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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 submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF 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.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Author Guidelines

The Ghana Social Science Journal (GSSJ) publishes a peer reviewed research for domestic, regional and in international audiences covering scholarly work in terms of: analysis, theory, measurements and empirical enquiry in all aspects of social science scholarship. Contributions are encouraged from all fields which have relevant and insightful comments involving social, economic, political, cultural, health, environmental and spatial dimensions of society and their implications for Social Science scholarship as broadly conceived. The Editor invites prospective authors to submit manuscripts (articles and book reviews) for possible publication in this international journal. The Journal is published twice a year in June and December.

1. Manuscript Requirements

i. Papers should be submitted in English in double spacing, preferably in Microsoft Word, sent as an electronic mail attachment to the following address: (socsjournal@ug.edu.gh)

ii. Articles and book reviews sent to this journal should not have been accepted for publication elsewhere and must follow the referencing guidelines of the GSSJ. Papers that fail to conform to the referencing requirements will be rejected outright. Authors are advised to keep copies of their manuscripts.

iii. Articles should normally not exceed 8,000 words in length, and must be accompanied by an abstract of not more than 150 words. A book review should not exceed 1,000 words. A brief autobiographical note on the author should be supplied including full name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address and full international contact details. These should be provided on the cover page of the manuscript.

iv. Illustrative material (maps, diagrams, photographs and others) should be numbered serially (using Arabic numerals).

v. Endnotes, which should be self-explanatory and kept as minimal as possible, should be numbered serially and typed on separate sheets from the text; they should not be used to introduce bibliographical references. Instead, references to books and articles must be in Harvard style; that is, shown in the main body of the text as the author’s last name followed by year of publication and page number(s). For example, “Field (1958: 1043) …” indicates that the reference is made to page 1043 of Field’s book or article, which appeared in 1958. Similarly, several authors, such as “Ward (1956)”, “Goody (1957)”, and “Field (1963)…” imply works by the authors which appear in the years indicated in brackets. If more than one work of an author that appeared in one year are cited in the manuscript, letters should be used to distinguish the works from one another, such as “Merton (1963a),” and Merton (1963b). This procedure should be used in the endnotes also.

vi. At the end of the manuscript a reference list in alphabetical order must    be given as follows:

 For books, last name of  author, followed by initials, followed by the date of publication, full  title of book; place of publication; publishers; for example:

Ward, W.E. (1958), A History of Ghana, Second Edition. London: George Allen and Unwin.

 For journal articles, last name of author followed by initials, year of publication, full title of article, full title of journal in which it appears, volume, number, month where available and pages, for example:

Poku, J.Y. (1992), Bilingual Representational System and Inter-lingual Transfer of Learning, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 13(4):470-480.

  For an essay in a book: last name of author, followed by initials; year of publication, full title of essay, pages; followed by the preposition in; this should then be followed by the name (s) of editor(s), full title of book; place of publication; and publishers, for example:

Titriku, P.K. (1999), “Agriculture in the Volta Basin: Problems and Projects”, in Gordon, C. and Amatekpor, J. K. (eds.), The Sustainable Integrated Development of the Volta Basin in Ghana, Accra: Volta Basin Research Project, pp. 107-117.

If several works by one author are cited, entries in the references should be in chronological order. Works by the same author that appear in the same year should be distinguished by the use of letters (a, b, c…).

2. Copyright

Manuscripts for publication should be accompanied by a declaration that the work does not infringe on an existing copyright and that indemnifies the publisher of Ghana Social Science Journal against any breach of warranty. For ease of dissemination and to ensure proper policing of their use, all published papers and contributions shall become the legal copyright of the publisher – the School of Social Sciences, University of Ghana, unless otherwise agreed. Upon publication the author will receive one complimentary copy of the issue in which the work appears.

3. How to Submit

Manuscripts and CDs and any other correspondence about the journal should be sent to:

The Editorial Office,

Ghana Social Science Journal

School of Social Sciences

University of Ghana

P.O. Box LG72

Legon, Accra, Ghana

Electronic mail address: socsjournal@ug.edu.gh

Privacy Statement

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