Submission Guidelines

Author Submission Guidelines

Who can submit to Majāl?

Any student enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar can submit their work. Alumni may submit for up to 3 years following graduation. Co-authors may be enrolled on any Carnegie Mellon campus, and faculty may co-author with students. Faculty may not appear as first author.  

What can I submit?

Majāl welcomes submissions in three categories:

  1. Formal student research: These submissions may come from student theses, Meeting of the Minds projects, capstones, collaborative projects with faculty, independent studies, individual student research with a faculty mentor, or another non-course context. These submissions are reviewed according to their discipline with a focus on methods and contribution. 
  2. Course-based work: These submissions may come from a wide variety of courses and are intended to showcase the breadth of scholarly learning happening across the CMU-Q campus. Majāl consults with the assigning faculty member to understand the goals of the assignment, and accordingly the editorial team sends out the assignment for reviews with appropriate instructions. 
  3. Student-faculty co-authored collaborations: These submissions may emerge from research or other projects co-authored by students and faculty. Note that students must lead the publication process and must appear as first authors.  These submissions are reviewed according to their discipline with a focus on methods and contribution. 

How Do I Submit?

Pre-Submission

  1. Students interested in submitting must first create a log-in using their Andrew email for the Janeway Publishing Platform. The account registration process will generate a confirmation email with a link students will need to click to activate their accounts before they can log in. If this email does not appear in your in-box, please check your spam folder.
  2. Students must also complete the required Majāl Submission Details Google form prior to submission. Please reach out to majal@qatar.cmu.edu with any questions about the google form. 
  3. Students submitting to the Independent Research category must anonymize the work by removing their name and any identifying information from their manuscript file before submitting.

Submission:

  1. Log into the Majāl journal site and begin a new submission through the Janeway manuscript management system. Students will provide their contact details, information about their submission, and ultimately submit their manuscript. If you struggle to begin a new submission, you can use this link to get your started.
  2. We request authors submit as MS Word documents (DOC or DOCX); however, they may also submit TXT or ODX files.
  3. Feel free to choose any copyright option, as we will review options with authors during the publication process and can change your selection later. 
  4. Students will have to attest that their work is original, and they will have to identify funding sources (if any) for their research.

What happens after I submit?

The review and mentoring process is slightly different for each submission type.

In short, the editorial team will confirm the submission, assign a Majāl mentor to the student, develop a "Review and Mentor plan," and support the author through a review and revision process. Students will revise based on expert reviews and editorial board feedback, often several times. Upon completion of the review and revision process, manuscripts may be accepted formally by the editorial team and published in the next issue.

For further detail, please see Review Processes.

Annual Submission Period

Majāl accepts submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year. Please refer to our homepage news and announcements for issue-specific deadlines.