36th AESOP Annual Congress 2024 Paris, France
“GAME CHANGER? Planning for just and sustainable urban regions”
The Best AESOP Congress Paper competition has been running as part of the AESOP Congresses since 2005.
You can choose to submit your paper for consideration for the Best Congress Paper Award, or you can choose not to be nominated. Similarly, you can decide whether your paper is included in the book of proceedings or remains unpublished.
You will be asked to make this choice during the paper submission process by choosing one of the four categories.
Submission procedure
General remarks
The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.
Full-length papers should be up to 8,000 words long (including notes and references).
Manuscripts should be submitted both as a Word document (see below for structure and style guidelines) and a PDF file. They should include the following: title of article, abstract (no more than 125 words), three to five keywords; main text; references; appendices; acknowledgements (as appropriate). A title page should include authors’ names and affiliations.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
Tables and table captions, figures and figure captions should be embedded in text in the position where they should ideally be placed. However, figures should also be submitted separately in jpeg format to allow sufficient quality and resolution (see below).
Any funding or grant awarding bodies should be acknowledged at the end of the paper.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined below.
Please prepare your manuscript as a Word document using A4 portrait page size and ‘normal’ margins (top 2.5 cm, bottom 2.5 cm, left 2.5 cm, right 2.5 cm). All text, including tables and figures, should be typed in Arial font. Main text and headings should be in font size 12, while the captions and titles of tables and figures, and the text in them are to be in font 11.
Line spacing should be single and a single line space should be left between paragraphs. Text should be right and left justified.
Use -ise/-isation endings rather than -ize/-ization (e.g., realisation, authorise etc.). Use English spelling rather than American (centre, not center etc.) except for American proper names (e.g., Kennedy Space Center).
Use italics for emphasis, not bold or underlining.
Use bullets in the text to break up lists and the like, rather than a), b), c) etc.
Use single quotation marks. Dates should be in the form of ‘day month year’, with a comma after the month e.g., 10 May, 1998, not May 10 1998 or 10th May 1998 or 10 May, 1998 or 10.5.98. Other examples include: from 2000–2016 (note the end dash, not a hyphen); from 11–15 December, 2016; from 1 January–15 December, 2015; between 1 January and 15 December, 2015.
In using numbers, spell out one to nine, use numerals after (except for page numbers, dates, percentages, special usages in text [e.g., Type 3], numbers in headings, tables, etc., ages, money, time and dates, temperature, dimensions). Spell out after a million (e.g., 1,000 100,000 1 million). Unless exact figures are important, round up or down large numbers – use your discretion, e.g., instead of 1,250,000; use 1.25 million; instead of 1,256,456; use over 1.25 million. Avoid beginning a sentence with numbers, but if avoidance is not possible, always spell out.
In the main text, spell out ‘percent’. Inside brackets, use the % symbol, e.g., 12 percent and (12%).
When using abbreviations or acronyms, spell them out in full on their first use. In all subsequent uses, use the abbreviation. For the European Union, United Kingdom and United States, spell out at all times unless used as an adjective, e.g., US control, EU Commission, UK Parliament. Do not use full points within abbreviations or acronyms.
As far as the structure of the paper is concerned, please refer to the following table:
Element |
Description |
Title Page |
This should include the title of the article, name(s) of author(s), full professional postal addresses, current affiliation and a clear indication of who the corresponding author is. In addition, the title page should include a short Biographical note on author(s). |
Abstract |
Your paper should begin with an abstract of about 150 words. Do not include any references in your abstract. |
Keywords |
Keywords should follow the abstract. Three to five keywords should be provided. |
Main Text |
The main text is to follow the abstract and keywords, presented in sections and subsection. |
Sections and Headings |
Divide your article into clearly defined and numbered sections. Subsections should be numbered 1.1 (then 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ...), 1.2, etc. (the abstract is not included in section numbering). Use this numbering also for internal cross-referencing: do not just refer to ‘the text’. Any subsection may be given a brief heading. Each heading should appear on its own separate line. The highest heading level and the second heading level should be bold, capitalizing the initial letter of each word. The third heading level should be italic, with the initial letter of each word typed in capital. Leave one line of space before and after each heading. |
Maps, diagrams, charts and photographs should be referred to as ‘Figures’ and should be numbered in a single sequence in the order in which they are referred to in the paper.
All figures should have brief descriptive captions.
Figures should be embedded in text where you would ideally like them to appear and be supplied digitally as separate files. They should be jpeg files and prepared in appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grey scale and 300 dpi for colour.
Tables should be numbered in a single sequence in the order in which they are referred to in the paper. They are to be embedded in the text where you would ideally like them to appear. All tables should be supplied as tables in Word, so that the text might be edited by the copy editor.
Quotations in the text of more than 30 or so words should be pulled out of the text and indented, using indents, not tabs. They should have a line space above and below them. Indented quotations should not be put in quotation marks. Italics only those parts of the quotation that were in italics in the original, unless you specifically want to stress part of a quote, in which case you should add ‘(emphasis added)’ after the quotation.
You must make sure that all references which appear in the text are given in full in the references section. Where there is more than one reference to the same author for the same year, they should be listed as 1995a, 1995b etc.
The references section should be a continuous alphabetical list. Do not divide the list into different sections (books, reports, newspaper articles etc.). Where there is more than one reference to the same author, that author’s references should appear in chronological order, with references to that author in conjunction with others coming after the last reference to the author alone.
For example:
Campbell, Neil A. (1990)
Campbell, Neil A. (1996)
Campbell, Neil A. and Jane Reece (1989)
Book (1 author)
Family/Surname, First Name (Publication year in brackets) Book title - italicised. Series title and volume if applicable. Place of publication: Publisher.
Bibliography exampleBook multiple authors
Family/Surname, First Name,
First Name Family/Surname and First Name Family/Surname, (Publication year in brackets) Book title - italicised. Series title and volume if applicable. Place of publication: Publisher.
Book (Editor/s)
Family/Surname, First Name (ed.) or (eds) – in brackets for editor(s) (Publication year in brackets) Book title - italicised. Series title and volume if applicable. Place of publication: Publisher
Bibliography exampleChapter in an edited book
Family/Surname, First Name of the author writing the chapter (Publication year in brackets) Title of chapter. In: Family/ Surname, First Name of editor(s) of book (ed.) or (eds) Book title - italicised. Series title and volume if applicable. Place of publication: Publisher, pp. followed by the page numbers of the chapter.
Bibliography exampleJournal article
Family/Surname, First Name of the author(s) (Publication year in brackets) Title of article. Title of journal – italicised, Volume number (part number/month in brackets), pp. followed by the page numbers of the article.
Bibliography exampleWeb-based resource of website
Family/Surname, First Name or Website name if no author is available (Year in brackets) Title of website in italics. Any numbers if necessary or available if website is part of a series. [Online in square brackets] Available from: URL.
[Accessed followed by date in square brackets].
If general website and no date (n.d.)
Bibliography exampleUN Habitat (n.d.) https://unhabitat.org/ Accessed [13/01/2022]
In-text example… according to UN Habitat (n.d)
‘Quotation’ (UN Habitat, n.d)
Corporate authors, committee reports etc.
Country and Name of Issuing Body (Year of publication in brackets) Title of publication in italics. Place of publication: Publisher. (Report Number – if applicable in brackets).
Bibliography exampleWorking papers, reports etc.
Family/Surname, First Name of author(s) (Publication year in brackets) Title of paper or report (italicised if published) (‘inverted commas’ if not published) (explanation of what the work is in parentheses after the title), place-related information if available.
Bibliography example