Library Services for Faculty and Staff

As a member of the Research and Instructional Services team, Cindy Fester (Editor-Research Publications) can provide the following support to UW Law faculty working on publications (journal articles, book chapters, books, briefs, blog posts, op-ed pieces, etc.):

• consultation regarding best practices when publishing, particularly for publishing books, especially if multiple authors are involved;
• consultation and tutorials on Microsoft Word features useful in publishing projects;
• proofreading manuscripts for typographical errors, grammatical errors, clarity, consistency;
• formatting manuscripts to publisher-provided guidelines or court guidelines;
• preparing permalinks for URLs to avoid “link rot” (when materials you are citing to are relocated or removed from the internet);
• incorporating style sheets in manuscript formatting for ease in working in a document;
• providing templates and formatting for journal article submission;
• creation of Tables of Contents;
• creation of Tables of Authorities or Tables of Cases in a given publication (brief or book);

Cindy Fester (Editor-Research Publications) and librarians are available to check the Bluebook formatting of footnotes in UW Law faculty ready-to-submit manuscripts. This service handles articles and book chapters. 

Note: We do not typically offer this service for articles that have already been accepted for publication. 

Procedure:

1. Send your nearly completed manuscript as a Word attachment to an email message to csfester@uw.edu. Use the subject heading: Bluebooking.
2. Note any known problem citations or specific questions.
3. Allow 2-3 weeks from the date of submission to the return of the cite-checked manuscript. We will make every effort to complete jobs more quickly. Long articles, articles containing multiple citations to foreign language sources, and some other articles may require a additional time.

We will:

1. Correct and reformat Bluebook citations in footnotes.
2. Provide a detailed list of questions about mysterious, unidentifiable, or problematic citations.
3. Highlight typographical and grammatical errors that we happen to find. (Note: we will not be proofreading the manuscript but we will note problems in the text if we notice them.)
4. Include cross referencing for supra and infra footnotes

Note that this service focuses on correcting Bluebook citations, not creating them. It does not encompass finding sources, source-gathering and cite-checking, or editorial proofreading (as book and law review editors do). You may ask the library for assistance in finding sources at earlier stages in researching and writing the article (email lawref@uw.edu).

Your research assistant should be first in line for assisting you with creating Bluebook citations.

Please note that we generally cannot check and correct footnotes or endnotes in other citation styles, such as MLA or the University of Chicago.

Providing as much advance notice as possible of the publication project with which faculty would like assistance allows Cindy to plan and set aside time in the future to accommodate the request. Particularly for book projects it is essential to have an advance consultation on the body of work, assistance required, and publisher guidelines and deadlines prior to embarking on the project.

Digital Commons

The UW Law Digital Commons institutional repository is an important tool to promote and disseminate UW Law scholarship. UW Law faculty can review their publications on Digital Commons via the UW Law Author's page. Authors with work hosted on the site will receive a monthly Author Readership Report that provides detail about download counts for your articles. The email will also include a link to your Author Dashboard where you can review more detailed statistics about your work, including PlumX Metric.

If you see works that are missing from Digital Commons that you think should be added or if you have a newly published work, please contact us at lawref@uw.edu. When submitting work for posting, please be sure to provide an abstract (if one is not already included in the article) and a list of applicable keywords.

NOTE: Digital Commons is UW Law's repository for final, published works. Draft and forthcoming works are more appropriately posted to SSRN as described below.

SSRN (Social Science Research Network)

SSRN is an open-access repository for scholarly papers across a variety of disciplines. UW Law faculty and staff may have library staff post draft, forthcoming and final, published works for them to by contacting lawref@uw.edu.

More information is available on our SSRN guide.