Submissions

Author Guidelines

We welcome submission of article proposals and reviews of essential (and not tangentially) linguistic content, whether from a theoretical or applied perspective. In this regard, see the focus and scope of the journal. Works that do not respond to these themes will be automatically rejected.

You must write your article proposal using the template that you can download where it states the format (on this same page, below). Works that do not comply with the guidelines specified there will be automatically rejected.

The reception of proposals is open throughout the year. All submissions will be made through the platform, for which you have to register on it. If you have already performed this action previously, you can login in directly and start managing your submission.

Publication in CLAC is completely free.

We ask you to pay close attention and correctly fill out the information that the platform will ask you for in the process of sending your proposal. It is very important that the metadata entered in this process is accurate, as it will be what appears on the journal's website if the work is published. Neither the editorial team of the journal nor Ediciones Complutense have the obligation to make subsequent corrections to errors made by others. To avoid problems, if the article has multiple authorship, it is advisable that the first author or the corresponding author be in charge of management on the platform.

If you have any technical problems during this phase, or at any time while your work is in press, write an email to prod.ediciones@ucm.es and explain your case.

CLAC's editorial team meets periodically, approximately every three months, and determines which of the proposals received go on to external evaluation and which do not. Until then, your proposal will appear as "Submission". We would appreciate it if you could wait patiently until the aforementioned meeting is held.

Date of last meeting: September 26, 2025.

Once submission is assigned, the communications that the author wants to make will be directed only to the editor assigned to their proposal and through the platform, not email. To do this, you just have to select the option "Add reviewer" Likewise, we would ask you not to ask us questions that you could obtain answers to by simply carefully reading these guidelines, since the answers you would obtain via email or platform would be the same as those that appear here.

Proposals accepted by the committee are assessed by editorial team members and invited experts. The duration of the peer review process is highly variable, as it depends on a) whether there are evaluators willing to do the work and b) whether the evaluators who have agreed to review the texts meet the deadlines. Each editor will put their best effort into this process, but delays may occur. We also ask you to be patient regarding this point.

Once the editor receives the evaluations, they will be sent to the author. The author will have 90 days to make the changes. The amended article will be reviewed by the editorial committee, which will ultimately decide whether or not the work can be published in the journal.

Once the work is accepted for publication, a certificate will be issued immediately, which will be fully valid until the article is published. Finally, it will be the editorial committee of the journal who decides when this will be published. CLAC does not have a pre-publication service.

Before publication, the author will be mailed proofs along with a deadline for review. Proofs will also be made whenever possible. Once the work is published, no new modifications will be accepted. Only comments made during proofreading that were inadvertently ignored will be addressed.

We also welcome proposals for coordinating special issues consisting of six or seven articles. If this is your case, please send an email to circulo@ucm.es and explain your proposal (including the titles of the articles and the names of the authors). The publication of special issues will be subject to the prior submission of a formal proposal by the guest editor, which will be evaluated by the journal’s editorial board.

If the special issue proposal is accepted, the guest editor will agree on a deadline with the editorial committee for the submission of all manuscripts to the platform. These submissions must also include a document listing the names and email addresses of two reviewers who have already confirmed their availability to undertake the evaluation. The rest of the review process will be managed by the journal’s editors. Once the manuscripts have been reviewed and revised, the final approval for publication will be granted by the journal’s editorial board.

Submissions must include five files:

a) An anonymous file in rtf or word with the manuscript.

b) An anonymous file in pdf with the manuscript.

c) A file with the author's data in rtf or word with the manuscript.

d) A file with the author's data in pdf with the manuscript.

e) A very brief CV of the author or authors.

f) In the case of reviews, sending a file containing an image of the cover of the reviewed work will be appreciated.

All images, tables, graphs and annexes must be included in the files indicated above. None of these items should be sent as a separate file.

Incomplete submissions will be automatically rejected.

At the beginning of each proposal you should include:

a) The title of the paper. It must be concise and not include direct quotations.

b) The name of the author/s, as well as their affiliation, their email address and their ORCID number. These last three pieces of information must be included in a footnote. All this information should be omitted in the anonymous versions.

- Whenever the official name of your institution is in a language that uses the Latin alphabet, you must include your name in that language. Never translate it into Spanish or English. If your institution's name is in a language that uses an alphabet other than Latin, always include its English translation.

c) An abstract 200 words maximum. The abstract may not include bibliographical references or citations.

d) Four key words in the language in which the work is written (Spanish or English). We recommend that you do not repeat in the keywords those that you have already used in the summary and/or in the title of the work. The first of these keywords must coincide with that of one of the disciplines of interest of the journal that appears in its focus and scope. Keywords must be separated by semicolons.

e) If the work is written in Spanish, the title, the abstract and four keywords in English must be included. In works originally written in English, the abstract in that language is sufficient. Keywords must be separated by semicolons.

- If the article, whether written in Spanish or English, deals with an issue related to the Chinese language, a summary in that language may also be included.

f) A summary, called contents, in body text of the numbered sections that make up the proposal. Example: 1. Introduction. 2. State of the question. 3. Methodology. 4. Analysis. 4.1. Qualitative. 4.2. Quantitative. 5. Discussion. 6. Conclusions. Acknowledgments. CREdiT author statement. Bibliographic references.

g) Titles of the sections. Number the sections up to a third level (1.2.3.). Do not number the bibliographical references section or the acknowledgments section and the CREdiT author statement section.

We recommend that you consult an article from the last published issue so that you can see graphically how to proceed. Proposals that do not meet these standards will be automatically rejected.

Format. You must use the paper template, which can be downloaded at this link.

Extension. The length of the reviews will be from 2000 to 8000 words and that of the articles, from 6000 to 10,000 including bibliographical references. If you have any other extension proposal, you can consult it with the editorial team of the journal.

Inclusive language. CLAC is committed to equality between men and women, which is why it supports the use of linguistic techniques and procedures in this direction. 

Quotations. Quotations of no more than 40 words should be inserted into the body of the text. At the end, the author, date, and page number should be indicated in parentheses. Example: (Coseriu, 1965, p. 23). Quotations of more than 40 words should be included in a separate paragraph and their source should also be indicated.

References. It will be done according to APA Standards. Always include the DOI identifier in the final bibliographical references. The DOI identifier must be included not only in the articles, but also in the chapters of collective volumes and monographs that have it. If you have doubts about whether a reference has a DOI identifier, you can consult it here. In addition, you must always include the full first name of the authors of the referenced works. Reviews must also include a section of bibliographical references.

Examples. They should be indented and numbered in parentheses.

Footnotes. Except for the exception listed above, do not include footnotes or endnotes. If you want to include acknowledgments, do so in a final section, prior to the bibliography.

Metadata. When you enter the platform, you will have to complete a series of points in the different windows that you pass through. It is very important that all the data you include is correct and complete, since these will be the ones that appear on the journal's website if your article or review proposal is published. Modifying these once the work is published is very complicated.

Support agencies. It is necessary to specify the support agency, project or research group to which your work is attached. Please remember to include this information in the existing section of the platform for this purpose. Also, record that information within your own manuscript. To do this, create a specific section, called "Acknowledgments" before the bibliographical references. In it, in addition to the information already entered, you can include mentions of a more personal nature.

Articles with more than one author. Articles written by several authors must include a new section at the end (after the acknowledgments and before the bibliographical references), entitled "CREDIT Authorship Contribution", in which the specific contribution of each author or author from the CREdiT role taxonomy. For more information on this issue, see the following link. Remember to enter this information only in the versions of your article with author data.

Number of proposals sent. It is only possible to have one proposal per author in the evaluation process or accepted without publishing. Until the job is published or a response is given, a new submission cannot be made.

Suspension of the evaluation process and rejection of the article proposal. The editorial committee of CLAC will make up to four attempts for the manuscript sent by the author to be reviewed. If at the end of these attempts the work has not been evaluated, the article proposal will be rejected. Likewise, repeated non-attention to the editor's messages during the evaluation process will be grounds for rejection of the proposal. Rejected papers may not be resubmitted.