Roman Emperors Article Guide

An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors

BUILDING The DIR

GUIDELINES FOR ARTICLES

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See also How to Submit a Proposal | How to Submit Materials
Go to Table of Special Characters (ISO Latin-1) | DIR Encyclopedia Page Template

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The DIR aims to present comprehensive, up-to-date articles that can both inform an interested, general reader and support research by amateurs, students, and professional scholars. Both clarity and accuracy are goals. Authors should presuppose intellectually capable readers, but not that they will all necessarily know Roman history in detail. The text of an article should tell the main story clearly, without bogging down in technicalities; footnotes should tell the reader where primary sources support the article's contentions directly, where controversies are disputed, and in both cases where to look for more information and for further discussion of the evidence. The extent of documentation in secondary sources should roughly match the general interest and importance of the imperial figure being treated. Editors will insist that articles and references be able to meet the needs of the DIR's users! If an author and his or her supervising editor disagree about the necessity of suitable documentation, the decision of the editor is final.

Cyberspace imposes no mechanical restriction on the size of a DIR article: authors and editors can decide how long an article needs to be to cover the topic in depth appropriate to the DIR's mission. One should note, however, that shorter articles save on load time and allow users to take greater advantage of hypertext linking to other relevant resources.

For clarity and ease of reference, all but the shortest articles should be articulated into subsections. Place section titles on the left margin. All articles should include, as a final section, Bibliography. This section should list bibliographical references for the works used in writing the article and for other sources that readers interested in pursuing the topic may wish to consult. Authors should follow the conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style (Turabian) when formatting bibliographical items, as for footnotes accompanying the text. Footnotes or parenthetical notes within the text should cite primary sources, using standard abbreviations such as are tabulated in LSJ, the OLD, or the OCD. See the article on Constantine I in the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies as a model of formatting.

Some points of style for the DIR

• Italicize titles of primary and secondary sources and words in foreign languages. Authors may italicize text for emphasis, but sparingly.
• Spell out centuries in lower-case letters (e.g., second century, fourteenth century); when used as adjectives, they should be hyphenated (e.g., third-century crisis). DIR editors generally use the old-fashioned B.C. and A.D.
• Numbers should be spelled out, if they can be spelled out in one or two words, unless they precede a unit of measure.
• Hypertext links may be included in articles. An editor will insert links to existing DIR pages into your article, or you may encode the material yourself. Please note that links to sites beyond the DIR should not be preceded by an icon.

For guides to HTML coding, see the NSCA's A Beginner's Guide to HTML and the Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas's HTML Quick Reference

If you have any questions about these guidelines, please e-mail the Managing Editor at mdimaio@ids.net.

Copyright (C), Michael DiMaio, Jr. and Jacqueline Long. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

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