Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council

For Authors

Submit Manuscript

Information for Authors

JNCHC publishes two types of articles: Longer research articles and shorter Forum pieces.

Research articles on honors and higher education may include theoretical or empirical research pieces and critical reflections on the scholarship about honors education or program administration. We publish analyses of trends in teaching methodology, discussions of problems common to honors programs and colleges, items on the national higher education agenda, research on assessment, and presentations of emergent issues relevant to honors. We welcome a variety of methodical approaches including qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches.

There are no minimum or maximum length requirements for research essays; the length should be dictated by the topic and its most effective presentation.

Forum articles are shorter pieces which address pressing issues in the field of honors. The Forum in each issue consists of a lead essay and articles responding to the lead. Authors interested in proposing a lead article for a Forum should contact the editor at jnchc@nchchonors.org. Forum leads are posted with a call for response essays twice a year. Length for lead essays are negotiable with the editor, but are around 3-4000 words. Response essays in the Forum should be roughly 1000-2000 words long.

Submission requirements

Manuscript Preparation
Authors should submit their manuscripts through JNCHC’s Scholastica portal as a MS Word file (.doc or .docx).

Authors should format submissions and citations using the most recent edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA).

All submissions to the journal must include an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of no more than five keywords (not repeating words in your title).

Bibliographies of JNCHC, HIP, and the NCHC Monograph Series on the NCHC website provide past treatments of topics that an author should consider. Especially avoid making sweeping generalizations about honors research without consulting these bibliographies.

A manuscript that has been published or that is under consideration for publication elsewhere should not be submitted to JNCHC.

Editorial and Peer Review Process

We use a double-blind, peer-review process to review all submitted manuscripts. Prior to peer review, the editor will conduct a preliminary review to ensure the manuscript is a fit in relevance and quality for the journal. Appropriate manuscripts will be sent out to two reviewers chosen for their expertise in higher education, honors, scholarship of teaching and learning, or other disciplinary expertise relevant to a submitted manuscript.

Reviewers will evaluate manuscripts for overall quality and will also evaluate the following criteria:

  • Relevance to honors and the journal’s mission
  • Significance or originality of findings and the contribution to honors scholarship
  • Grounding in relevant research, especially research on honors and teaching and learning in higher education
  • Readability for a cross-disciplinary audience
  • Methodological soundness relative to an article’s purpose
  • Clarity and effectiveness of style

Reviewers will provide feedback for authors, along with one of 4 recommendations to the editor: accept, accept with minor revisions, revise and resubmit, or reject. Substantially revised and resubmitted manuscripts may be sent for an additional round of peer review.

Accepted essays are edited for grammatical and typographical errors and for infelicities of style or presentation. Authors have ample opportunity to review and approve edited manuscripts before publication.

Ethical Treatment of Human Subjects

Submissions involving research based on data from human subjects should include reference in the text or notes that approval to conduct the research was sought and granted from a campus institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate third party providing review and oversight of ethical protection of research subjects. If no such approval was sought or research was determined to be exempt from IRB review, an accompanying explanation should be provided. Authors should make explicit reference to the approved IRB protocol number in the text or notes of the submission.

AI Policy

We believe that only humans can be authors and readers, and therefore, we expect human-determined content in our publications. However, we recognize that AI tools are rapidly changing editing, publishing, and academic work, and we accept that AI tools may provide some unique advantages in data analysis and can provide essential assistance to scholars with primary languages other than English. We also recognize the complex copyright legalities around AI-assisted writing and the need to protect the IP of the journal and of authors.

We have therefore established these policies concerning AI use in NCHC publications:

AI Policy for Authors

The use of assistive AI for grammar and clarity is allowed provided a human author is ultimately making each grammar or style choice. This policy covers typical grammar and style checkers built into basic word processing and the use of external grammar programs that may suggest changes but that do not totally write/rewrite the work.

Generative AI is allowed provided that the authors of the work:

  • Disclose the extent, purpose, and type of AI use in the manuscript (either in methods, footnotes, or acknowledgements) and in the submission letter to the editor.
  • Check any AI output for clarity and correctness and take responsibility for the output.
  • Compose a majority of the manuscript (or in the guiding language of the U.S. Copyright Office, “… a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements” such that it can still be copyrightable).
  • Conduct responsible human reading of and citation from secondary sources, rather than substituting these scholarly practices with generative AI use.

AI Policy for Peer Reviewers

We believe that only humans have the capacity to read work thoughtfully and provide authentic and specific responses to a submitted manuscript. Furthermore, manuscripts under consideration are not the property of the journal and therefore cannot be fed into 3rd party AI programs by reviewers (since those works may then become property of the AI company or become part of an AI training set without the permissions of authors).
Manuscripts under review cannot be fed into AI programs by reviewers, and all reviews must be authored by human reviewers. Assistive AI, as described in the author policy above, is permitted to edit a reviewer’s comments for grammar and clarity, but the review content fed into an assistive AI tool may not contain any of the submitted manuscript’s content.

Publication details

JNCHC is published semi-annually. Submission deadline for 26.2 is December, 15, 2025.

All inquiries should be directed to jnchc@nchchonors.org.

NCHC Publications’ editorial guidelines and polices are available on the NCHC website.

Authors grant and assign the entire copyright for their contribution to NCHC. The copyright consists of any and all rights of whatever kind or nature now or hereafter protected by the copyright laws of the United States and of all foreign countries, in all languages and forms of communication, and NCHC shall be the sole proprietor thereof. NCHC, in turn, grants to authors the right to reprint and use the contribution
as long as they give proper credit for its original publication to NCHC.