As of July 1, 2024, Pacific Affairs has a new permanent editor at the helm in the person of Soo Yeon Kim, a political scientist by training who comes to us from the National University of Singapore. She is the second woman to serve as editor of Pacific Affairs in its nearly 100-year history, the first being Elizabeth Green (editor 1928–1933). With a new Editor comes some housekeeping changes we thought our readers might be interested in hearing about.
At a recent editorial workshop held in September 2024, it was decided that Pacific Affairs will be adopting in-text citation style (still using the Chicago Manual of Style format), effective with our March 2024 issue. This means authors should be submitting a reference list and using in-text citations in their submissions. We have updated our Style Guide to reflect these changes.
Another change concerns our Perspectives category. While previously we had different length options for these (6,500 or 8,500 words), we have decided to seek shorter, more focused Perspectives pieces by mandating a single length of approximately 4,500 words. Research article lengths remain unchanged (between 8,000-9,000 words). For more on our submission guidelines, visit our webpage.
We have also instituted a new decision category at the pre-review stage: reject and resubmit. This means at the pre-review stage, where we previously only had two possible decisions (either yes, it goes out for review or no, it is declined), for those submissions in which we see some promise but which we feel are not quite ready for external review, we may reject them at the pre-review stage but invite the author to strengthen certain aspects of the paper and resubmit it for consideration.