Submissions

Status: OPEN

Please see the following information for details on eligibility, what and how to submit, formatting and styling, rolling submissions, reviewing timeline, the review process, criteria for acceptance, our academic writing service, and tips on turning your dissertation into a JoULAB article.

Eligibility

Anyone is eligible to submit to JoULAB so long as their work was carried out (or the bulk of it was carried out) when they were an undergraduate student and so long as their undergraduate studies were completed no more than three years prior to submitting.

Any undergraduate research that falls within the discipline of linguistics, or associated subfields, will be considered for acceptance to JoULAB.

Works in review at or previously featured in peer-reviewed publications are ineligible for consideration, but non-peer-reviewed pre-prints, such as those placed in a repository, are eligible. Papers published in ULAB's Conference Proceedings are also ineligible for consideration.

How and What to Submit

To submit, fill out the submission form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TS8eGgGyf6GEMMeXQ2qIyUEURDKCHez_9K54Y9_2c7o/

Then, send the manuscript itself, in .docx format if possible, to [email protected].

Please note: You must anonymise your submission before you send it to us. This includes removing your name, institution, and any other identifying information from your manuscript (both in-text and from the metadata). Any submission containing personal information will be sent back to authors for anonymisation before being reviewed.

Your (anonymised) manuscript should include:

Title
Up to six keywords
Abstract (maximum 250 words)
Main body of text
Page numbers

If your paper had multiple authors, you must include a signed Undergraduate Authorship Agreement with your email to [email protected].

Formatting and Styling

All manuscripts should be formatted and styled as far as possible in accordance with the Journal's Formatting and Styling Guide. Basic and full versions of this guide can be downloaded from the journal homepage.

Reviewing Timeline

Academic reviewing is a lengthy, in-depth process in which the contents of an article are scrutinised by two experts in the field. Consequently, it can take many months for authors to receive their first and subsequent rounds of feedback on a manuscript. Each paper takes a different amount of time depending on the availability of members of the Board of Reviewers and the correlation of their expertise with a given paper's content, along with the time taken to actually review a paper with sufficient scrutiny.

The Review Process

Every submission to the Journal is peer-reviewed over several rounds by two doctoral students in linguistics (or related fields) from the Board of Reviewers. For more information on how reviewing works at JoULAB, please see our page on the Journal's Review Process.

Criteria for Acceptance

While there are no strict criteria mandating what is and isn't suitable for acceptance for the Journal, the Board of Reviewers are requested to keep the five following broad criteria in mind during reviews, which may be helpful for authors to consider:

Novelty, originality, or utility of approach, analysis, or methods
Importance of the research’s impact
Relevance of the paper to pressing issues in its field
Scope for future work following the article’s conclusions
Impressiveness, given undergraduate authorship

Authors should also note that replication studies, studies finding null results, and shorter contributions that still indicate substantial scholarship may all be considered for publication in JoULAB.

Copyright Policy

As a published JoULAB author, you retain full ownership and copyright of your JoULAB article. In return, you grant us the right of first publication, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. With this licence, anyone may share or adapt the content of articles within JoULAB only if they give appropriate credit to the author and Journal and only if they indicate whether and where changes were made.

Academic writing support

JoULAB provides academic writing support for any author who would like it.

How it works:

You let us know if you’d like this service
A member of the committee takes a look at your use of academic English and structure alone, not content
You’ll receive feedback from them alongside your two content-based reviews

This service is completely optional and by no means remedial! We want to extend this offer to everyone who submits to the Journal to make sure it is as accessible as possible for as many people as possible.

Turning your dissertation into a JoULAB article
Written your dissertation? Unsure if it'll work as an article? JoULAB founders Tom Williamson and Brandon Papineau give some tips on workshopping a dissertation into an article and assuage some fears about submitting. Read their advice here.

Questions

If you have any further questions about submissions, or require particular advice or support with your manuscript, please address your query to Associate Editor Hafren Vaughan via [email protected].