Aims and Scope
High Power Laser Science and Engineering is a Gold Open Access peer reviewed journal that seeks to uncover the underlying science and engineering in the fields of: high energy density physics, high power lasers, advanced laser technology, and applications and laser components. Topics covered include laser-plasma interaction, ultra-intense ultra-short pulse laser interaction with matter, attosecond physics, laser design, modeling and optimization, laser amplifiers, nonlinear optics, laser engineering, optical materials, optical devices, fiber lasers, diode-pumped solid state lasers and excimer lasers.
Article Length
All article types in HPLSE have no page limits although papers deemed excessive in length may be rejected or will require significant revision.
Article Types
All manuscripts must be written in English.
HPLSE welcomes the following article types:
· Research Articles: Regular submissions to HPL are termed ‘research articles’ and must contain original research. Papers should be written in a concise manner; though HPL has no page limit, each paper will be judged on its own merits, and those deemed excessive in length will be rejected or will require significant revision.
· Review Articles: Articles reviewing the developments and achievements within areas of interest to the laser science community are welcomed as ‘reviews’. Reviews must be fully referenced and authors should take care to avoid excessive length.
· Letters: HPL Letters are short communications of original research that is of the highest quality and particular urgency. These papers receive expedited peer review and expedited copyediting/typesetting to accelerate publication.
· Editorials
· Commentries: HPLSE publishes commentaries that contain either an in-depth review of published articles or a discussion of an aspect of a topic that is relevant to the journal's scope. Commentaries should be a maximum of 2000 words.
· Perspectives: HPL Perspectives are reviewed by the journal Editor-in-Chief before being published, rather than undergoing a full peer review. These articles reflect the opinions of the authors rather than those of the journal and Editorial Board.
· Interviews: Interviews are articles in forms of Q&A regarding some topics that will be of interest to the wider high power laser related research community. The interviewees are normally top experts in the field providing their personal views and thoughts on issues surrounds research. The vast majority of interview articles are commissioned, but proposals can be made to the editorial team.
These article types may be eligible for APC waivers or discounts under one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Preparing your article for submission
Papers should be prepared in either Microsoft Word or LaTeX format, and initially should have figures and tables embedded. If the paper is prepared in Word, the doc file can be uploaded during submission, and the submission system will generate a PDF for review purposes. Please find the Word template for HPLSE below:
Word template file for submission
If the paper is prepared in LaTeX, the author must generate a PDF and upload this during the submission process. Authors should use the cup-hpl.cls style file and supporting files provided below:
LaTeX template files for submission (zip file)
The LATEX source file should not initially be submitted alongside the PDF, but upon provisional acceptance of the paper, the LATEX source file, along with individual figure files and a PDF of the final version, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes. See the publication process after acceptance page for further information.
Abstract and Keywords preparation
The abstract should be no longer than 150 words. It should be informative, without descriptive words or citations, and contain the major conclusions and quantitative results or other significant items in the paper. Together with the title, the abstract must be adequate as an index to all the subjects treated in the paper, and will be used as a base for indexing.
The authors should provide from 2 to 5 keywords that reflect the content of the article.
Tables and Artwork
Tables
Tables should be numbered consecutively and each should be typed doublespaced. All tables must be cited and their approximate positions indicated in the text. Tables should be appended on separate sheets and identified with appropriate titles. The table title, which should be brief, goes above the table. A detailed description of its contents or table footnotes should be given directly below the body of the table.
Figures
There is no charge for colour figures. For review purposes figures should be embedded within the manuscript. Upon final acceptance, however, individual figure files will be required for production.
Each figure should be accompanied by a single caption, to appear beneath, and must be cited in the text. Notations in the figures should be distinct and consistent with the same ones in the text. Figures should appear in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text and figure files must be named accordingly to assist the production process (and numbering of figures should continue through any appendices). For photographs, the original photos must be supplied with good contrast and clearly distinguishable details. Failure to follow figure guidelines may result in a request for resupply and a subsequent delay in the production process.
For further information, please consult the Cambridge Journals artwork guide.
Citations and References
References must be published work and must be numbered consecutively in order of their first citation. All papers included in the References section must be cited in the article and vice versa.
Citations in the text should be denoted superscript as consecutive numbers in square brackets with one number per reference. For example, see the work of Author [1], Author and Other [2], and Author et al. [3]. Note that et al. is used in the citation, but the full reference in the references section should list all authors. Citations may also be inserted when the author is not being directly referenced [4], and multiple references should be indicated as, for example, [1,3] and [2 – 4].
All of the references’ authors should be given.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements should be included at the end of the paper, before the References section or any appendicies. Please use the acknowledgements to identify all funding sources (by name and contract number, as appropriate).
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Seeking permission for copyrighted material
If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. As the author it is your responsibility to obtain this permission and pay any related fees, and you will need to send us a copy of each permission statement at acceptance.
For information on how to obtain permission, please refer to this guidance document.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Ethics and Transparency Policy requirements
Please refer to HPLSE's Publishing Ethics and Research Transparency policies when preparing your manuscript.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
During the submission process, the Corresponding Author must declare that they have the authority of all co-authors for the submission. The Corresponding Author will be asked this question when they submit the article for review.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.