Upcoming Steps

Writing the articles

A typical article, consisting of approximately 1500-2000 words devoted to a single Ottoman author, will contain a brief biography of its subject, detailed information about each one of their historical works (contents, evaluation, critique of the secondary literature, editions, etc.), and a list of relevant manuscripts. All of this should be written in strict accordance to the guidelines available on this website. The editorial committee of the Historians of the Ottoman Empire project will assign article topics to selected scholars, and provide them with a basic bibliography of secondary sources and/or a list of manuscripts as collected by the research assistants.

In order to maintain consistency throughout the database, a set of guidelines has been determined to harmonize the transliteration of non-Latin scripts, the translation of Turkish official titles, and some phonological issues. The contributors will be requested to follow these rules in order to achieve a proper degree of consistency between the various articles.

The project will pay $ 0,12 per word as royalty to the authors. The payment will be made after the article is accepted for publication in its final version.

Collecting and editing the articles

Once the articles are submitted, the editorial committee will review them and, if necessary, request some modifications or improvement. In order to ensure the highest level of reliability of the database as a research tool, Historians of the Ottoman Empire reserves the right to ultimately reject an article it solicited and assign it to another scholar if the author is unwilling or unable to conform to the guidelines and scholarly standards of the project.

Publishing the first draft on the web

After the editorial committee has received and given its preliminary approval to a certain number of articles, these will be made available on the web, free of charge, accompanied by a set of practical search tools. Although we expect that not all articles will be ready by the end of 2005 and that those available will still be subject to minor modifications and additions, this beta version of the Historians of the Ottoman Empire database will already be citable. This will allow us to receive feedback from the scholarly community at large, both in general terms and about specific entries, and will have the added advantage of publicizing the existence of the project Historians of the Ottoman Empire.