PLEASE READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES IN ITS ENTIRETY. FAILURE TO ADHERE TO ALL POLICIES MAY LEAD TO ARTICLE REJECTION.
Table of Contents
The Tower accepts papers from all disciplines offered at Georgia Tech. Research may discuss empirical or theoretical work, including, but not limited to, experimental, historical, ethnographic, literary, and cultural inquiry. The journal strives to appeal to readers in academia and industry. Articles must be easily understood by bachelors-educated individuals of any discipline. Although The Tower will review submissions of highly technical research for potential inclusion, submissions must be written to educate the audience, rather than simply report results to experts in a particular field. Original research must be well supported by evidence, arguments must be clear, and conclusions must be logical.
More specifically, The Tower welcomes submissions under the following four categories:
An article represents the culmination point of an undergraduate research project, where the author addresses a clearly defined research problem from one, or sometimes multiple approaches.
A dispatch is a manuscript in which the author reports recent progress on a research challenge that is relatively narrow in scope, but critical toward his or her overall research aim.
A perspective reflects active scholarly thinking in which the author provides personal viewpoints and invites further discussions on a topic of interest through literature synthesis and/or logical analysis.
A synopsis article is a detailed overview of an article already published in a professional, refereed journal (of which the author must be a co-author), specifically highlighting the parts the author was responsible for.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year. The Tower publishes two volumes per year. Due to the review and production process, for submissions to be considered for each issue they must be submitted before the publicized deadline, which can be found at gttower.org. Submissions received after this deadline will be considered for the following issue. If the quality of their submission were to be compromised to meet the deadline, authors are encouraged to further develop their work and only submit it once it is fully realized.
Submitters must be enrolled as undergraduate students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to be eligible for consideration. Authors have up to six months after graduation to submit papers regarding research completed as an undergraduate.
Undergraduates must be the primary authors of all submissions. Graduate students or faculty may have been involved in the research only if they acted as mentors rather than as full-time collaborators. Multiple authors on a submission are acceptable, as long as all authors are undergraduate students at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Multiple manuscripts from the same author will be considered, but each should be submitted separately. The author must provide a separate consent form for each manuscript submitted, but is not required to provide a separate author biography.
Simultaneous submissions with other publications is discouraged, but may be considered if within the policies of the other journal. If a submitted manuscript has been submitted to another journal for simultaneous consideration, this fact must be clearly indicated on the consent form. It is the author’s responsibility to notify The Tower immediately upon a paper’s acceptance elsewhere. Submissions published in The Tower may be reprinted in another publication, as long as The Tower is credited.
Submission must adhere to the following criteria to be considered for review. Otherwise, the submission will be returned to the author for necessary changes. It is therefore to the advantage of the author to ensure that all basic formatting and quality criteria are met before the submission deadline.
The following formatting requirements are specific for the type of submission. When submitting their work authors must indicate which submission type they would like their work to be considered as.
The longest and most in-depth of the submission types, articles represent the culmination point of an undergraduate research project, where the author addresses a clearly defined research problem from one, or sometimes multiple approaches.
An article should:
A properly formatted article must:
Some questions an article should answer:
A submission type that is more narrow in scope than an article, but by no means lower in quality. Aimed at undergraduates earlier in their research career, the dispatch should report recent progress on a research challenge, no matter how minor the result may seem to the technical field at-large, as long as the result is supported with scientific rigor, and the author shows good awareness of the greater picture.
A dispatch should:
A submission type not based on primary data but rather active scholarly thinking in which the author provides personal viewpoints and invites further discussions on a topic of interest through literature synthesis and/or logical analysis. By nature, undergraduate researchers tend to be futuristic and the perspective encourages all Georgia Tech students to explore the profound impacts of achievements in their disciplines on society.
A perspective should:
A submission type that provides a detailed overview of a research article that has already been published (must specifically say the Synopsis article is based off of a published article). The author must be a co-author on the original paper, and must have the expressed permission of ALL authors of the original paper through our Consent Form
A synopsis article should:
The following formatting requirements apply to all types of submissions. They must all be satisfied before a submission will be reviewed.
All papers must:
List references in APA, MLA, or Chicago format at the end of the document, and have a citation for every reference listed within the text, and a reference listed for every citation. References should be listed alphabetically by author, and should be cited within the text using the author last name and year. For example:
The Tower undergraduate research journal published its first issue in fall of 2008 (Smith, 2008).
According to Smith (2008), The Tower undergraduate research journal published its first issue in fall of 2008.
For more information, including other citation formats and examples, refer to OWL at Purdue or other online APA resources.
Reference formatting is easily accomplished by using Endnote software, which is available for free download from OIT. The Georgia Tech Library periodically holds free training workshops for Endnote, and all individuals planning to write research papers should consider learning the software. A key benefit of using the software is that references will be automatically formatted to any style specified.
Images and graphs should be submitted as separate files from the submission document in the online journal system. Captions should be included in the submission body Word document to indicate placement of images and graphs, and not in the figure files. Each image and graph requires a caption in the format of:
Figure 1. The relationship between concentrations of photoinitiator and polymerization time.
Acceptable formats for images and graphs include: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF (preferred). However, figures or graphs created in Microsoft Office (such as Word flowcharts or Excel graphs) should be submitted in the original format (e.g., .doc or .xls), instead of converted to a graphic file.
Graphs and images with text or sharp lines should be submitted using GIF, PNG, or TIFF (and not JPEG), to preserve image quality.
Images should be at least 4 inches wide. Larger images with maximum resolutions are preferred. All monochrome images (line art) must be at least 1000 dpi in resolution, all combination halftone images (color with type) must be at least 600 dpi, and all halftones (color without type) must be at least 300 dpi. If images are not of high enough resolution, articles (even accepted) will be withheld from publication.
During the production stage, the Associate Editor for Production (AEP) may be in contact to make suggested or necessary modifications to graphics. Please keep an editable copy of each figure secure and available for this purpose.
The Tower accepts sound and video files that greatly enhance a submission. Sound files should be submitted in MP3 format, and videos in MPG or MP4. These files may be included in online media.
Tables should be submitted in Microsoft Word or Excel. They may either be included with the submission text, or as separate files. When appropriate, table columns should have descriptive headings. Number tables in order of appearance. Like images or graphs, they must be accompanied by appropriate caption text:
Table 2. Number of testing subjects included in each cohort.
Equations must be submitted in Microsoft Equation Editor (unfortunately, we cannot accept LaTeX formats). Like tables, they may either be included with the submission text, or as separate files. Do not submit equations as image files. Equations do not require captions, but clearly identify all variables within equations upon their first appearance. Equations should be numbered in order of appearance, and can be referenced within the text by number:
a2 + b2 = c2
(3)
Where: a and b are the two shorter sides of a right triangle, and c is the hypotenuse. The relationship between the three sides of a right triangle is evident from Equation 3.
An acknowledgements paragraph should be included as a separate Word document, as it contains identifying information. If your work received any funding, e.g. NSF, NIH, or PURA grants, these sources must be acknowledged. Collaborators, as well as faculty or graduate student mentors, should also be acknowledged.
To submit a paper, authors must register on our Online Journal System (OJS). Once the author fills out the required information and registers as an author, he or she will have access to the submission page. There is a five-step process for submission and OJS will not allow the author to proceed to the next step without fulfilling the current one.
Submissions are reviewed anonymously through a blind review process by student and faculty reviewers. The journal review process takes a great deal of time “ a few months, on average. Often papers will need several cycles of review and revision before they are ready for publication. It is therefore suggested that every effort is made to be early and prompt with submissions to ensure inclusion in the next issue of the journal.
Papers are reviewed based upon methodology, originality, and relevance of results. Statistical analysis should be used and reported where appropriate. Depth of analysis should be comprehensive. The most important consideration is to ensure that the paper is written for a general, educated audience.
After submitting papers to The Tower, the Associate Editor for Submission and Review (AESR) will review each submission for adherence to the above formatting criteria. If submission meets these requirements, it will be forwarded to members of the student review board in the authorŐs discipline for review.
The AESR will compile all of the peer reviews and assign one of the following status labels to the manuscript:
Accept. If the article is accepted, the AESR will forward the article to a faculty reviewer in the author’s field for review. The faculty reviewer will review the article and return an additional review of the article and recommended rating for the article. Once Accept status is reached for a paper, it will remain in a queue to be reviewed by the Board as a candidate for inclusion in this year’s issue. The Editor-In-Chief (EIC) and the review board will select a final mix of articles to be included in the journal. Any articles with Accept status that are not included in the current year’s issue will automatically be considered “In Press” to be included in a future issue of The Tower.
Reject. If both the reviewers and the AESR agree that the paper should be rejected, the paper will be returned to the author for revision suggestions. The author is invited to resubmit the paper for another issue of The Tower if desired and still qualified at that time.
Accept with Revisions. Upon recommendation of Accept with Revisions from the article review committee, the AESR will create a consolidated list of revision recommendations to the author and the author will be given two weeks to make revisions and resubmit. This process will be repeated until the AESR and faculty reviewer are satisfied that the paper is of publishable quality or the final submission deadline. The goal of this process is to revise the paper so that it is ready for production. Once Accepted by the article review committee, the final approved resubmitted article will be collected with the other papers to be reviewed by the EIC and the rest of the review board to make the final decision of the papers to be included in the current issue.
The Tower’s editorial staff maintains the right to revise articles for clarity and modifications for layout adherence.
Feel free to contact any member of our editorial board if you have any questions or concerns about this journal or submitting to the journal. Contact information is as follows:
Editor-in-Chief
editor@gttower.org
Associate Editor for Submission and Review
review@gttower.org
Associate Editor for Production
production@gttower.org
Business Manager
business@gttower.org
Faculty Advisor
advisor@gttower.org
Mailing Address
The Tower at Georgia Tech
Office of Student Media
353 Ferst Drive
Atlanta, GA 30332-0290
Website (general information about The Tower)
http://gttower.org
Journal submission portal
http://ejournals.library.gatech.edu/tower