Chicago Wilderness Journal:
Guidelines to Authors

Chicago Wilderness Journal Mission

The mission of the Chicago Wilderness Journal:

1. Facilitate the sharing of results and lessons learned from member-initiated projects and activities, including consortium-funded projects, team activities or the work of individual member organizations that would be useful to the wider membership;
2. Through easily consumable articles discuss practical implications, interpret data, and/or make recommendations about issues within the areas of science, land management, sustainability, education, and communication in the Chicago region;
3. Foster a sense of community among Chicago Wilderness members and improve members' ability to communicate with diverse audiences.

This journal is:

• A forum for sharing important results and lessons learned through biodiversity conservation work,
• An interdisciplinary publication that features a mix of articles in each issue from the fields of science, land management, education, communication, and sustainability,
• An online journal, published three times a year, guided by an editorial board made up of Chicago Wilderness members and consortium staff.

This journal is not:

• A peer-reviewed journal,
• A forum of advocacy or political positions,
• A newsletter with event announcements,
• A means of presenting biodiversity issues to the general public.

What we're looking for in an article

Submissions will be considered from the volunteers and employees of Chicago Wilderness member organizations, and from participants in Chicago Wilderness Teams and projects. Articles should report on the results of a Chicago Wilderness project, workshop, roundtable, or the results of such work performed by an individual Chicago Wilderness member organization. While the emphasis of this publication is on Chicago Wilderness members and affiliates, submittals from outside the membership that are relevant to the Chicago Wilderness audience will also be considered. The topic should pertain to biodiversity conservation in this region. Articles should emphasize the lessons learned and interpretation of data, rather than methodology or simply reporting of results.

Questions to answer in the article include:

• Why did you undertake the project and what did you do?
• What did you learn from the experience? What do your results tell you?
• What are the practical or applied implications of the work - both in your field and in other fields?
• Based on what you learned what do you recommend to Chicago Wilderness members?

Note that articles don't necessarily need to tell a success story; if valuable lessons were learned from an unsuccessful project, please consider submitting an article.

Target audience

The target audience for this journal is the volunteers and employees of Chicago Wilderness member organizations, and participants in Chicago Wilderness Teams and projects. To meet the needs of this broad audience, articles should:

• Emphasize practical implications,
• Be easy to read and interesting, not overly technical and full of jargon
• Be short but refer to additional sources of information for interested readers,
• Help readers feel connected to other Chicago Wilderness members,
• Offer readers information and resources that will help them carry out their jobs.

Article format

General

Please submit your article as a Microsoft Word or WordPerfect file. Articles should be three to five pages in length (approximately 450 words per page). Please use: Times New Roman, 12 pt font, single-spaced, and justified alignment.

Author information

Each article should begin with the author(s) full name and organizational affiliation underneath the title of the article. Each article should end with a sentence giving the authors name, position, and contact information. This final sentence(s) should be italicized.

Required Components

All articles must include the following components:

• A short abstract of several sentences that will quickly capture the reader's attention,
• A description of the work you did and why you did it,
• Results and implications for Chicago Wilderness partners.

Style

Before submitting an article, please check for the following:

Use acronyms for processes or names of agencies and organizations if they will be repeated in the article. The first time the name or process is mentioned spell out the entire name and follow with the acronym in parenthesis. The acronym should then be used in the rest of the article. Example: "The United State Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) is a sponsor for the 2004 Congress. The US EPA has a tradition of providing assistance for this event."

Check for agreement between nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Examples: "The steering committee wants their agenda in advance", should be either "The steering committee wants its agenda in advance" or "The steering committee members want their agendas in advance."

Avoid using vague pronouns. Example: "We would like to thank you for attending the meeting", should be "The organizing committee thanks you for attending the meeting".

Use round, 12 point bullets. Alternatively, a numbered list may be used. Items included in a bulleted list may either be complete sentences, in which case each bullet ends in a period, or words or phrases. In the case of words or phrases, each bulleted item may or may not end with a comma or a semi-colon, depending on the complexity of the phrase; the last bulleted item should end with a period. All text within bullets should have parallel construction.

• A forum for sharing important results and lessons learned through biodiversity conservation work,
• An interdisciplinary publication that features a mix of articles in each issue from fields of science, land management, education, communication, and sustainability,
• An online journal, published three times a year, guided by an editorial board made up of Chicago Wilderness members and coalition staff.

Avoid using all capitals for emphasis- it's perceived as SHOUTING. Use boldface instead.

Spell out numerals one through nine and use numerals for 10 and higher. The exception is if you start a sentence with a number: then it should always be spelled out. Examples: "We wrote nine pages out of the 150 published"; "Thirty of our member organizations regularly engage student volunteers".

Reference to other people's work should be included in the text where appropriate. When an article or book or idea is referred to in the text, it should be followed by the author's last name and date. The last name and date should be included in parentheses. The name and the date do not need to be separated a comma. If the literature cited has two authors list both names; if there are more than two authors then list the first author's name followed by "et al." If a sentence includes ideas from multiple works, include all references in the same set of parentheses but separated by semicolons.

Examples: (Smith 1999), (Smith and Jones 2000), (Smith et al. 2002), (Smith 1999; Smith and Jones 2000)

Literature cited in the text should then be listed at the very end of the article under the heading 'References.' The following format should be used for references:

Boudreau, D. and G. Wilson. 1992. Buckthorn research and control at Pipestone national Monument. Restoration and Management Notes 10:94-95.

Lawton, J. and C. Jones. 1995. Linking species and ecosystems: organisms and ecosystem engineers. Pp. 141-150 In: Jones, C. and J. Lawton (eds.) Linking Species and Ecosystems. Chapman and Hall, New York.

Soule, M. 1990. The onslaught of alien species, and other challenges in the coming decade. Conservation Biology 4(3): 233-239.

Cite personal communication as follows: (First initial. Last name, affiliation, pers. comm. Month, Year) or (C. Bendowitz, Chicago Wilderness, pers. comm. May 2005)

Note that books and journals are italicized; articles and chapters are not. The volume number should be in bold.

Use both the common name and the scientific name the first time a species is mentioned. Thereafter, just case the common name. The scientific name should be in parentheses and italics, as in common name (scientific name). Common names are not capitalized unless they include a proper name as part of the common name. Names of Families are capitalized but not italicized.

Examples: white lady slipper (Cypripedium candidum) but Hill's thistle (Cirsium hillii) or European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), the spider family, Salticidae.

Photo, graphic, and diagram formats

All photos, graphics, and diagrams must have permission to be printed in the CW Journal prior to submission.

1. Please submit graphics in their native format whenever possible, e.g. jpg, gif, xls, etc. Do not submit graphics embedded in MS Word or other word processing packages.
2. Submit graphics as early as possible in the editing process, but no later than when returning your responses to the initial round of editing.
3. All graphics submitted must have Figure #s specified, and the desired insertion point for the figure must be specified in the article text. Because of page layout constraints, we cannot guarantee placement at the exact location that is specified.
4. All graphics submitted must have captions. Captions should be a phrase or one-two sentences in length. Captions that are too long may be edited at the discretion of the editorial staff.
5. Avoid using very small text for any words or numbers inserted into graphics.

1. Please submit photos in one of the following formats: .jpg, gif, .eps, .tif, .bmp, .png, .psd. If you cannot submit in one of these formats, please contact Bob Sullivan (630) 252-6182 or sullivan@anl.gov to discuss options.
2. Do not submit photos embedded in MS Word or other word processing packages.
3. Please submit photos at high resolution if possible, but not more than 3 Mb per individual photo. Low-resolution photos generally will not print well.
4. Titles and text for photos should be submitted separately, and the graphic designer will place them appropriately.

1. Please submit graphs and charts in MS Excel if they were created in Excel. Please do not submit Excel graphs and charts embedded in MS Word. Graphs and charts created in MS Word may be submitted within the same document as your article. Graphs and charts created in other programs should be submitted as .jpg, .gif, .eps or one of the other formats specified for photo submissions (see above).
2. Graphs, charts, and diagrams must have titles in addition to captions. Titles will be placed either above the graphic or at the beginning of the caption. Titles should be provided as text accompanying your graphic, not inside the graphic, because of the frequent need to resize images for publication.
3. Simple annotations to charts and graphs should be submitted as text separately from the graph or chart, with directions about placement. If there are many annotations or placement directions are complicated, please put the annotations in the chart or graph itself.

Submission procedures

Authors can submit either an article or a query to Michelle Uting at muting@chicagowilderness.org. Queries should include a thorough abstract of the intended topic. Articles and all accompanying graphic files should be submitted electronically to Michelle. Be sure to include the author's contact information. Submissions can also be saved on a disc and mailed to Michelle at 5225 Old Orchard Road, #37, Skokie, IL 60077.

Although articles will be accepted on an ongoing basis for consideration in all upcoming issues, a rough schedule of deadlines follows:

• For March issues: first drafts will be due the second Friday of the preceding November,
• For July issues: first drafts will be due the second Friday of the preceding March,
• For November issues: first drafts will be due the second Friday of the preceding July.

Authors are welcome to submit articles that have already been published, as long as the article contains specific implications for Chicago Wilderness, and the author observes copyright law and has obtained the appropriate permissions for reprinting. If your submission has been published elsewhere, please indicate where and when it was published so we can note this in the journal.

The journal's editorial board recommends that if possible, authors should work with their internal PR departments for assistance in translating specialized information into material that is accessible to a more general audience. In addition, members of the journal's editorial board will partner with authors to adapt the style and format of articles to be most useful to the broad Chicago Wilderness audience.

For more information, contact Michelle Uting at muting@chicagowilderness.org or call (847) 965-9253.

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