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Author Guidelines

Urban Library Journal welcomes new work that address urban libraries and librarianship in relation to city environments. ULJ is an open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal. Manuscripts, written and formatted in APA style, must be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format to the editors.

ULJ invites scholarly submissions that speak to urban librarianship as it relates to: topics in urban studies, higher education (with emphasis on public higher education), public and academic library collaboration, community outreach and programming, social justice, critical race studies, gender and work, sexuality and identity within librarianship, technology and privacy issues, or other topics.

MS Word document

  • Body of text--Century 12-point font (if you don’t have Century, use Times New Roman)
  • Section headers—Century 14 pt, centered
  • Title of article—Century 16 pt, centered
  • Use one-inch margins on all sides.
  • Text should be single spaced.
  • Do not include page numbers.
  • There should be a single blank line between paragraphs with no indentation for the first line.
  • All copy aligned left; do not justify.
  • Divide your article into sections; there should be two hard breaks before and after sections.
  • Only insert a single space between words and after punctuation.
  • There should be two hard breaks between citations in bibliography (treat each citation as a paragraph)
  • Do not include headers and footers.
  • Do not reduce images. Embed into Word documents any illustrations or graphs; if possible, also send images separately as .gif or .jpg files.
  • Include an abstract (50-200) words.
  • Include a brief biography (50 words).
  • Supply four to six keywords for your article.
  • For questions about manuscripts, editorial queries, or comments, contact the editor.

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items. Submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.

Ensuring a Blind Peer-Review

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

  • The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
  • With Microsoft Office and PDF documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.