A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social scientists
Large data sets can now be quickly analyzed to assess whether or not certain features, previously deemed unimportant, can actually affect the chances of a research paper being accepted for publication. In this post, James Hartley looks at new research on weekly submission dates.
Writing satisfaction is strongly linked to publishing productivity and, potentially, career success. Chris Smith reports on research investigating the tools and systems academics from all career stages use to keep writing and publishing. Age, experience, and having a sense of certainty about what sort of writing system suits you and your life are all important to productivity and overall satisfaction.
People love stories. We watch, read, tell, and listen to stories every day. Despite this, most researchers don’t think in terms of story when they write a journal paper. To Anna Clemens, that’s a missed opportunity, that she helps solve so that we may be ready to write a paper that is concise, compelling, and easy to understand.
A combination of influences — practice, classroom and POWER — has made Patricia Goodson’s book ‘Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing’ a winner for many academics around the world, and now the Textbook & Academic Authors Association has awarded Goodson’s book with one of its 2018 Textbook Excellence Awards. We talk to the author about writing, both her own and perhaps yours!
The new Open Writing project aims to open academic writing practice to reflections and experiments with the actual process of writing, with a view to creating new, open research products that have an impact on peers, public and policymakers.
Many academics still operate under the flawed logic that good writing must be complex writing (or vice versa).
Every now and again a paper is published on the number of errors made in academic articles. These papers document the frequency of conceptual errors, factual errors, errors in abstracts, errors in quotations, and errors in reference lists. James Hartley reports that the data are alarming, but suggests a possible way of reducing them. Perhaps in future there might be a single computer program that matches references in the text with correct (pre-stored) references as one writes the text.
Be substantive and communicate your key findings – simple counsel from Patrick Dunleavy. But how exactly do you that? Here’s how.
Patrick Dunleavy offers four principles for improving how you display tables, graphs, charts and diagrams to give the beleaguered reader help in deciphering your message.
An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, or languish unread among hundreds of millions of other documents on the Web. That must be what what we want, based on on what we do.
The opportunity for H&SS to reach much wider audiences who appreciate the value of their work generally, and to reach those specific people who will make important use of it is enormous.
