Undergraduate publication mentoring offers strong students interesting opportunities. Emerging academics, perhaps most obviously, benefit from establishing a publication record at such an early stage in their careers. Students considering graduate study burnish their academic credentials. Furthermore, students enjoy seeing their name in print. Mentoring undergraduate publications need not place a large burden on faculty members. Over the past few years, I have helped six undergraduates at Victoria University in Wellington (New Zealand) publish academic works in undergraduate history journals in North America. Other faculty can do the same.
While the technique proposed here is not difficult, it presupposes that faculty have designed undergraduate assignments that enable students to conduct original research. Not all undergraduate classes permit students to write an original research paper, but more could. Structuring classroom assignments to encourage original research is not as challenging as some scholars might think.
Instead of choosing from a choice of “research questions” to answer, for example, students can explore a set of “research topics,” each accompanied by a short bibliography of primary sources. Students are instructed to read the sources and devise their own original argument. In my second-year course called “Peoples of the Soviet Empire,” for example, one of the topics concerns “the 1956 Revolution in Hungary.” Students are given links to a collection of declassified CIA reports on Hungarian politics, a digital archive of interviews with refugees, and an online archive of interviews with Hungarian “freedom fighters.” In my course on the Middle East, to give another example, one of the topics is “Republican Iraq, 1958-1990.” Students get links to translations of Ba’ath party documents, Iraqi government documents, and CIA reports. And so on. Be aware that assignments based on archival links will need regular updating: online archives frequently change their webpages.
The next step is to create a list of relevant journals. Readers who search Google for “undergraduate history journals” will find that several such journals exist, and that several such lists have already been compiled. Faculty interested in undergraduate publication mentoring should create their own personalized list of journals related to their own disciplinary profile. The list of journals can include some technical information about what the journals require from prospective contributors. A list of this sort also requires regular updating: undergraduate journals come and go. I check my list for dead links about once a semester.
My personal list, which fits on one A4 piece of paper, has a short entry for ten journals. Each entry contains the title of the journal, a short description of the journal taken from the journal homepage, word lengths or page count, citation style, preferred submission formats, and contact information. Two sample entries from my list are shown below.
Central Europe – Undergraduate Yearbook (University of Minnesota)
“devoted to the study of the past, present, and future of Central Europe”
6,000 – 8,000 words, Chicago notes, 100 word abstract + 50 word bio, .doc or .pdf
Vanderbilt Historical Review (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee)
(“all topics and periods of history and historiography”)
1700 and 3500 words, Chicago notes, word .doc or google doc
Faculty can then distribute this list of journals to students who write a good original research paper in class. While marking end-of-semester research papers, instructors can separate the unusually strong papers into a special pile, count how many there are, and print out that many copies of the list. On each, write an individualized note praising the student’s research and asking for a short meeting after class about the possibility of publishing. Then insert a folded copy into the papers before returning them to students in class. Students are usually receptive: they receive the list of journals and first contemplate the possibility of publishing while learning they have received top marks on an assignment. My top students, at any rate, have always lingered after class to learn more.
The meeting with selected students lasts from ten to fifteen minutes. Start by praising their work, and then make a short “pitch” for them to consider undergraduate publishing. Undergraduates typically lack the “publish or perish” mentality of higher education. However, students will have considered postgraduate study. So briefly explain the importance of publications in academia overall and suggest that having established a publication record will help them get into a prestigious graduate program, or alternatively help them win a scholarship. An appeal to vanity is also possible: students typically enjoy seeing their work in print or sharing the link with family and friends.
After the “pitch,” students should be given a short explanation of academic publishing. Explain the process of anonymous peer review and the possible outcomes of “accepted,” “rejected,” and “revise-resubmit.” Explain that authors can only submit to one journal at a time. I add that many of my students have successfully published, which suggests that their chances are good. I feel obliged to add that my advice is not wholly selfless, since I count undergraduate student publications as a professional accomplishment on my own CV. Undergraduate students should be discouraged from doing extensive revisions. If students have already written a good paper, the perfect may become the enemy of the good: students who want to perfect their papers may never get around to submitting anything. Students sometimes have questions at this meeting, and sometimes email questions afterwards. Nevertheless, most of the mentoring work takes place at this short meeting.
Students typically appear receptive when hearing the pitch, but faculty must resist any feeling of disappointment if students do not follow through. Most undergraduates are not pursuing academic careers, and submitting an essay for publication is not a course requirement. The job of an undergraduate publication mentor is to inform students about possibilities that might not have occurred to them. Whether students choose to submit their paper is up to them.
Undergraduate publication takes nearly as long as professional academic publishing. Students who submit a paper may be taking other classes, or have even graduated, by the time they are published. First time authors, however, are almost always pleased when they get the news of publication. Unexpected emails passing on the news of publication make a welcome surprise months or years later. Former students of mine have published both on the 1956 Hungarian revolution (in the Ohio University Undergraduate Review of History) and on Republican Iraq (in the Vanderbilt Historical Review), based on the assignments described above. If you teach a class in which students write a research paper, give undergraduate publication mentoring a try.
Featured Image: In Peer Review We Trust, Wikimedia Commons.
Clio and the Contemporary 
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