in terms of:

  • their scholarly interest and originality;
  • analytical, and where appropriate methodological, rigour;
  • quality, coherence and structure of argument;
  • clearly publishable quality following one set of relatively minor revisions, and where necessary, clarification/improvement of language.

Please note: if there are no papers which meet the standard required, the panel need not award a prize.

Timetable

Submitted papers will be sent to the judge by late January 2011. The judges will evaluate, rank and return the papers and their decision to the editorial office by April 2011. Candidates should receive feedback and the results of the competition by late May 2011. The winning author(s) must return their final version paper, conforming in length and style to JESP requirements, to the JESP office by mid-July 2011. A formal announcement of the prize-winner is made at the annual ESPAnet conference in the autumn.

Submission process

To enter this prize authors should email their papers to jesp@ed.ac.uk on or before the above deadline. In the main text and subject line of the email please state, “Doctoral Researcher Prize entry 2011.”

Please attach the following to your email (in MS word format):

  • A separate title page containing the title of your paper, your full contact details,
    institutional affiliation, name of PhD supervisor, and ESPAnet event at which the paper was originally presented.
  • An anonymous separate word document containing the paper’s title and abstract (abstract of no more than 150 words).
  • A separate document containing the main text of the article. This also should be anonymous.

Submissions must have a file name which includes their surname (this includes the anonymous documents outlined above. The editorial officer will make all papers fully anonymous before the assessment stages).

Style, format and guidelines

  • Papers should not exceed 8,000 words. Those which exceed the word limit may be disqualified from the DRP.
  • Papers should be written in English.
  • Footnotes should always be avoided. If necessary, endnotes can be used.
  • When referencing papers should use the Harvard system, which in the text cites authors and year of publication, and the full reference in a List of References at the end of the main text.
  • All tables and figures should be kept to the minimum essential to your paper's argument. They are to be provided in a separate electronic file, submitted with the main text of the paper, clearly labelled, and the file name should include the author's surname.
  • Submissions should be presented in the JESP house style. Details are available on the journal website and on the inside back cover of each issue.

For further details please refer to the Journal of European Social Policy website:
http://esp.sagepub.com/

Submission rules

Papers must have been presented at, or contributed to, an ESPAnet workshop, conference or seminar during the competition year. Authors must not at the closing date have been awarded a doctorate. Jointly authored papers are acceptable, providing that no authors have been awarded a doctorate at the closing date.  Submissions must address any aspect of European social policy. There are no other exclusions on the basis of subject matter: papers can cover any subject; country/countries; adopt any theoretical basis; use any methodology; and come from any discipline within the broad field of social policy. The only subject matter  requirement is that the paper should make a contribution to our understanding of, and knowledge about, social policy in Europe. Authors may have revised their papers in the period between presentation at an ESPAnet event and the submission deadline. Authors may be required to revise their submission in the light of judges' comments before publication. Failure to comply with these revisions may result in loss of the prize. If no paper of a high enough standard is identified by the judges in any one year, the prize will not be awarded. The prize-winning paper will be published in the Journal of European Social Policy in the first issue of the subsequent volume. The winner(s) will receive 1 year's free subscription to the Journal. For further information please contact jesp@ed.ac.uk