GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS

Urban Habitats is a peer-reviewed, open-access electronic journal on the biology of urban areas. Articles are welcomed from scientists, scholars, and practitioners in urban habitat restoration, conservation biology, urban botany, landscape architecture and design, and other fields concerning urban ecology.

Submissions should be e-mailed to the journal in the form of a cover letter that includes separate attachments for the text of the paper, tables, charts, illustrations, photographs, and other material.

Once accepted, individual papers will be published online as soon as author revisions and copyediting have been completed. When all papers have been completed, the entire issue will be dated and published in both HTML and PDF formats.

General Policies

By submitting an article to Urban Habitats, authors implicitly agree to the following editorial and publishing policies.

  • Articles submitted must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
  • Authors must honor any reasonable request by the editors for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusions of the studies reported.
  • Authors retain copyright on most content but agree to grant Urban Habitats an exclusive license to publish the content in print (the journal is archived at numerous reference libraries) and online.
  • Authors agree to disclose all affiliations and funding sources, especially those that might be perceived as potential sources of bias or conflicts of interest.
  • The corresponding author accepts the responsibility that all authors named on an article have agreed to be listed and have seen and approved the manuscript.
  • Articles will remain privileged documents and will not be released to the press or public prior to publication.

Urban Habitats is available free over the Internet and therefore cannot pay for submissions. Neither does it charge authors to publish accepted papers.

Preparation of Manuscript

Articles should be approximately 5,000 words (equivalent to 20 double-spaced pages excluding tables and charts) and include the following information:

  • Name and address (including e-mail address) of author(s)
  • Word count of article, including abstract
  • Brief but descriptive title of the paper
  • 300-word abstract that concisely describes the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions of the paper
  • List of eight to ten "key" words or phrases for purposes of indexing and electronic linking
  • List of tables, charts, illustrations, and other visual materials accompanying text
  • Text of the paper followed by source citations
  • Brief biography of author(s), including degrees, areas of expertise or study, institutional affiliations, and particular interests.

Format and Style

The preferred program for submission of text is Microsoft Word, using the .doc suffix as a naming convention. Word Perfect is also acceptable. Tables should be created by using the table function of the word-processing program or Excel. Maps and diagrams generated within Microsoft Word are acceptable, as are Quark files. They may also be submitted as electronic images (see below).

Photographs and other images may be submitted electronically as JPEGs, GIFs, and TIFs. Bitmapped images and PICT files are discouraged. Please name the file using the appropriate extension: .jpg for JPEG, .gif for GIF, and .tif for TIF. When attaching the files electronically, provide a naming key for images and tables to match with text references.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, is the primary resource for spelling, hyphenation, and usage. Refer to the Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press) for general style, grammar, and punctuation. For bibliographic references and citation style within text, we follow the style for "Literature Cited" defined by Systematic Botany: aspt.net/publications/sysbot/checklist_systbot.php. Here are examples of some frequently used bibliographic citations:

Greller, A.M., and S.E. Clemants. 2001. Flora of West Hills Park, Suffolk County, New York, with considerations of provenance of some long-distance disjuncts. Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 128: 76-89.

Marinelli, J. 1998. Stalking the wild amaranth: gardening in the age of extinction. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Withers, M.A., M.W. Palmer, G.L. Wade, P.S. White, and P.R. Neal. 2000. Changing patterns in the numbers of species of North American floras. Retrieved April 11, 2002, from the U.S. Geological Survey Website: http://biology.usgs.gov/luhna/chap4.html

Since Urban Habitats is an e-journal, citing links to other Web-based sources of information is encouraged.

In keeping with the broad reader-contributor base of Urban Habitats, which includes city planners, urban historians, and naturalists as well as scientific researchers and practicing ecologists, authors are asked to include nontechnical explanations of specialized terms and scientific jargon, either in the text of the paper itself or with links to the Internet. By encouraging interactive participation by the reader, Urban Habitats hopes to engage all people interested in the biology of urban places.