Author Guidelines & Style Sheet
1. Manuscript Categories & Word Limits
Original Research Treatises (6,000 – 10,000 words)
Thorough, textually grounded investigations of philosophical, philological, or hermeneutic problems. Word count includes footnotes and bibliography.
Critical Translation & Commentary (4,000 – 8,000 words)
Annotated translations of unpublished manuscript fragments, obscure treatises, or critical re-evaluations of classical passages with comprehensive philological apparatus.
Review Essays & Scholarly Debates (3,000 – 6,000 words)
Critical syntheses evaluating current scholarly trends, monograph clusters, or methodological controversies in Dharma Studies.
Book Reviews (1,200 – 2,000 words)
Rigorous assessments of recently published monographs in Indian philosophy and religion.
2. Transliteration & Orthographic Standards
All Indic terms romanized in the text must follow the standard IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) scheme with complete diacritics:
- Vowels:
ā, ī, ū, ṛ, ṝ, ḷ, ḹ, e, ai, o, au - Anusvāra and Visarga:
ṃ, ḥ - Velar and Palatal Nasals:
ṅ, ñ - Retroflexes:
ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ - Palatal Sibilant:
ś
Common loanwords naturalized in English (such as karma, yoga, dharma, guru) may appear without diacritics when referring to general concepts, but must be italicized with diacritics (dharma, karman) when subjected to technical philosophical analysis.
3. Citation & Referencing Conventions
PIJDS uses the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition), Notes and Bibliography system (or Author-Date where consistently applied):
Brahmasūtra-Śāṅkarabhāṣya 1.1.1, ed. V. L. Shastri Pansikar (Bombay: Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1917), 14.
Modern Academic Monographs:
Matilal, Bimal Krishna. Epistemology, Logic, and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
4. Double-Blind Anonymization Checklist
To preserve blinded peer review integrity, the submitted manuscript file must not contain any identifying author information:
- Remove author names, academic affiliations, email addresses, and bios from the text and headers.
- Replace self-citations with neutral phrasing (e.g. "as shown previously by [Author, 2021]" rather than "as I demonstrated in my 2021 study").
- Strip personal metadata from document properties (Word: File > Inspect Document > Remove Personal Information; PDF: Document Properties).
- Submit acknowledgments, funding disclosures, and title page in a separate cover file.
Submission Checklist
- Manuscript in .docx or .pdf format
- Abstract (200–300 words) & 5–7 keywords
- All author identities anonymized
- IAST transliteration verified
- Original work; no concurrent submissions
Editorial Office
For technical manuscript queries, transliteration questions, or special issue proposals: