Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author guidelines (please find the Author formal style checklist below), including that references adhere to APA guidelines and DOI is included where relevant.
  • Please also see the Torture Journal Author formal style checklist and ensure the article complies with these formal requirements. You may want to go through this systematically once the article has been through the peer-review process. Please stipulate this when you submit the article. 
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • For observational research designs, the Torture Journal encourages readers to align their designs to STROBE guidelines. Please familiarise yourselves with the checklists in the link provided before submitting the paper: https://www.strobe-statement.org/index.php?id=available-checklists

Author Guidelines

Checks for submission
Please ensure you have read the full Torture Journal author guidelines and ensure the article complies with these formal requirements. Regarding the latter, you may want to go through this systematically once the article has been through the peer-review process. Please stipulate this when you submit the article. 
 
For observational research designs, the Torture Journal encourages readers to align their designs to STROBE guidelines. Please familiarise yourselves with the checklists in the link provided before submitting the paper. 
 
Please also see the guidelines for submitting your article on our online submission platform here. 

Further information:

Selection of manuscripts will, amongst other things, be on the basis of the subject being worthy of investigation, as well as on the suitability and soundness of the research methodology and the soundness of the conclusions. Additionally, priority will be given to articles that provide original knowledge and information, particularly those with comparative and interesting or new perspectives.  Articles categorised as clinical trials, research methodology papers, data based population examinations, critical or explaining case descriptions may in some incidences be preferred.

The Torture Journal welcomes all submissions, and has a wish to promote submissions particularly from low and middle income countries. Where possible and if necessary, we will assist those working for the rehabilitation of torture survivors and the prevention of torture to make their submissions more publishable, especially those from non-English native speaking countries. (Please note, however, that publication of scientific articles cannot be guaranteed due to the integrity of the double-blind peer review system).
 
The Torture Journal will endeavour to provide succinct, relevant and timely feedback to authors on a manuscript, even when it is rejected.  The editors reserve the right to reject a manuscript at any time up to publication.

 

Research and Scientific articles

  • Research and scientific articles include an abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion.

Review articles

  • Review articles provide a critical survey and examination of the literature of a particular subject of research which generally consist of Abstract, Introduction (including explanations of conflicts in the literature, and analysis of the field), Methods, Results, Conclusions and Outlook (including limitations of current knowledge and future directions to be pursued in research).

Case reports

  • The Torture Journal welcomes the submission of case reports with respect to unusual cases for any specific reason (either social, nosological, clinical or therapeutic).

Perspectives

  • A personal view or reflection in a clear narrative voice can also be submitted to the journal. It is intended that this section can add a more qualitative perspective to other scientific articles. Perspectives from torture survivors or field workers are particularly encouraged.

Research news

  • Please let us know at publications@irct.org if there is something you believe is newsworthy for the Torture Journal. Examples include items which may be of use or interest to the wider  sector, such as key or unusual papers published in another journal that are worthy of wider dissemination, or, literature that your organisation has produced

Statements

  • Official declarations made by professional bodies or committees which may be of value or interest to the readers related to the torture field.

Book and media reviews

  • Readers are welcome to contribute a book, film, TV, exhibition, or web review.

Debate and Comment

  • Debates and comments are commissioned largely to contextualise a review or scientific paper published in the same issue.

Letter to the Editor

  • Letters can be written in response to previous content published in the Torture Journal or be of  general interest.

Special section: torture in prisons

This call for papers aims to examine prisons and other detention facilities (immigration detention centres, juvenile detention centres, etc) as torturing environments

Torture Journal encourages authors to submit papers with a psychological, medical or legal orientation, particularly those that are interdisciplinary with other fields of knowledge. We welcome contributions related (but not limited) to:

  1. Conditions of detention as environments of torture: overcrowding, food, inhuman treatment, etc.
  2. Carceral geographies: emotional cartographies in detention spaces.
  3. Impacts of isolation and closed regime units. Alternatives.
  4. Use of mechanical restraints, chemical restraints and other methods of control and coercion. Intervention programs to abolish restraints.
  5. Challenges of forensic documentation in prisons and other closed institutions.
  6. Studies on reprisals against persons deprived of their liberty following monitoring visits to investigate allegations of torture.
  7. Violent institutional cultures. Generating and perpetuating factors, and intervention programmes on violent milieus.
  8. Violence by other inmates and staff. Methods of detection and prevention.
  9. Effectiveness of torture prevention measures: videotaping, civil-society monitoring, medical documentation of injuries and others
  10. Sexual torture and abuse in closed institutions.
  11. Short or adapted forms of the Istanbul Protocol for documenting torture during monitoring visits or short-time evaluations in closed institutions.
  12. Self-harm and suicide. Self-inflicted violence in closed institutions.
  13. Severe Mental Illness and Torture in closed institutions.
  14. Legal contours of torture in detention centres: legal reviews with a special focus on the intentionality and purpose criteria

Copyright Notice

The Creative Commons Licence  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) covers both the Torture Journal and the IRCT web site. The publisher will not put any limitation on the personal freedom of the author to use material contained in the paper in other works which may be published, provided that acknowledgement is made to the original place of publication.

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