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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • At least one of the authors is an undergraduate student, or was an undergraduate student, at the time the submission was written.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Nature formatting guide.
  • The Faculty Advisor Agreement has been signed by the faculty mentor and is included as a part of the submission.
  • A Faculty Reviewer - who is a different person from the Faculty Advisor - has agreed to review the submission. Their name and contact information is included in the Comments for the Editor.

Author Guidelines

Who can submit?

Any current CSUSM undergraduate student(s), or a student(s) who has graduated in the past year at CSUSM, may submit to the journal provided they are the lead author. The work must have been completed during the time the student was enrolled at CSUSM and done under the mentorship of a CSUSM faculty member.

Formatting your submission

Please follow the Nature formatting guide and use the general examples to assist in proper formatting. 

Faculty Advisor Agreement

Please include as part of your submission the Faculty Advisor Agreement, to be signed by the CSUSM faculty member who originally supervised the research.

Please note the following timeline:

  1. Prior to submitting your paper, you must identify a CSUSM faculty member who has agreed to serve as the faculty reviewer for your paper. This faculty member must be different from the faculty advisor who supervised the research in your paper. After you submit your paper, it will be sent out to the faculty member you have identified. These are open reviews; the authors will know who’s reading their essay and the reviewers will likewise know who the authors are. The reviewers will follow the Reviewer Guideline rubrics in making their recommendation (accept, accept with revisions, reject) to the editorial board. 
  2. You will hear back in approximately 4 weeks with the reviewer’s comments. Please revise and rewrite your paper incorporating the reviewers’ comments and clean up any lingering issues regarding grammar, footnotes, bibliography, etc. 
  3. The deadline to resubmit your paper will be listed along with the reviewers’ comments. 

Articles

This section is for research articles. All submissions undergo an open peer-review process. Submissions must comply with submission guidelines. 

Topic Reviews

This section is for topic reviews of current advances in research. All submissions undergo an open peer-review process. Submissions must comply with submission guidelines. 

Copyright Notice

Authors retain copyright of their work. All submissions will be Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license, which permits unrestricted production, distribution, and adaptation, provided that citation of the original work is included. 

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.