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Submission Guidelines

 

Types of Submissions Accepted

Ergo: Weber State University Undergraduate Research Journal will be accepting Full-Length Research Articles as well as Travel Abstracts.

Full-Length Research Articles should be no longer than 2000 words, or eight journal pages, including all text and graphics*. The 2000-word limit includes the abstract, the body of the paper, and the references. Students from all departments at WSU are encouraged to submit articles to the journal. Full length articles are not required to have been presented at a conference to be published.

Travel Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words. For a research summary to be published in Ergo, it must have been presented at an undergraduate conference (e.g. state, regional, or national).  Your abstract will automatically be taken from the Undergraduate Travel Grant Application submission.  No additional steps are required.

*Graphics: The journal is not imposing a limitation on graphics, but due to space limitations, each published article cannot exceed eight journal pages. Also, the layout editors may need to meet with students who include graphics or images in their research to ensure that they are suitable for publication and formatted correctly.

 

Format for Full-Length Articles

Submissions should be typed in 12 point, Times New Roman font and include a cover sheet and mentor signature page.

Please submit an electronic copy of your submission online at https://ur.weber.edu.

Submissions should include a cover page with all required information.

Citations and references should follow the style outlined on the website (see documentation/reference guide below).

Students are encouraged to use headings and, if appropriate, sub-headings in full length submissions to separate the article into sections.

Mentor

Each submission must be approved by a mentor (current WSU faculty or staff). The mentor does not need to be directly involved with the research, but should read and review the research before it is submitted. The mentor should help the student correct any errors and problems with the manuscript before it is submitted. The mentor's signature on the Mentor/Student Signature Page is an endorsement of the student's work. Students should submit the Mentor/Student Signature Page together with the submission.

Review Policy

The first review process should happen between the student and the mentor. Students are also encouraged to take advantage of campus resources (professors, peers, writing center, etc.) in order to submit work that is accurate and polished.

When submissions are received, they will be reviewed blindly by  faculty in the same college as the student researcher. Following this review, the best submissions will be chosen for publication in Ergo. However, if the review committee determines that an article or abstract needs to be revised before being published, the journal staff will contact the student and ask him or her to make the appropriate revisions by a determined date. If the student agrees, he or she can make the changes and the article will be published. If the student is unable or unwilling to revise the article, another submission may be chosen for publication.

Document/Reference Guide

In order to have consistent documentation and references in the articles published in Ergo, submissions must be formatted according to the following examples. However, because there are so many possible sources, it is not possible to show an example of every kind of reference that students may use in their research. As a general rule, Ergo prefers that all manuscripts follow the APA citation format.

For further help and questions, students are encouraged to visit the Writing Center. 

References (Bibliography)

All references that are cited in a submission should be listed at the end of the submission on a separate page called the "References" page. References should be organized in alphabetical order and with a hanging indent.
Book with one author
Last Name, First/Middle Initials. (year). Title of the book in Italics (edition-if necessary). Publication information. City: Publisher.
Example
Lapote, P. (1997). The art of writing and finding truth in words. (3rd ed.). Amsterdam: Barnaby.
Book with more than one author
Last Name, First/Middle Initials., Last Name, Initials., Last Name, Initial., & Last Name, Initial. (year). Title of the book in Italics (edition-if necessary). Publication information. City: Publisher.
Periodical (journal or magazine)
Last Name, First/Middle Initials. (year). Title of the journal or magazine article. Name of the journal or magazine in Italics, Issue.Volume, page numbers of the entire article.
Newspaper article
Last Name, First/Middle Initials. (Year, Month and Day). Article title. Name of the Newspaper in Italics, page numbers of the article.
Internet Sources
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of the article. Title of Online Periodical, volume number (issue number if available). Retrieved month day, year, from http://www.someaddress.com/full/url/.

*Note: Include the name of the online database the article was retrieved from and the date accessed if necessary.

Internal Citations

The first part of an internal citation should be the first word or words of the reference on the "References" page, that way anybody reading the article can easily find the source. Usually, it is the author, but if there is no author, start with the first part of the citation. The following are examples of in-text citations that were not preceded by any other information, such as the author's name. If this information is previously mentioned, there is no need to include it in the citation.
Example:
In 1999, Smith and Jones concluded that the research method was flawed (p. 120).
or
As Smith and Jones stated, "The methods used in previous analysis resulted in inconclusive and incorrect data as compared to other methods" (1999, p. 120).
For basic internal APA citation formatting, see the following list:
Works by one author
(Castro, 1983, p. 233)
Works by two authors
(Townsend & Barker, 1999, p. 24)
Works by three to five authors*
(Woods, Smithers, & Bradbury, 2006, p. 3)

*Note: In works by three to five authors, use the last name of the first author followed by et al. as shown in the next example.

Works by six or more authors
(Woods et al., 1988, p. 112)
Works from a secondary source
(as cited in Shockey, 1994, p. 54)
Works with no author
("Finding Balance," 1982)
Government documents
(United States Forest Service, 1992)

Plagiarism

Students must avoid plagiarism by citing any material that is paraphrased and/or quoted from other sources. Plagiarism is a violation of the WSU Student Code and is not acceptable. (See student code if necessary.  IV.D.2.b).
WSU's plagiarism policy extends to the use of materials such as photographs, charts, figures, tables, and graphs. Any use of these materials without proper citation is plagiarism. Any use of copyrighted materials is not allowed and is grounds for exclusion from Ergo. Photographs must be the author's original work. Plagiarism even extends to your own published work.