Contributions to Voting matters

Brian Wichmann

Understanding your audience:

Please read some previous articles to find out the style required. You should explain technical terms like monotonicity. You can assume the reader understands STV, but not what the Condorcet Paradox is.

Understanding your subject:

Please make sure that your paper does not duplicate material already published in Voting matters. You should study papers related to your own ideas. Since all of Voting matters is now available on the Internet, this is a good place to start - and then the papers which appear as references.

Keep in touch:

The Editor tries to help and brief emails can often avoid unnecessary work on your behalf.

References:

These are important. The title, date and publisher is essential. For material off the Internet, since a URL can change, a title is still essential - but please check that a Web search engine can find the paper from the title you provide. Please give the organisation responsible for the web site if at all possible.

Communication:

Most contact these days is via email. However, authors without email or Internet access should not be disadvantaged. Postal communication should be via the McDougall Trust address (see the home page).

Computer-based documents:

If you use WORD, then please email the .DOC file. Otherwise and especially for simple documents, use ASCII. If you are producing material with mathematics and know how to use it, please use L^AT_EX. (Voting matters is set using a special style sheet using L^AT_EX, but individual contributions should be set using article style.)

Tables and complex figures.

In some cases, rather than re-setting such material, I would prefer to use the author's version. This must be in .EPS format. For those with a Windows computer, the tool wmf2eps: at http://www.wmf2eps.de.vu/ provides a means of generating an EPS file.

Timetable for publication:

Over the last ten years, we have never had a significant backlog of papers. This implies that most papers are published in the next issue unless that is within a month or two.

Refereeing.

Papers are refereed, but perhaps not to the same rigour as leading professional Journals. Most, but by no means all, of the referees are previous contributors to Voting matters. Except very occasionally, the referees are anonymous.

A  Document details

1. First written 23rd June 2004.
   
   
2. Revised, 10th March 2006.