A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
t’s Academic Book Week 2020! The theme this year is the environment, and makers, providers and readers of academic books will be celebrating them as vehicles for ground-breaking ideas. To kick off the week, David Beer, author of ‘The Data Gaze,’ discusses the notion of ‘digital atrophy’ and consumer capitalism within the technological and social environment we inhabit.
The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.
Stoyan V. Sgourev, possibly the only management professor teaching (and indulging in) art history, argues that many of the key principles that guided the evolution of painting during the Italian Renaissance can be usefully applied to the domain of academic writing. Leonardo quite likely never intended to articulate advice on writing as an intellectual activity, but Stoyan borrows generously from his style and writings in formulating a number of basic principles that can help connect with the reader in a similar way to his paintings.
The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses were caused by blockages that interfered with the healthy flow of magnetic fluid through the body.
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).
The reference section of an academic work is more complex than you might think. The references not only provide validity […]
[Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to welcome SAGE Publications’ Michael Todd.] “We need to apply the science of communication to the […]
