Contributor Guidelines

Printable version

The Oculus is committed to upholding the UVa honor code and expects all submissions to cite sources when appropriate.   Contributors are asked to use citation standards common to their field, which for the humanities means notes and bibliography style and for the social and hard sciences means author-date style.

When submitting a paper, please send it as an email attachment to oculus@virginia.edu. The subject line should read "(your name) Oculus Submission."   In the text of the email please provide your name, the title of your paper, and what class (if any) the paper was written for.

Submissions must be made in MS Word .doc format or OpenOffice .odt format.   Please name the file "(your name).doc" (or .odt).   All supporting media (images, charts, tables, and the like) must be supplied in either .jpg or .tif file format.   Please name the files "(your name)1.jpg," "(your name)2.tif," etc., in the order in which they appear in the paper.

There is no recommended length, though past articles have commonly ranged between 7 and 30 pages in length.

The Oculus has chosen The Chicago Manual of Style as its style standard.   Contributors are encouraged to check this resource and make every effort to conform to its recommendations.

When evaluating submissions, The Oculus looks at both the quality of research and the quality of writing.   The paper must contain original research conducted by the student and must make a reasonable contribution to the body of scholarly work in the field.   In addition, the paper must be free from grammatical errors and written in a lucid, professional style.   The target audience for papers published in The Oculus is advanced undergraduates in the paper's field.

Please direct additional questions to the Editor-in-Chief at oculus@virginia.edu.