Instructions for Contributors to JGE

The Journal of Geoscience Education publishes papers related to pedagogical, educational, historical, philosophical, and cultural, aspects of all the geosciences, including such related fields as geophysics, geochemistry, oceanography, astronomy, meteorology, soil science, and environmental sciences. Broadly speaking, it is the objective of the Journal to improve geoscience instruction at all levels and in all settings. Although material published in the Journal should somehow be related to instruction, review papers on topics that are experiencing significant change will be considered.

General

The Journal ONLY accepts submissions through its web-based file management system. Authors are to convert their manuscripts to pdf format. PDF files and figures are to be uploaded at the following site:

https://www.digibinder.com/member_login.asp?ID=645

To access the site, authors are to use the following

Username: jgesubmission
Password: jge2468

Once the site has been accessed, authors are to click on the "JGE Submissions" folder and use the "Add Document" function to upload files.

Upon receipt of the new submission, the Editor will contact the author and arrange for a unique username and password for use during the remainder of the review process.

For additional information, contact Carl Drummond, Editor at the address below:
Journal of Geoscience Education
Department of Geosciences
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499
jge@ipfw.edu
(260) 481-5750

The manuscript may not be under consideration elsewhere or have been published elsewhere. The letter of submission should explicitly certify to this effect.

Papers will be acknowledged via e-mail and as such an e-mail addresses must be included with the address on the Title page of the manuscript.

Manuscripts must be typed with all material double-spaced and must have a three-centimeter margin all around. Text should not be block or right justified, and words should not be broken between lines.

The first page of a manuscript should have the title, authors' names, complete addresses including e-mail addresses, and phone and fax numbers.

Abstracts

All papers must be accompanied by informative abstracts of 200 words or less, the shorter the paper, the shorter the abstract. The use of phrases such as is discussed, is described, or are presented must be avoided. Instead, authors should remember that the abstract is not a description of the paper, but should be a short version of the essential parts of the paper. It is NOT an introduction to the paper. Abstracts are necessary because, among other reasons, they are reprinted in the Bibliography and Index of Geology and by the Institute for Scientific Information. See Landes (1966), Royal Society (1966), Day (1979, p. 20-22), Cremmins (1982), Hill and others (1974, p. 34-37), and Lowman (1988) for helpful hints on abstract preparation.

Acknowledgments

Authors should make certain that the content and wording of acknowledgments of help or criticism have been approved by those who are acknowledged. This should be stated in the authors letter of submission.

Copyright

The Journal is copyrighted under the 1976 United States Statute. Authors must complete, sign, and include with their manuscripts a copy of the copyright release form. Readers may copy and use material from the Journal for non-commercial purposes of educational or scientific advancement.

Cover Photographs

Exceptionally good photographs are sought for the cover of the Journal. These photos and their complete captions may be submitted independently or with articles. Color photographs are much preferred. Ordinarily, cover photos should be submitted as glossy prints at the final printed size of about 20 x 20 cm. Note the square format. Rectangular photos will have to be cropped, and it is advisable not to leave cropping to the Editor. Thirty-five millimeter slides may be submitted, but prints are preferred.

Discussions

Short discussions of Journal articles and authors replies will be published as space permits and at the Editor's discretion. Discussions and replies are printed in the Letters column. Each discussion submitted should be given a short title, and keywords should be provided.

Figures

The use of illustrations that contribute to the message an author is trying to communicate is strongly encouraged. Illustrations include cross sections, diagrams, drawings, graphs, maps, and photographs. Tabular items such as columnar lists of words and numbers are considered tables, not figures. Illustrations in the Journal are called figures and are given sequential Arabic numbers. If authors wish to have multi-part figures (4A, 4B, and so forth), they must put the A, B, C on the figures. Figures are to be submitted in jpg or tif format at a minimum of 600 dpi resolution. Please do not embed figures within the text document.

Cropping of photographs

Since authors know best what they want to show in a photo, they should crop their own photographs, leaving in only essential material. This will result in generally larger and clearer coverage of significant subjects and omission of distracting material.

Since Journal articles are regularly printed in two-column format, most figures should be planned for either one-of-two-columns width or page width. If necessary, figures can be rotated 90 degrees and printed sideways. The maximum dimensions of figures are given below. Authors should plan their figures and tables and submit camera-ready copy at these dimensions.

It should be understood that the Editor may decide to reduce a figure to a size smaller than that recommended by an author. Consequently, letters and numbers should be kept large. The minimum acceptable height for a letter or number in a camera-ready figure is about 3 mm, or about nine points. However, it is always better to use larger characters than this, since larger characters are easier to read and since a figure may end up being given a greater-than-expected reduction. Scales on figures should be graphical, not numerical. Figures drawn by dot-matrix printers are never acceptable as Journal figures because of their generally poor quality. Laser-printed computer output is usually acceptable as is. Shading produced by fine dot patterns, as all computer printers do, is difficult to reproduce and will be returned for revision.

Each figure must have its own complete caption, and all figure captions should be typed together, double-spaced, on a separate (from the text) page.

Many helpful suggestions about illustrations can be found in Allen (1977), Pratt and Ropes (1978), Cochran and others (1979), Cochran and Hill (1979), Rodolfo (1979), Day (1979, p. 49-60), Bishop and others, (1978), and Heron (1986).

Page Charges

A fee of $75 per page is charged to authors who have institutional, industrial, or grant funds available to pay publication costs. Authors without access to such funds are strongly urged to assist in defraying costs to the extent their resources permit. However, payment of page charges has no bearing on the decision to accept or reject a manuscript, and authors need say nothing about page charges at the time of submission.

Permissions

Obtaining necessary permissions for the use of published materials (figures, and so forth) is the responsibility of authors. Credit lines should be included when appropriate.

Proofs

After an article has been accepted for publication, proofs will be sent to the (senior) author for proofreading. At that time, the author will have the opportunity to check any minor editorial changes that have been made. The article should also be checked thoroughly for possible omissions or duplications of text as sometimes happens with computer-generated text.

References

Footnotes, as such, are not used in the Journal, but are incorporated into the text in the style followed by most geological journals. A list of References Cited should appear at the end of each paper. Serial and book titles and the names of publishers in the list should not be abbreviated but should be spelled out. The format for citations and references should be that used in recent issues of the Journal. See, for example, the list at the end of these Instructions. Failure to include such a list when appropriate may suggest that an author is not familiar with the literature of a field, has not given proper credit to prior work, and has not taken such research into account in his/her own work. Particular attention should be paid to the matter of whether prior work on the subject has been described in this journal. Authors will find the cumulative index (see above) particularly helpful in this regard.

Tables

Lists of words or numbers are called tables and are given sequential Arabic numbers, like figures. Each table should have its own caption and, unlike figure captions, each table caption should be typed below its table. In general, tables will be prepared at the Journal. However, authors may be asked to prepare their own tables in camera-ready form if the material is complex and/or difficult to typeset. If there is any question about specific tables, authors should check with the Editor when a manuscript is submitted. Authors should consider the Journal's columnar format, plan their tables to fit one of the available widths (see Figures, above), and make a specific recommendation to the Editor for each table at the time of submission.

Titles

Titles should be short and informative, rather than catchy or cute. As a general rule, titles should not contain punctuation, particularly colons.

Units of Measurement

International Metric System (SI) units of measurement should be used, with English equivalents following (in parentheses) if necessary. More detailed instructions and guidelines to prospective authors can be found in Cochran and others (1974), Hill and Cochran (1977), and Day (1979). Some additional references that may prove useful to authors are also provided.

Because failure to work within the spirit of these instructions places an unnecessary burden on the Journal Editor, some manuscripts may have to be returned to authors for a second preparation.

Citation Style

Embedded Citations

Single Author: (Smith, 2002)
Two Authors: (Smith and Jones, 2002)
More than Two Authors: (Smith et al., 2002)

Journal article

Devlin, J. F., 2003, Rationalizing geomorphology with an energy balance, Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 51, p. 398-409.

Book

Gilman, A.G., Rall, T.W., Nies, A.S., and Taylor, P., editors, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (8th edition), New York, Pergamon, 650 p.

Book Chapter

Kuret, J.A., and Murad, F., 1990, Adenohypophyseal hormones and related substances, In: Gilman, A.G., Rall, T.W., Nies, A.S., and Taylor, P., editors, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (8th edition), New York, Pergamon, p. 1334-1360.

Abstract

Mendez, M.F., Manon-Epaillat, R., Lanska, D.J., and Burstine, T.H., 1977, Rapikivi granites [abstract], Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, v. 34, p. 295.

Dissertation

Dettmers, J.M., 1995, Assessing the tropic cascade in reservoirs: the role of an introduced predator [dissertation], Columbus (Ohio), Ohio State University, 188 p.

Conference Paper

Meyeres, B., and Hermanns, K., 1985, Formaldehyde release from pressed wood products, In: Turoski, V., editor, Formaldehyde: analytical chemistry and toxicology, Proceedings of the symposium at the 187th meeting of the American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., American Chemical Society, p. 101-106.

Web page

Burka, L.P., 1993, A hypertext history of multi-user dimensions: MUD history, http://www.utopia.com/talent/lpd/muddex/essay (2 August, 1996).

Software

ID Software, 1993, The ultimate doom, New York, GT Interactive Software.