Author Guidelines

Please read and adhere to the following guidelines and information on the “Submissions” page before proceeding with the submission of your manuscript. 

Prior to submission 

Alignment with focus and scope 

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read the “Focus and scope” of the ILR and that your research falls within the journal's remit.  

Where to submit 

Submissions to the ILR should be made via the journal's publishing platform, which can be accessed through the “Submissions” page. 

Book reviews

The ILR will only consider solicited book reviews. The word limit for book reviews is between 800 and 1,000 words. These will be processed by the Managing Editor and a decision on whether to accept, accept with revisions or reject the review will be communicated to the author of the book review.

Languages 

Articles can be submitted in English, French or Spanish (if translated from another language the original should also be provided). Authors are encouraged to submit their articles in whichever of these languages they feel most comfortable. They are also invited to write in a style that is accessible to academics, policymakers and a multidisciplinary audience. 

Submission declaration statement 

All submissions should be accompanied by a statement indicating that they are not under consideration elsewhere or have not already been published, and that they will not be submitted for publication elsewhere without the agreement of the Managing Editor. 

Policy on statistical reporting and human research participants  

All submissions should comply with the journal's policy on statistical reporting and human research participants. Rights and permissions 

Authors must observe the usual rules and practices regarding the reproduction of copyright material in their articles, assuming responsibility for obtaining permission where appropriate. 

Preparing the submission 

Formatting 

Manuscripts should be submitted as Word documents. The figures of final versions should be provided in Excel files or as vector graphics. Manuscripts should be submitted in “Times New Roman”, font size 12, double spaced. Each new paragraph should be indented except for the first paragraph under a heading. 

Parts and length of manuscripts 

Articles should be between 7,000 and 10,000 words long, including tables, boxes, footnotes and references, with an abstract of no more than 100 words. 

The article manuscript file (Word document) should contain the main title and any tables, including their titles, in a text format (not an image). Appendices should appear at the end of the article manuscript and be clearly labelled. Image figure files should be uploaded to the system as separate files, but their original position in the body of the text should be indicated with captions; ideally, the images would also be placed into the Word document for further clarity.  

Title page 

The title page should contain: 

1. A title containing no abbreviations; 
2. The full names of the author(s), specifying the name of the corresponding author, i.e. the person who will have the primary responsibility for communicating with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review and publication processes. The information should be given in the order in which the authors wish to appear in the article.  
3. The institutional affiliation(s) where the work was conducted and email address(es) of the author(s), with a footnote indicating the current affiliation(s), if different from the one(s) where the work was conducted; 
4. Acknowledgements. Besides indicating any contributions from persons who do not meet the criteria for authorship, any financial support should be mentioned. Should the manuscript draw partly on already published material, this should also be acknowledged; 
5. Submission declaration statement; 
6. Conflict of interest statement; 
7. Information on rights and permissions obtained to reproduce material from other sources.

Main text file 

The main text file (your manuscript) should contain: 

1. Title; 
2. Abstract: describing the aims, methods, scope of analysis, results and conclusions; 
3. Key words (between 4 and 8);  
4. Main text; 
5. List of references.  

Tables, figures, appendices and supporting information 

Figures such as images should be included in the text with a supporting caption underneath, and also supplied as an uploaded separate file when the manuscript is submitted.  

Tables should be supplied in the main text of your manuscript as text using the “table” function in your word processor, along with a supporting caption underneath. 

Appendices will be published after the references. For submission they should be supplied as separate files but referred to in the text. 

Supporting information is information that is not essential to the article but that provides greater depth and background. This information may be hosted online as supplementary files, and they will appear without translation or typesetting. This might include tables, figures, videos, datasets, etc.  

If data, scripts or other artefacts used to generate the analyses presented in the manuscript are available via a publicly available data repository, authors should include a reference to the location of the material within their manuscript. 

Statistical reporting and human research participants 

The ILR editorial policy requires that discussions on statistical results are presented in a transparent and helpful way. This includes reporting standard errors, sample sizes and addressing the economic importance of variables in the context of confidence intervals rather than statistical significance.  

The privacy and safety of human research participants should also be carefully considered regardless of the place of the scholarship. The responsibility for identifying and following the appropriate code of ethics lies with the authors. 

Please see the “Journal policies” page for further information if your manuscript involves statistical reporting or human research participants and adhere to the given guidance when preparing your manuscript for submission. 

House style 

References 

References follow the “author–date” system in the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Authors are responsible for verifying all citations and quotations in the text, and the list of references before the submission of the manuscript. Incorrect surnames, journal/book titles, publication year and pagination may decrease discoverability. 

When using citation management systems (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, etc.), authors should, where the option is available, select the British English Chicago Manual of Style model. 

List of references 

A list of references should be provided at the end of the text.  

As entries in a list of references are arranged alphabetically by author name, the first-listed author’s name is inverted (last name(s) first). Any subsequent names (up to ten authors in total) are written with the first name(s) followed by the last name(s):  

Lieuw-Kie-Song, Maikel, Haile Abebe, Theogene Sempundu, and Eddy Bynens. 

All references mentioned in the list of references should be cited in the text (including its appendices, tables and figures) and vice versa. 

Reference examples 

Book 

Supiot, Alain. 2012. The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice vs. the Total Market. London: Verso. 

Edited book 

Bellace, Janice R., and Beryl ter Haar, eds. 2019. Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 

Chapter in book 

Gyimah-Brempong, Kwabena, and John A. Karikari. 2009. “Telephone Demand and Economic Growth in Africa”. In Back on Track: Sector-Led Growth in Africa and Implications for Development, edited by Diery Seck and Sylvain Boko, 265–289. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 

Journal article 

Sen, Amartya. 2000. “Work and Rights”. International Labour Review 139 (2):119–128. 

Working paper 

Dale, Stacey B., and Alan B. Krueger. 1999. “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables”, NBER Working Paper No. 7322. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Presentations at meetings 

Larsson, Allan. 1999. “Towards a European Pact for Employment”. Paper presented at the ILO Transition Workshop, The Hague, January 1999. 

If the information is available online, a URL should be included. 

Newspaper article 

Mahdawi, Arwa. 2017. “What Jobs Will Still Be Around in 20 Years? Read This to Prepare Your Future”. The Guardian, 26 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/26/jobs-future-automation-robots-skills-creative-health?CMP=share_btn_url. 

Electronic material (blogs and websites) 

Sachs, Benjamin. 2015. “Do We Need an ‘Independent Worker’ Category?” OnLabor (blog), 8 December 2015. http://onlabor.org/2015/12/08/do-we-need-an-independent-worker-category/. 

Several works by the same author(s)  

Fine, Janice. 2006. Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. 

––––––. 2011a. “Worker Centers: Entering a New Stage of Growth and Development”. New Labor Forum 20 (3): 44–53.  

––––––. 2011b. “New Forms to Settle Old Scores: Updating the Worker Centre Story in the United States”. Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations 66 (4):604–630. 

Works by multiple authors or editors 

For works by, or edited by, up to ten persons, all names are usually given in the list of references: 

Adams, Zoe, Louise Bishop, Simon Deakin, Colin Fenwick, Sara Martinsson Garzelli, and Giudy Rusconi. 2019. “The Economic Significance of Laws Relating to Employment Protection and Different Forms of Employment: Analysis of a Panel of 117 Countries, 1990–2013”. International Labour Review 158 (1): 1–35. 

For works with more than ten authors, the first seven should be listed, followed by et al. 

Electronic references 

When citing electronic sources, an access date is required only if no date of publication or revision can be determined from the source. The access date should be indicated after the URL (e.g. “accessed 17 January 2020”). 

For citations of journals consulted online, the inclusion of a DOI or URL must be given if consulted online (if an article was consulted in print, there is no need to include them). If an entry has both a DOI and a URL, only the DOI should be included. 

Both DOIs and URLs should be presented as hyperlinks (i.e., beginning with “http:” or “https:”) and these should not be underlined: 

Du, Yang, and Weiguang Pan. 2009. “Minimum Wage Regulation in China and its Applications to Migrant Workers in the Urban Labor Market”. China and World Economy 17 (2): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-124X.2009.01143.x. 

In-text references 

Citations 

Sources should be cited in the text by providing, within parentheses, the author’s last name, year of publication and, if applicable, page number(s) or other identifiers of location:  

Skills like problem-solving are more effectively developed in workplaces than in off-the-job situations (Brewer 2013, 43; OECD 2010b, para. 53). 

When citing a source with two or three authors, all surnames should be stated:  

The precise relationship between Decent Work and UFW hinges on the content of the relevant standards (see Fudge and McCann 2015, 48–51). 

When citing a source with four or more authors, the first author’s surname should be used followed by “et al.” (not italicized): 

(Adams et al. 2019) 

When citing an edited book, the citation does not include ed./ eds.: 

(Bellace and ter Haar 2019) 

Quotations 

Short quotations incorporated in the body of the text should be indicated by double quotation marks. If a quotation appears within such a passage, single quotation marks should be used. 

Page number(s) should be included in the citation for quotations:

Regrettably, most studies in this field have concentrated only on numerical (or external) flexibility rather than considering the internal (or functional) one in the so-called “‘zone of acceptance’ within which an employee can be expected to obey orders” (Simon 1991, 31). 

Quotations exceeding four lines should be set out without quotation marks as an indented block of text in smaller print, with the reference (also in smaller print) in parentheses at the end: 

Adam Smith himself recognized in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: 

A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate (1776, 68). 

Cross references  

Internal cross references should be used to take the reader straight to a precise place (for example "See note 109"). Avoid making a cross-reference that will be difficult for the reader to find, such as “see above”. 

Footnotes 

Footnotes should be used instead of endnotes, numbering them consecutively throughout the article, restarting the numbering for any appendices, and inserting them in text following punctuation marks. 

They should be used sparingly and should never be used for referencing, except in the case of judicial rulings and legal case reports, and for data sources such as databases and general information websites: 

1ILO , “ILO Modelled Estimates Database”, ILOSTAT, accessed 22 August 2024. https://ilostat.ilo.org/data/. 

1See https://www.workersrights.org/about/, accessed 22 August 2024. 

Legal references 

The rules for presenting different types of legal references may vary according to the usage of the country concerned. In general, it is recommended to follow national practice. 

When cited in the text, laws, statutes, regulations and so on should normally be referred to by their full name, followed by the date, without a comma:

the Safety and Health at Work Act of 2013  

When mentioned in text, case names should be italicized: 

Van der Mussele v. Belgium 

In discussion, a case name may be shortened: 

In Smith (or in the Smith case), the Labour Court found against the applicant 

References to judicial rulings and legal case reports should be provided in footnotes. Case names are italicized, as are the names of the journals in which they are published. Short forms, also italicized, may be used in subsequent citations: 

Profit Sharing Plan v. Mbank Dallas, N.A., 683 F. Supp. 592 (N.D. Tex. 1988). 

Profit Sharing Plan, 683 F. Supp. 592. 

Germany, Federal Labour Court, Decision of 19 February 2015 – 8 AZR 1007/13, in International Labour Law Reports Online, 35, No. 1, p. 61. 

Tables and figures 

Tables, figures and boxes should be numbered consecutively, in order of appearance in the text.  

Notes for tables and figures should be kept to a minimum and should appear immediately under the table or figure, rather than in a footnote.  

Authors should indicate a source under figures and tables, in particular indicating the source of any data used for calculations, regardless of whether this has already been explained in the text.  

Layout and general style points 

Headings and subheadings 

Titles, headings and subheadings should be numbered (following the format 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc.) to indicate the level of importance. We recommend removing any headings and subheadings that do not add to clarity.  

Abbreviations and acronyms 

In general, terms and names should not be abbreviated unless they are used repeatedly (more than three times) and the abbreviation is helpful to the reader. Where abbreviations are used, each one should be expanded on its first use, followed by the abbreviation or acronym in parentheses. Thereafter, the abbreviation or acronym should be used rather than the full term. 

Capitalization  

In articles, only the first letter of the title, subtitle and headings should be capitalized, as well as any other words that would ordinarily be capitalized. 

Following colons and en dashes, the first letter of subtitles are also capitalized: 

Welfare and labour market regimes: A review of earlier work 

In source citations, however, regardless of the capitalization of the original, English language titles of works are capitalized in headline style (with initial capitals for significant words): 

Houston, Diane M.,ed. 2005. Work–Life Balance in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. 

Initial capitals should be used for the short titles of legislative texts and international instruments: 

The Family Allowances Act 1964 

The Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100) 

But  

the 1964 Act on family allowances 

Numbers 

Numbers should be spelled out from one to ten inclusive in the body of the text, except for figures before “million” and billion”, for dates, percentages (N.B per cent not %), units of money or measurement, ages, times of the day, page references, serial numbers, etc. 

Page references  

Page references should be set out in full, e.g. pp. 123–124 (not 123–4). It is preferable to cite a precise range of pages rather than using expressions such as “p. 218 ff.”. 

Spelling  

The ILR applies British rather than American spelling, according to the first entry of the Oxford English Dictionary. Note that while “z” rather than “s” spelling is used, there are a number of words to which this does not apply (e.g. analyse).  

Hyphens “-” and en dashes “–” 

Hyphens are used in composite words, compound expressions, or with prefixes (e.g. X-ray, melting-point, non-contributory). En dashes are used either to indicate number ranges or relationships (e.g. 1–5, Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, worker–employer relationship, export origin–destination pairs), or in punctuation as parenthetical dashes. 

Country names 

The ILR by default applies the standard ILO terminology for country designations, where appropriate. In instances where country codes are used, an indication should be given of the coding that has been applied (e.g. ISO alpha-2 or Eurostat country codes) and, where possible, consistency should be maintained throughout the text.