Founded in 2020 by Dr. Gerard Dumancas, a Huie Delmon Trust Endowed Professor, as the LSUA Undergraduate Journal of Teaching and Research, we chose the name The Oak Leaf in 2021.

Dr. Ginger Jones was the second editor of The Oak Leaf. Her notable contributions included renaming and rebranding the journal, designing a new website, earning a National and Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Grant to publish the journal, expanding the interdisciplinary scope of the journal, and building partnerships with the campus and Rapides Parish libraries 

Dr. Jones worked tirelessly to ensure that the scholarly endeavors of the student authors were celebrated in a meaningful way. She currently applies her editing skills to judging creative writing and research journals for the National Council of Teachers of English.

One of the highlights of the LSU Alexandria campus is its centuries-old live oak trees, which keep their leaves all year long. The longevity of the oak reminds us of the qualities honored by the LSUA Generals: wisdom, strength, and knowledge. The Oak Leaf showcases the best multidisciplinary research and reviews from undergraduates and their mentors.

We are an open-access, peer-reviewed journal designed to acknowledge the achievements of LSUA undergraduate students. We also welcome submissions from the wider community. The Oak Leaf is housed in LSUA's Center for Opportunity, Research, and Experiential Learning (CORE) and is associated with the National Council for Undergraduate Research (CUR).

Our objectives:

• to showcase research of undergraduate students from LSUA as well as other colleges and universities

• to provide a forum for the LSUA community to express and exchange diverse ideas from various fields

• to recognize outstanding undergraduate students, familiarize them with the publishing process, and encourage faculty-student collaboration

• to offer undergraduate researchers in all disciplines the opportunity to communicate their experiences and results to general as well as academic audiences worldwide—the final and very important step in the research process 

The Oak Leaf is multidisciplinary!

All areas of research and teaching are encouraged. For more information or to submit your work, email Dr. Christof Stumpf at oakleaf@lsua.edu.

Students from all departments engage in scholarly work.

In the humanities, faculty members may think course assignments that earned A grades might be eligible for publication in The Oak Leaf because they

• were well-written,

• had clearly defined propositions, 

• used the third person singular, 

• had few grammatical and punctuation errors, 

• and had careful documentation. 

In the sciences, faculty members may encourage their students to publish in The Oak Leaf, if their research

• had a testable hypothesis,

• was replicated and used statistical tests whenever appropriate,

• included new findings,

• and was worthy of presenting at a scientific conference in their field of research.

Those teachers may consider conferring with students about how to prepare their work for the journal. Preparation may include recognizing a larger audience for the piece (what will non-majors, or someone unfamiliar with the discipline, need to know?), reviewing each sentence for clarity, shortening or lengthening the submission, adding a thesis that is appropriate to a wider audience, and generally coaching a student to transform an assignment into a publishable manuscript. 

Book reviews and historical reviews in any discipline are welcome.

All submissions will be reviewed by at least two Oak Leaf Board members who teach or work in the field in which the manuscript has been submitted and who may, or may not, suggest submissions be resubmitted with recommended revisions. If the submission is rejected, the reviews will explain why and invite mentors to help students learn about the “revise and resubmit” process in academic publishing.

The Oak Leaf is a multidisciplinary forum dedicated to advancing undergraduate research and reviews. All submissions must use a standard style guide for the discipline.

The Oak Leaf uses the following style sheets:

• MLA style for the humanities,

• APA style for psychology,

• Chicago style for history, philosophy, and religion,

• AMS style for mathematics,

• and CSE style for the natural sciences.

The above list of style sheets is not complete yet and will be updated soon. Please review the Purdue University Online Writing Lab or OWL for general citation advice. Citations must not be formatted by an app. All papers must be submitted as a Microsoft Word file.

Undergraduates have a maximum of one year after graduation from college or university to submit their paper to The Oak Leaf. Only undergraduates can submit to The Oak Leaf.

1. All submissions must be original 

2. Each submission must include a letter of support and authenticity from a full-time faculty mentor

3. Each submission needs a separate page with corresponding author name and email address, additional authors' names, faculty mentor name and email address, and school affiliation

4. Each submission needs to be blind (no in-text reference to a school, professor, or the author of the essay, or review, or research,  or review, or research, or name of course).

5. APA and CSE submission need an abstract (100-250 words) and five keywords

• Becca Dauzat, RN, MSN, CNE

  • Assistant Professor of Nursing, LSUA

• Susan Bowers, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, LSUA

• Patricia Bugayong, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Benedictine College, Kansas

• Gerard Dumancas, Ph.D.

  • Founder

  • Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Scranton

• Randall Dupont, Ph.D.

  • Dean, College of Business, LSUA

• Bernard Gallagher, Ph.D.

  • Professor of English, LSUA

• Purujit (PJ) Gurjar, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Chemistry, LSUA

• Jennifer Innerarity, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, LSUA

• Guoyi Ke, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Mathematics, LSUA

• Mark LaCour, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Professor of Psychology, LSUA

• Sathish Lageshetty, Ph.D.

  • Senior Scientist, CHASM Advanced Materials

• Elmer Mojica, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Chemistry, Pace University, NY

• Jerry Sanson, Ph.D.

  • Professor of History, LSUA (ret.)

• Holly Wilson, Ph.D.

  • Professor of Philosophy, LSUA

• Min Wu, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Communication Studies, LSUA