British Postgraduate Musicology
About the journal and this site
British Postgraduate Musicology is a peer-reviewed journal run by postgraduates for postgraduates. It began in October 1997 as a print publication (ISSN 1460-9231), under the editorship of Benjamin Davies. After three volumes, the editorship was passed to Nicholas Reyland, who was instrumental in transferring BPM from print to online publication in 2001. After three further volumes he was succeeded by Tim Rutherford-Johnson before handing over to the journal’s current editor, Rachel Jeremiah-Foulds.
This site includes the full text of the current volume of British Postgraduate Musicology, as well as back issues from volume four onwards. Contents pages for volumes one to three are also available here, and a limited number of copies of these volumes are available for sale. Please see the back issues page for more details.
Current postgraduate students wishing to submit an article for publication should refer to the contribute page.
The Process
In the case of the BPM, a call for papers is released annually. Each article recived will be sent out to the two most relevant members of the editorial board to begin the reviewing process. Each of these articles will be reviewed, and accepted or rejected. If fewer than five articles attain the standard and are accepted, a further call for papers will be issued and, contrarily, if more than five are felt to be of a publishable standard, the topics of the articles will be considered so to bind together the volume coherently.
These referees will each return an evaluation of the work to the editor, noting weaknesses or problems along with suggestions for improvement. The editor will then evaluate the referees' comments, her or his own opinion of the manuscript, and the context of the scope of the journal or level of the book and readership, before passing a decision back to the author(s), usually with the referees' comments. During this process, the referees do not act as a group, do not communicate with each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities or evaluations.
The referees' evaluations will usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal and most recommendations are along the lines of the following:
- to unconditionally accept the manuscript,
- to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways,
- to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission,
- to reject it outright.
How to cite BPM
Citation of British Postgraduate Musicology follows that for any other online journal publication. The volume number and date of publication may be found on the index page of any volume, links to which may be found on the article page itself. As with all citations to online resources, the date of last access should be incorporated into the citation; very occasionally changes are made to articles or the website’s directory structure so this date is important. With allowance for the particular style guide you use, citations of BPM articles should look something like this:
A.N. Author, 2006: ‘Article Title’, British Postgraduate Musicology, viii, http://www.bpmonline.org.uk/bpm8/author.html, accessed 1 June 2006
Technical information
Every effort has been made to make BPM online as accessible as possible. If you have any comments or suggestions as to how we might improve the usability of the site, particularly for disabled users, then please email editor@bpmonline.org.uk. All code used on BPM online is fully validated and compliant with current web standards.
