Preparing Your Files
All contributions, whether articles, correspondence or reviews, must be sent in electronic form. Authors are encouraged to provide the final version of the contribution in LaTeX, TeX, or Word format.
Authors using LaTeX should ideally use the KER LaTeX files which can be obtained here (zip download). In case of difficulties obtaining these files, there is a help-line available via e-mail; please contact texline@cup.cam.ac.uk . Tables and figures should be embedded in the article in the usual way, with figures in .eps form, which should be also supplied as separate files.
Contributions should follow the general style of papers in recent issues of The Knowledge Engineering Review. The author is invited to nominate up to five possible referees, who will not necessarily be used.
Articles must be accompanied by a brief, informative rather than indicative, abstract.
Authors should select a minimum of three recommended reviewers for their manuscript as part of the submission process.
If you are not using the ker.cls file, then please adopt the following layout rules. Headings should be set out clearly but not underlined. Primary headings should be in lower case, at margin, with Arabic numeral; subheadings should be numbered 2.a., 2.b., etc., and tertiary headings, 2.a.1., 2.a.2. No cross-references should be given by page number, but ‘above’ and ‘below’ should be used with the section specified, e.g. Section 2.a.2. The SI system of units should be used. The author should mark in the margin of the manuscript where figures and tables may be inserted. References to points in larger works should, where possible, quote the page reference, e.g. Ager, 1981, p. 102.
Tables and Illustrations
Tables should be typed with double-line spacing on sheets separate from the running text. Each table must have a caption that will make the data in the table intelligible without reference to the text.
Illustrations should be drafted for reproduction as full page (148 mm) width. Originals should normally be drawn at twice final area and must be sent in a flat package; larger drawings may delay publication. Lettering should be of a size so that when reduced the smallest lower-case letters will not be less than about 1 mm. Avoid gross disparities in lettering size on a drawing. Duplicates of illustrations should be sent, and may be prints or, preferably, photocopies reduced to final size. Illustrations in the text, both line drawings and photographs for halftone reproductions, will be referred to as figures (Fig. 2, 2a, etc.). Folding plates will not be accepted. Figures composed of photographs should be glossy prints presented at publication scale. Figure captions must be typed with double-line spacing on sheets separate from the running text.
Graphics
The preferred graphics package is Freehand 5 but files from many others can be accepted. Please indicate clearly the file format (e.g. TIFF, EPS, DCS, Freehand etc), computer operating system and graphics software used for originating the artwork files. The typefaces used in electronic artwork supplied should be restricted to Monotype, Adobe and Bitstream font libraries. Illustrations should be supplied as EPS files and never as Postscript files, or as the native format files from the graphics package used. They should be accompanied by laser proofs with the name and version number of the graphics package used, and also the names of the fonts used.
Competing interests declaration
All authors must include a competing interests declaration in their manuscript above the references. 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 A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
References
The accuracy of references is the responsibility of authors. References must be double-spaced and spelt out in full, e.g:
Gale, W A, ed 1986. Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
Pearl, J 1984. Heuristics. Intelligent search strategies for problem solving, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
Tie-Cheng Wang and Bledsoe, W W, 1987. "Hierarchical deduction" Journal of Automated Reasoning 3 (1) pp 1-34.
Pau, L F, 1986. "Survey of expert systems for fault detection, test generation and maintenance" Expert Systems, 3 (2) pp 100-111.
Unpublished work should normally be referred to in the text parentheses as, for example, ‘private communication’ or ‘unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. London, 1988’, and not included in the reference list unless in the press.
Offprints
No paper offprints are provided, but the corresponding author will be sent the pdf of the published article.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.