Abstract
Welcome to the eighth volume of VURJ, a showcase of some of the best undergraduate research conducted at Vanderbilt University. Since 2005, VURJ has featured over 100 articles in the sciences, humanities, social sciences. This year, we received 57 submissions originating from all four undergraduate schools at Vanderbilt for an overall acceptance rate of 30%. Manuscripts were read by two to three trained peer reviewers, ranked numerically, and selected for publication by our team of associate editors. Articles in the 2012 volume explore topics ranging from the use of rhythm in Brahms' music to hidden messages in Alexandrian tombs and the future of limb regeneration. I am pleased to announce this year that VURJ will soon be indexed with EBSCO Publishing, a testament to our excellence as a premier forum for academic discourse. I encourage you to contribute your own ideas to the upcoming 2013 volume and consider joining our editorial staff in Fall 2012. We bid you happy reading! Tim Xu Editor, 2011-2012Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (linked here). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are available for wide dissemination at no cost to readers, with proper attribution (acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal), in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, in a journal or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal. However, for undergraduates authoring a manuscript under the guidance of a faculty member or research mentor, we strongly encourage the student to discuss with the faculty mentor and the Editor if prior publication in the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal will constrain future publication efforts in professional journals. To this end, all authors must submit a signed mentor consent form at the time of submission..