Honors in Practice

For Authors

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Article types

Honors in Practice (HIP) accepts articles about innovative practices and integrative, interdisciplinary, and pedagogical issues of interest to honors educators and other readers in higher education. We are eager to publish scholarly work that records and inspires best practices in honors education.

HIP is an applied research journal. Authors should include discussion of how central ideas and practices may be applied in campus settings other than their own and should locate their argument within a larger context such as theoretical perspectives, trends in higher education, or historical background. Submissions should demonstrate awareness of previous scholarship and should conform to NCHC standards concerning the use of AI and the ethical treatment of human subjects.

HIP publishes two types of articles: research essays that develop substantive arguments and provide significant context and assessment data; and “great ideas” that document an innovative pedagogical practice or a new honors course, project, idea, or experience, with or without assessment.

Submission requirements

Manuscript Format
Authors should submit their manuscripts online with Scholastica. HIP accepts submissions in Word (.docx format). A manuscript that has been published or that is under consideration for publication elsewhere should not be submitted to HIP.

Manuscripts should be double spaced and must conform to APA guidelines, with in-text citations and a full list of references. Research essays should be between 2,000 and 8,000 words, inclusive of notes and reference list; “great ideas” should be between 500 and 1,500 words. All submissions to HIP should include an abstract and a list of keywords. Longer essays should be accompanied by five keywords and an abstract of no more than 250 words. Great ideas require a one-sentence abstract and three keywords.

HIP is a blind reviewed journal. The author’s name and identifiable information should therefore not appear in the uploaded submission. Authors referring to their own prior published work should cite it as a third party would.

Accepted essays are edited for grammar, typographical errors, and style. Authors have the opportunity to review and approve edited manuscripts before publication.

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

Editorial and Peer Review Process

The journal editor reviews submissions for suitability for HIP and conformity to length and other standards in the author guidelines. Unsuitable manuscripts are returned to the author/s. Suitable manuscripts are sent out for peer review.

HIP adheres to a double-blind review process and aims to return decisions to authors within two months after date of submission. Reviewers are instructed to rate a submission as follows: accept; accept with minor revisions; revise and resubmit; and reject. Minor revisions made to accepted essays will be reviewed by the editor. Major revisions made to essays that have been invited for resubmission will be examined by the original reviewer(s). Final publication decision is made by the editor. Prior to publication, accepted essays are copyedited by the editorial team, who also manage communications with authors in the production stage.

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 acknowledgments) 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

HIP is published annually. The 2026 deadline for submissions is March 1.

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.