Undergraduate students at the University of Saskatchewan will soon have a chance to have their research published in an academic journal on campus.

The University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal will launch on Feb. 27, 2014 and will highlight student research from various colleges and disciplines. The journal will be published online.

“Students have an opportunity to publish their own work that might include research from a summer project, undergraduate honors theses or something written for a class,” said Undergraduate Editor-in-Chief Scott Adams.

The journal will include original research, not published anywhere else, that will be reviewed and will provide students with a means to disseminate their findings to a broad audience

Like all academic journals, submissions will be subject to a peer review process.

Authors are required to submit the names of two U of S professors with relevant expertise in a field related to their academic work to assist the editorial board in selecting reviewers. After receiving comments from the reviewers, the editorial board can choose to accept the paper, ask the author to make modifications, reject it outright or dismiss it for the current issue and welcome the author to resubmit.

The journal is open to all submissions provided they were written in the last two years while the author was an undergraduate student at the U of S.

Submissions for the first issue, to be published in February, are now closed. However, students can still submit their work for future issues.

With the university’s push towards becoming a more research-intensive institution, the journal will seek to increase student research engagement.

“As part of the U15 Canadian research universities, there needed to be an initiative to encourage undergraduate students to partake in research at the U of S,” said Orhan Yilmaz, an associate editor of the journal’s health and sciences section.

“The journal allows students to have their scholarly work subjected to a peer review process and would encourage academic programs to incorporate research into degree programs,” he said.

Students began advocating for an undergraduate research journal at the U of S in February of 2012. The University Learning Center organized a Research Learning Community for students from a variety of disciplines to draft a proposal. Following the presentation of the proposal in April of that year, the journal gained support from the University Learning Center and the university’s Office of the Vice-President Research.

The journal’s editorial board is comprised mainly of students and is divided into four sections: Health and sciences, social sciences, humanities and fine arts, and interdisciplinary.  Each section has a head editor and two or three associate editors.

Many of the current editors, including Adams and Yilmaz, were involved in the Research Learning Community that drafted the original proposal for the journal.

New editors will be selected every term and all undergraduate students are encouraged to apply.

Students wanting to submit to the U of S Undergraduate Research Journal can do so at usask.ca/usurj.

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Graphic: Cody Schumacher/Graphics Editor