BAMS Guidelines for Authors

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Submitting a Proposal

Before you submit your manuscript—and if possible before you begin to write—send your proposal to the BAMS editors via Editorial Manager. The proposal must be approved by the editors before your manuscript can enter peer review.

Keep in mind that in January 2020 BAMS becomes a new multiplatform publication for serving authors and communicating to readers. You’ll experience much faster times to open access distribution online (typically within 8 weeks of acceptance), a more engaging format for presenting your work in the print and digital magazine for AMS members, and lively multimedia outreach on behalf of your article in social media and on mobile devices.

The first step—the proposal—is up to you. Make your case in an abstract (up to 250 words) plus a cover letter (also up to 250 words) that your article is sufficiently timely, important, accessible, and interesting. BAMS looks for articles that will be a rewarding read for a broad range of people—not just specialists. Explain your purpose, intended audience, and what category of article you are submitting (justify article length if it will exceed 4500 words).

Learn more about the Article Proposal

In accepting a proposal, the editors may give further guidance on the type of article, length, and focus. But that’s just our first step in helping you publish in BAMS. The new BAMS process alleviates the difficult balancing act of satisfying peer reviewers with full documentation and scientific clarity while also appealing to a broad readership of nonspecialists. In the new format, you’re writing the full article for online only publication in BAMS. The full article is disseminated more quickly that way for research and applications purposes, and can be aimed at motivated readers who are relying on your work for their own work.

To direct a wider audience to your work in general, and specifically to the full article, we take two important steps on your behalf. We will

  1. prepare a shortened adaptation of the manuscript as an attractive feature article for the printed magazine (also mirrored in BAMS Digital Edition for AMS members). This will be 5 pages or less—optimal for the wider AMS membership.
  2. feature (and link to) your article in social media, starting with the AMS blog, The Front Page.

Your level of participation in these outreach efforts will be up to you; you will find opportunities to flex your creativity. The more ideas you share—the more your personal touch is evident—the better the outreach will be. All we will need to start is your answers to a few brief questions—along with a couple of supplemental images—to enable social media and enhanced content in BAMS. You’ll want to start thinking about these questions now:

  1. What would you like readers to learn from this article?
  2. How did you become interested in the topic of this article?
  3. What got you initially interested in meteorology or the related field you are in?
  4. What surprises/surprised you the most about the work you document in this article?
  5. What was the biggest challenge you encountered while doing this work?
  6. What’s next? How will you follow up?

Shortly after production begins, we will contact you to request, for example, participation in a podcast or video interview, or work with you on a visualization, slide show, or other social-media-ready content. We’ll also seek coordination with whatever social media channels you may already have established on your behalf personally or at your institution.

For now, though, it all starts with the proposal and demonstrating why your article is a good fit for BAMS.