About the Undergraduate Research Commons

The Undergraduate Research Commons (URC) is a portal showcasing outstanding published works authored by thousands of undergraduate students. The portal was built to provide greater visibility to the exemplary student works that universities and colleges are publishing on their Digital Commons institutional repositories. You’ll find only publications published by universities and colleges here.

In the URC, you can browse more than 700 undergraduate research publications including award-winning research, conferences, posters and presentations, fieldwork and class projects, honors theses and capstone projects, creative works, and research papers.

The URC is also an index of undergraduate publishing outlets. Aspiring undergraduate authors can use this tool to find peer-reviewed journals and conferences in their fields of research. We invite undergraduate researchers interested in publishing an article in a scholarly journal to explore the commons, find the university publications that are open for submissions, and visit the publication's site to submit work for consideration.

The Undergraduate Research Commons is of great interest to those of us who are trying to promote undergraduate research to faculty and to undergraduates themselves. It provides good examples of the types of projects Undergraduates are pursuing and gives a list of publication opportunities that might be of interest. One of the most important aspects, though, is that it helps disseminate the work undergraduates perform. That carrot is enormously compelling!