Current Issue
Dear Reader,
The twenty-first volume of the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal comes on the heels of celebrating two decades of publishing. Last year, we took the opportunity to look back at how far the journal and, by extension, undergraduate research has come. If Volume 20 was about where we had been, then Volume 21 is decidedly about where we are going.
Milestones deceive. They invite us to view our progress as a project that has been completed rather than as a continual process. This year has marked a turning point in science globally. The enterprise of science is changing rapidly and sustaining a research journal within it requires work renewed each year by a new board, new authors, and new questions. In so doing, each year, we earn the platform we have been given.
This volume features nine articles, including MSURJ's first-ever Commentary, reflecting the breadth of undergraduate investigation. In particular, we are proud to publish work spanning scales: from using electricity to stimulate germination in plants, to characterizing crayfish species composition in the Gault Nature Reserve, to modelling our peatland carbon sinks from space. Undergraduate research remains unconfined by scope, discipline, or scale.
What these works share is an orientation: each author chose to subject their findings to the scrutiny of peer review, to revise and defend their conclusions. That process, as much as the published result, is what our journal exists to foster.
We present to you Volume 21 with immense pride in our past and excitement for the future of undergraduate scientific inquiry.
On behalf of our entire Editorial Board, thank you.
Lisa Xie and Benjamin Lévesque Kinder
Editors-in-Chief