THE JOURNAL OF INDIVIDUAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT


Manuscript Submission & Style:

  1. Papers must be in English.

  2. Papers for publication should be sent to the Editor:    

    Effective October 15, 2007, Stuart Michelson of Stetson University became the Editor of Financial Services Review. He is handling the submissions of all new manuscripts. Conrad Ciccotello will handle the disposition of all manuscripts submitted prior to October 15, 2007.

    Authors of previously unsubmitted manuscripts can generally rely on the instructions on this webpage and send their papers to Stuart at smichels@stetson.edu

    There is a $50 submission fee payable to the Academy of Financial Services (AFS) if at least one of the authors is a member of AFS. Submission fees can be mailed to the Editor when a manuscript is submitted electronically. If none of the authors is a member of AFS, please complete a membership application form (click here to download), and mail the application, along with a check for annual dues and submission fee ($125 total; $75 for a one-year membership and $50 submission fee) to the Editor. Submission of a paper will be held to imply that it contains original unpublished work and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. The Editor does not accept responsibility for damage or loss of papers submitted. Upon acceptance of an article, author(s) transfer copyright of the article to the Academy of Financial Services. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination.

  3. Submission of papers: Authors are encouraged to submit their papers electronically as an e-mail attachment to the Editor at smichels@stetson.edu. Please send the paper in MS Word format. Those who cannot email paper should submit their papers on disk in addition to mailing two (2) hardcopies to the Editor. All aspects of the review process are expedited by sending the manuscripts out for review as e-mail attachments. For those authors sending a disk copy, the preferred storage medium is a 3.5 inch disk in MSWord. Make sure that the file on the disk and the printout are identical. Please use a new and correctly formatted disk and label this with your name. Do not convert the file to plain ASCII. Ensure that the letter `l' and digit `1', and also the letter `O' and digit `0' are used properly, and format your article (tabs, indents, etc.) consistently. Characters not available on your word processor (Greek letters, mathematical symbols, etc.) should not be left open but indicated by a unique code (e.g. gralpha, [gt]alpha[lt], etc., for the Greek letter [ga]). Such codes should be used consistently throughout the entire text; a list of codes used should accompany the manuscript submission. Do not allow your word processor to introduce word breaks and do not use a justified layout. Please adhere strictly to the general instructions below on style, arrangement and, in particular, the reference style of the journal.

  4. Manuscripts should be double spaced, with one-inch margins, and printed on one side of the paper only. All pages should be numbered consecutively, starting with the title page. Titles and subtitles should be short. References, tables, and legends for the figures should be printed on separate pages.

  5. The first page of the manuscript, the Title Page, must contain the following information: (i) the title; (ii) the name(s), title, institutional affiliation(s), address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail addresses of all the author(s) with a clear indication of which is the corresponding author; (iii) at least one classification code according to the Classification System for Journal Articles as used by the Journal of Economic Literature, which can be found here; in addition, up to five key words should be supplied.

  6. Information on grants received can be given in a footnote on the Title page.

  7. The abstract, consisting of no more than 100 words, should appear alone on page 2 and titled, Abstract.

  8. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum and should only contain material that is not essential to the understanding of the article." As a rule of thumb, have one or less footnote, on average, per two pages of text.

  9. Displayed formulae should be numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript as (1), (2), etc. against the right-hand margin of the page. In cases where the derivation of formulae has been abbreviated, it is of great help to the referees if the full derivation can be presented on a separate sheet (not to be published).

  10. The Financial Services Review journal (FSR) follows the APA Publication Manual, 4th Edition, style. However, consistent with the current trend followed by other publications in the area of finance, the journal has a very strong preference for articles that are written in the present tense throughout.

    References to publications should be as follows: ``Smith (1992) reports that'' or ``This problem has been studied previously (Ho, Milevsky, & Robinson, 1999).'' The author should make sure that there is a strict one-to-one correspondence between the names and years in the text and those on the list.

    The list of references should appear at the end of the main text (after any appendices, but before tables and legends for figures). It should be double spaced and listed in alphabetical order by author's name. References should appear as follows:

    Books:

    Hawawini, G. & Swary, I. (1990). Mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. banking industry: Evidence from the capital markets. Amsterdam: North Holland.

    Chapter in a book:

    Brunner, K. & Meltzer, A. H. (1990). Money supply. In: B. M. Friedman & F. H. Hahn (Eds.), Handbook of monetary economics (Vol. 1, pp. 357-396). Amsterdam: North Holland.

    Periodicals:

    Ang, J. S. & Fatemi, A. M. (1997). Personal bankruptcy costs: Their relevance and some estimates. Financial Services Review, 6, 77-96.

    Note that journal titles should not be abbreviated.

  11. Illustrations will be reproduced photographically from originals supplied by the author; they will not be redrawn by the publisher. Please provide all illustrations in quadruplicate (one high-contrast original and three photocopies). Care should be taken that lettering and symbols are of a comparable size. The illustrations should not be inserted in the text, and should be marked on the back with figure number, title of paper, and author's name. All graphs and diagrams should be referred to as figures, and should be numbered consecutively in the text in Arabic numerals. Illustration for papers submitted as electronic manuscripts should be in traditional form.

  12. Tables should be numbered consecutively in the text in Arabic numerals and printed on separate sheets.

    Any manuscript which does not conform to the above instructions will be returned for the necessary revision before publication.

    Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author. Proofs should be corrected carefully; the responsibility for detecting errors lies with the author. Corrections should be restricted to instances in which the proof is at variance with the manuscript. Extensive alterations will be charged. Fifty reprints of each paper are supplied free of charge to the corresponding author; additional reprints are available at cost if they are ordered when the proof is returned.