Placing your research within a wider academic discourse or ‘conversation’ is a standard requirement for academic writing, but what does it actually mean? In this cross-post, Pat Thomson, explores the concept and suggests that three principl…
Category: academic writing
2021 In Review: The Culture of Academic Publishing
Responding to the necessities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerating application of the open paradigm to more and more aspects of research, academic publishing and the cultures that support it continue to be in flux in 2021. This review brings t…
Keeping a research journal that works for you
Think of a research journal and you may imagine a well-thumbed notebook replete with insightful entries, answers to research questions and a chronicle of the key moments that led to this point. However, as Nicole Brown (author of Making the Most of You…
Authors over automation: 3 Steps for better alt-text and image descriptions in academic writing
Alt-text is an important and increasingly required element of online publishing that provides accessibility to visual images for those using screen readers to listen to digital publications. Reflecting on a recent experience when writing up her PhD the…
A step-by-step guide for using Wikipedia for research communication
The Wikipedia community has become a source of information for a broad and global public. Paul Börsting and Maximilian Heimstädt argue that contributing to the encyclopedia as a scholar can be a powerful way of achieving a strong societal impact of the…
Designing a useful textbook for an open access audience – Q and A with Filipe Campante, Federico Sturzenegger and Andrés Velasco, authors of Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide
Textbooks play an important role in defining fields of research and summarising key academic ideas for a wider audience. But how do you do this for an open access audience that is potentially unlimited? We talked to Filipe Campante, Federico Sturzenegg…
Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.
Drawing on their recent analysis of journals in the field of Higher Education Studies, which shows that journals with lower impact rankings are more likely to feature research from diverse geographic and linguistic contexts, Shannon Mason and Margaret …
Beyond publish or perish – Exploring the multi-faceted benefits of academic writing
The phrase ‘publish or perish’ suggests that the purpose of academic writing is in and of itself to be published. Drawing on qualitative research into academic writing practices, Marion Heron, Karen Gravett and Nadya Yakovchuk suggest that the ‘p…
The problem with the ‘gap in the literature’
In this cross-post Pat Thomson explores how an approach based around filling a gap in the research or literature can be problematic and how approaches based on different wording can align research more clearly to the contexts in which it matters. Gap t…
In defence of writing book reviews
David Beer argues that reviewing allows us to put collective knowledge ahead of individualised contributions. I recently read Benoît Peeters’ fantastic biography of Jacques Derrida. Looking back upon the working practices of Derrida and his contemporar…