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Aims & Scope

Between 2011 and 2015, Gettysburg College graduated 415 students from Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science alone. Work and research conducted by these students represents only a fraction of the academic achievements in the Social Sciences that have gone unnoticed outside of their immediate classrooms. Their thoughts and insights have been lost to time and relocated to boxed records or personal collections. These contributions to larger educational discussions are now unsearchable by their peers at other institutions and their peers to follow at Gettysburg College.

Establishment of the Gettysburg Social Sciences Review via the Gettysburg College Institutional Repository, The Cupola, will ensure that the academic dialogue begun by current and future students will not disappear at their graduation but will be preserved indefinitely. In publishing the Gettysburg Social Sciences Journal via The Cupola, its content will also be accessible to anyone else in the world. This will enable Gettysburg College to feature the academic achievements of its Social Sciences majors on a global platform and allow its students to contribute to discussions from a larger platform than what is generally possible from a brick and mortar school. In opening the journal to submissions from other undergraduate institutions, the Gettysburg Social Sciences Review will enable academic discussion of topics on a broader scale than is possible from any single institution.

Students will experience the added benefit of learning the peer-review process and professional style editing. Publishing as an undergraduate will provide students an achievement that can be noted on applications to graduate schools or resumes as they move forward in their academic or professional careers.

Accepted Articles

The journal currently accepts two article types related to social science: ‘research papers’ and ‘discussion papers.’

Research papers are original research using a clear methodology. The format of research is defined by the typical research journal format:

  1. Introduction: an overview of previous literature and relevant research
  2. Methods: a thorough description of the methods
  3. Results: a clear reporting of results
  4. Discussion/Conclusion: a discussion of the results of the research in light of previous literature. In other words, what has the author contributed to the field?

Discussion papers are original research articles that provide new perspectives or raise new questions about existing literature. Discussion papers may analyze existing research and data sources, but the discussion papers do not include the traditional format of research articles: therefore a methods and result section is not needed. The use of subheadings is strongly encouraged.

Both articles types require an abstract.