Scottish Historical Review Early Career Researcher Article Prize
Early Career Researcher Essay Prize
The SHR is pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Early Career Researcher Article Prize.
The Prize is intended to promote the careers of ECRs, and especially those from social groups who remain under-represented in the SHR’s author profile, by providing an opportunity to publish in a leading peer-reviewed journal. The winning entry/entries will be published in the journal and receive a £500 award.
The deadline is Tuesday, 8 September at 5pm
Your essay should adhere to normal SHR author guidelines for word length, style and formatting. Please download the application form below and return it, along with an anonymised Word copy of your submission (please do not use PDF), to The Secretary, Dr Stephen Mullen: Stephen.Mullen@glasgow.ac.uk
If you have any queries, please contact The Secretary.
Eligibility
ECRs are defined as individuals within eight years of PhD award and not in a permanent post, excluding any period of career break. Entries must not have been published, or be under consideration for publication, by any other organisation (online or print). The author must not have previously published a research article with the SHR (this does not include book reviews). Articles previously submitted to the Prize, but which were unsuccessful, may be submitted in a future round, provided the essential eligibility criteria continue to be met.
Criteria
1. The Prize Panel will consider submissions pertaining broadly to the political, social, economic, cultural, and material history of Scotland and its peoples, in British, European, global, and transnational or comparative contexts, in any period of history from the early to the modern.
2. The Panel will in the first instance assess anonymised Prize submissions according to criteria ordinarily applied by reviewers for SHR articles: originality; contribution to historical knowledge; clarity of argument; engagement with the relevant historiography; understanding and explication of the source base; standard of writing and presentation.
3. Applicants will be invited to complete an Equality and Diversity (ED) Form that will be seen only by the Secretary and destroyed immediately following the conclusion of each year’s competition. It is not mandatory to complete the Equality and Diversity Form in order to be eligible for the Prize. All entries will be assessed anonymously according to the criteria in Clause 2, above. In assessing whether an applicant is from an under-represented group, the considerations will be disability, ethnicity, sex, gender reassignment and sexual orientation, being protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.
Please see below, under Procedure, for more information about the ED form.
Procedure
Entries will be submitted to the SHRT Secretary and read by a Panel comprising the Special Issues Editor and two Trustees. The Panel alone will determine the winning entry according to the criteria specified in Clause 2, above. The Secretary will ensure that submissions a) meet the eligibility criteria and b) are anonymised before sending to the Panel for review. Panel members will read the eligible submissions and categorise them, according to the criteria at Clause 2, as follows:
1a) publishable in the SHR
1b) publishable in the SHR subject to revisions
2a) not publishable in the SHR without significant revisions
2b) not publishable in the SHR
Panel members will submit their reports to the Secretary. The Secretary will convene and chair a meeting of the Panel members to determine the winning submission. In this meeting, Panel members will jointly agree an outcome for each submission. Submissions in Category 2 will be eliminated from the competition; submissions in Category 1 will be considered for the Prize.
In the event of multiple submissions achieving Category 1, the Panel will return to their original reports and produce a ranking. Once the Panel ranking is produced, then at this stage and only in this eventuality, the Secretary will inform the Panel whether any of the authors are, according to their ED statement, from social groups under-represented in the SHR’s author profile. Having concluded that more than one submission is worthy of the Prize based on academic merit alone, the Panel reserves the right to take positive action and award the Prize to an author whose characteristics are under-represented in the SHR’s author profile. However, where the quality of more than one entry is deemed to be exceptional, the Panel is at liberty to recommend either that the Prize be awarded jointly, or that a ‘runner up’ be offered publication (subject to the normal peer review process) without being awarded the Prize. The Secretary has no voice in the Panel’s selection, ranking or final decision.
Outcomes
Applicants who meet the eligibility criteria will be informed of the Panel’s decision in December 2026. The Secretary will inform authors of outcomes and provide them with short reports from each of the Panel members as feedback. The winning submission(s) will then be prepared for the normal peer-review process. Further support from a designated Trustee, to aid revision for publication, may be offered to the author. The Secretary (in consultation with the Panel) is at liberty to recommend any other Category 1 submission for peer-review. Category 2 submissions will not be considered for peer-review at this time. The Panel reserve the right not to award the Prize in the event no submission is deemed publishable in the SHR.
Download and save the application forms to your computer, then select the function 'Open with' and choose 'Word' to enable editing OR Print, fill out by hand, scan, and email it with your submission OR Request a Word version (which our website cannot support) directly from The Secretary.