On MAL-attribution

I was recently reviewing a paper and saw my own work cited. Very nice, you might think. However, I was cited for saying a thing that I didn’t say – a thing that I would never ever say. It was a thing that I have railed against in almost everything I’ve written on the topic.

Now I know that meanings are not fixed. People interpret. And that’s generally good and we writers like to make people think their own thoughts. But we also like our readers to get what we are saying and not be 100% inaccurate.

100% wrong, attributing the opposite of what is actually said is, in my books, mal- attribution not mis – attribution. It’s a bit more than mis. Even if it’s unintended, a mal-attribution has ongoing negative effects, as the text is read by others and taken and used as fact.

It’s par for the course I know. But hey ho, on this occasion I decided to have a little moan to my facebook friends. I knew they would be sympathetic and I was pretty sure most of them had had exactly the same experience. And sure enough they had. But two of them had something more to say.

The first facebook friend had a little story. I won’t reveal their identity, just know I’m repeating their story with permission. My friend said,

“ I was once challenged in a PhD viva when I told the candidate that I hadn’t written anything on a certain topic which they had claimed I had. They told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. It’s some years ago but I am still sort of reeling from it.”

Gobsmacking eh for someone to tell their examiner that they knew better about what they had done. In a viva!

Of course there’s two ways to read this story. The first is that the candidate was really stupid or arrogant. The second, kinder explanation is that the candidate was in defensive defence mode and just blurted out the first thing that came to mind to justify their literatures work. If that was the case, I imagine they spent most the next night replaying the scene over and over and thinking of all of the several thousand alternative things they might have said. 

The second facebook friend referred me to a 2010 paper I had forgotten about, Varieties of Ignorance by Andrew Abbott (here, paywalled). Abbott was interested in how to understand and explain ignorance in scholarly work. So he decided to examine how one of his own books had been used and cited. He looked at both Wikipedia and the scholarly literature. 

Well, no prizes for guessing that the Wikipedia entry writer had entirely missed the mark, according to Abbott. The writer had used the old and largely debunked approach that Abbott not only critiqued but also reframed. This is a much bigger example of the kind of citation, what I am calling mal-attribution, that had irritated me. 

But when he got to the scholarly literatures, Abbott found that things were only marginally better. He found 105 articles which had cited his book in the year 2008.  Of these, he judged that 

  • Only 27 actually needed to cite the book because they were building on it in some way. Of these a mere 13 used his work centrally in their arguments. The other 14 cited correctly, but the material was more peripheral to their argument. 
  • About another 20 got Abbott’s argument about right, but could have referenced anybody not him as the point cited was made by many people. 
  • Another 15 cited his work but trivially. 
  • 42 cited Abbott in a list of vastly varied texts and did not differentiate between any of them
  • And 12 papers cited Abbott for something he didn’t say. Abbott concludes that these latter attributions were the result of either careless reading, using someone else’s summaries or just plain old guesswork. 

Abbott weaves this data into an elegant explanation of ignorance which, at its heart, suggests that misattribution and malattribution are rather more commonplace in scholarly work than we might think. 

And really, that’s not acceptable.

Getting your reading of other people’s work wrong is in part about the speed with which many of us have to write – we get careless about reading everything thoroughly and we don’t make time to double check that all of our citations are actually correct. And it may also be a side effect of the unwritten expectation that writers on given topics have to cite particular key books and people. Regardless of relevance to their particular argument.

A further possibility is that some writers weren’t careful enough about noting and summarising and there’s been slippage of some kind  – those who take one position are lumped together with those who critique it. ( I suspect this may have happened in my particular case). And Abbott may well be right in pinpointing careless reading, poor use of summaries  and lack of double checking. 

If any or all of these reasons are true, I do wonder what can be done about  the apparent prevalence of mal and misattribution – yes I know that one paper and a facebook conversation isn’t really enough to make a case. So alright, more research. And certainly more time on referencing and the ethics of citation in methods and writing courses. 

I guess I’d like to think that if everyone could imagine that the writers they cite and use are reading what they have written there might be a bit of a change – although that won’t necessarily change the behaviour of an exceptional and very nervous viva participant.

But I’d also like to think that at some point soon we could all slow down a bit, read and note slowly, read the originals and not rely on summaries …

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Posted in academic writing, citation, reference, reference list | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

a brief word on academic mobility

My apologies dear Reader. This post is later than expected. I am drowning under boxes of stuff, all part of moving countries – again. 

i shouldn’t moan. Academic mobility is a privilege. You get to see another institution, another country, another culture. You see how the agenda you have been working on stays the same but also changes in a new location. You see new problems. There are different funding and publishing opportunities. You  meet new people and make new connections. These in turn open up new collaborations. This is all exciting and generally rewarding and makes the crap parts of the moving experience worthwhile.  

Academic mobility is also a challenge, particularly when it involves moving countries. Visas are just one of the very many problems you have to deal with. Moving countries means re-establishing every part of your life – from mobile phones, bank accounts and  credit cards and drivers’ licences to getting access to the health system, taxation system and whatever voting privileges you are able to have. Moving institutions also means a whole gamut of New Things, from how to access technical support and the library, to how to get your salary paid. And I’ve learnt – from leaving home, working somewhere else and then coming back – is that some institutions are better than others at supporting you in your move, but most of the national systems are hard to manage, if not in the same ways. 

Now of course I am writing as someone in a very privileged position. I have all of my paperwork and possessions. And I have an income. I  know people where I’ve left and where I’ve arrived.

I can barely imagine how it must be to move or consider moving under duress, in a situation where you are struggling to stay alive, let alone continue academic work. So in light of my current moving experience, I’ve made some personal decisions about what I need to do.

But one way that some of you may be able to do something, either as an individual or through your institution, is to connect with CARA – the Council for At-Risk Academics. CARA operates throughout Europe and beyond. It supports academics in highly dangerous situations to move and/or to take up a fellowship in another location. You can donate or volunteer your services or organise an event or host a fellow in your university. 

Here is the latest news from CARA.

We have received a number of enquiries from university partner colleagues, asking what we are doing, or hope to do, to help academics in Gaza.

As always, our focus is on the individual academics who need and deserve help, not on the politics. We have for some years been supporting Palestinian Fellows; and we have been following the recent tragic events in and around Gaza with deep concern. As we reported recently, one of our ‘alumni’ has already been killed there. Another is still in Gaza; we have a further placement lined up for him in the UK but almost nobody is able to leave at the moment, so he is having to stay, in very dangerous circumstances.

Some other academics in Gaza have also contacted us in recent weeks, seeking our help to get away. We are keeping in touch with them as best we can, given the very poor internet connectivity there now. Again, they cannot leave at the moment, and even keeping in touch with us can expose them to danger. We understand that, for some people at least, just getting a signal means going out into the open, and on raised ground. We urge them not to take risks.

We very much hope that peace can be restored soon, of course, and we will be ready to help as soon as people can leave. We hope that our university partners will be able to support us in this, with further placement offers, and invite them to contact us if they can.

When it becomes possible to rebuild higher education in the area more generally, we hope to be able to help with this too, using the experience we have gained through our three regional programmes (e.g. our Syria Programme). But we are unable to plan anything specific as long as the present crisis continues.

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Key word – claim

Claim is a difficult word. Dictionaries offer Meaning One –  claims are assertions that something is true, that something is a fact, but there is no proof or evidence. We just have to take the claim at face value and as being ‘right’, or not. 

Dictionaries also offer Meaning Two. A claim is a statement or action geared to get something to happen. Examples of Meaning Two are the claims made for reimbursement of expenses – pay me don’t ask questions- or the claims that someone might make in court for a particular judgement. Meaning Two claims generally do require some form of substantiation. Receipts. Evidence. This kind of claim is not only about truth, but allows for interpretation and evaluation. Is the evidence adequate?

So there are two meanings of claim on offer, one where the claim is not backed up by anything much, and the other version which usually is. And one which suggests that the claim asserts a right or a truth, and the other that refers to a process of interpretation.

Now in research, claims have quite a specific meaning. A claim has to backed by evidence and argument, and we researchers understand that a claim is always subject to interpretation. However, in some disciplines, a claim might also be a truth claim, well certainly of the this-is-the-best-version-of-truth-we-have-now-but-it-is-always-up-for-change variety. 

We researchers make claims about what our research means, what it might lead to, where it fits in the literatures and so on, on the basis of the analysed material generated by and through our research. These are our results, and because of these we can claim something – this works, this way of thinking needs changing, this policy is problematic, this approach to teaching is better, people need, kangaroos behave this way and not that… and so on. 

You’ve got where this is going right? The claims we make are usually the answers to our research question(s). We claim that we have this answer to the question/problem/puzzle we posed at the start of our research.  We deal with our thesis. We claim we now know something that we didn’t know before. We are less ignorant. 

But claiming doesn’t stop there. Once we have our claims sorted out, we have a basis for saying that we have made a contribution, and that things might happen as a result of our work. So the claim is an important little step between concluding what the results of the research might be and cause to happen. 

But wait there’s more. Research claims generally sits on a spectrum of “strong to weak’, depending on the evidence and depending how explicit the wording of the claims is. And of course,  strength and weakness are strongly tied to questions of validity/reliability and/or trustworthiness, depending on your research tradition. So claim also connects with bigger questions about research design, process and paradigm. (I get to keyword them later.)

We also claim significance for our research. We say that our research question-answer is important and we give reasons.  And our reasoning relies on our reading of literatures, and perhaps policy and practice. 

Oh, and before I forget, it is important that researchers don’t over or underclaim what they’ve done. The veracity of our claims are reliant on the evidence we’ve produced and how well we’ve argued what can be concluded from research of this type, scale, location and so on. Oh yes. It gets more complicated by the minute. Research claims are tangled up in other parts of the research process. But not so much that we can’t talk about them separately. 

Well. So far so good. That was pretty straightforward after all! 

Yeah/nah. 

There’s just a little bit more to say about claim. ‘Claiming’ comes from the act of staking a claim. Staking a claim in relation to knowledge simply means that as scholars, we are saying this is ours, we did this research, we want the credit and the citation thankyou very much. Oh. Cue all manner of subsequent worries about academic careers, who gets to claim and who doesn’t, and of course the nasty business of claiming other people’s work as your own. 

And a further concern. Staking a claim is not a  neutral metaphor. The derivation of staking a claim comes from those who drove a stake into the ground. Miners do exactly this, they stake a claim to a piece of ground that they are going to dig up. Gardeners use stakes to hold up plants. Vampire hunters also have use for stakes. But countries and empires have also and still do stake claims, not only to land, but also to entire peoples over whom they claim sovereignty. 

We can conclude from this that the term claim comes from an extended family with a very chequered geneaology.  And this is something to think about, as well as work on what we can claim from our research and how. 

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Posted in argument, claim, claims, evidence, interpretation, keywords | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

key words – contribution

The dictionary definitions of contribution are:

  1. A gift or payment
  2. The part played by a person or thing in bringing about a result or helping something to advance and
  3. A piece of writing submitted for publication in a journal or book

When scholars talk about contribution it might be 3. A contribution might be a piece we have submitted to an edited collection, a text book, an anthology of cases or an encyclopaedia.

But the most usual scholarly formulation of contribution is as a “contribution to knowledge”. 

Contribution to knowledge is an apparently simple idea, but in reality it’s pretty slippery. So here’s few thoughts about how to make sense of it, just to start with. 

A contribution to knowledge is more like dictionary definition 2. Your research and/or writing helps to advance understandings about a topic.  People know a little or a lot more about a topic because they’ve engaged with your work, read what you’ve written. And you’ve been able to explain to readers that the work adds up to a contribution – it takes the field somewhere – through

  • a defensible and well-designed inquiry, investigation, exploration, interrogation, deconstruction, experimentation, testing out, bringing things together that were previously apart and so on
  • a thorough analysis which is explained and available for scrutiny 
  • the development of a credible and clearly ordered argument that explains the results, which leads to 
  • a conclusion about the specific place of the results within the existing research on the topic – and how it complements, contradicts, adds something new, challenges, questions, confirms, reframes etc what is already known. 
  • pointers for further development in policy or practice or further research. 

In English language/Western traditions of research your readers/examiners/reviewers expect you to spell the contribution out to them in detail. ( This is not always the case in other cultural traditions.)

Readers/examiners/reviewers always expect to see the particulars of where the research fits and sits in relation to published literatures. In some disciplines, there is also a strong expectation that you’ll make connections to policy and professional practice. 

And, justifying and explaining your contribution in relation to the field and extant literatures may well be an integral part of your viva or defense.

That’s not all to contribution of course. Most university guidelines still refer to contribution as ‘original’. Original doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been done before; in some disciplines re-doing what has been done before is very important. And original in the context of contribution doesn’t mean that the researcher has made a ground-breaking discovery – although that is very occasionally the case. Nor does original mean that the research is all your own work, although that is always a requirement and, perhaps in the light of AI, this meaning of original will come to matter much more . 

No, what is meant by original is very clearly definition 2. Your research has taken you somewhere new. At the end of your research you know much more about your topic than you did at the start. Even if some if it is what not to do or think. 

But the research also takes the field somewhere, it sets a line of thinking or does more to an established line of thinking, it offers well argued and evidenced results which others can build on.

And this is of course how contribution relates to significance. The field won’t move forward and/or no one will bother with the research if it isn’t of some value. A contribution generally isn’t just something that wasn’t there before (ie it fills a gap)  but something that, like a contribution to a conversation, supports thinking and talking in the field to go somewhere.   

In this sense, an original contribution is also definition 1. A gift. A gift to the scholarly community which colleagues can use to help build their own contribution.  A (re)payment for the work of others that you used to build your own. A down payment on the work of others you will use in the future. 

Making a contribution to knowledge is the essence of what scholarship is about. Taking a field and its thinking forward, even if only a little. 

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research key words – significance

We all want to do research that matters. Right? Surely no one out there wants to spend a load of time and energy doing research that is of no value, that nobody will take any notice of and that won’t make an iota of difference to anyone anywhere? Why do that?

Of course, there is a road between the research results and having it taken up. So rather than making a difference, research has to have real potential to do something – stimulate other work, bring about a change in a field, explore something because it could be of vital concern, point out issues that require discussion, raise questions about policy, point the ways to changes in practice. And so on. 

But what about blue skies research I hear you ask? Well, people who do curiosity driven research which has no immediate application still choose topics which they think are worthwhile. Out of all of the things that they could do, they choose to investigate an area that they can justify in terms of its value. 

When we talk about research having potential and being worthwhile, we are talking about significance. We are talking about choosing some research because we think it is important. What’s more, we can make a sound case for why we think the topic and our research results are important.  

And in most kinds of research, importance is not simply about the fact that there is a gap, or a dispute, or several ways of thinking about something, or it’s a few years since anyone looked at it, or no one has used this approach. Generally, we decide something is important because of the possible actions that might arise from it. 

Doctoral researchers focus on significance at the start of their programme. They have to justify to someone, or several people, that their proposed research is important. Doctoral researchers also focus on significance as they are writing their thesis text, or papers that come from their research. They not only have to justify and explain their topic at the outset, they also have to say at the end why their results matter, to whom, how and when.

Establishing the relevance of a topic and final results is usually integral to talking about significance. It is an expected aspect of introductions and conclusions, particularly in Western and English language research approaches and genres. 

It’s not surprising then that examiners want to hear  (viva) and read a statement (thesis, paper) about the importance of the research in question – and they might ask for it to be added in into a text if it’s not there. 

It’s not just doctoral researchers who have to take significance seriously. Pretty well all researchers have to focus on significance. Attending to significance is crucial in funding applications, book proposals, conference presentations, keynotes and the like. 

The job of a researcher is to tell a reader or listener how we understand our topic, why we’ve chosen it and why it matters. We help our reader/listener to understand this too. We write a compelling and persuasive text. We make an authoritative and well evidenced pitch. We start our presentations and papers with a succinct and judiciously crafted rationale. We connect our topic and our results with wider conversations in the field.

So getting clear about significance is a significant aspect of the research process. Now, significance is of course related to claims and contribution. It’s hard to talk about significance without mentioning either of these. They’re coming up next.

Notę: The term significance is also used in statistical analyses, it’s showing that result numbers are more than could be possible through sheer chance: this is crucial for the claims made. Confusing eh.

Posted in conclusion, introduction, keywords, research, research as process, research bid writing, research decisions, significance | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

a thesis is not just a display

It’s tempting to think that the PhD thesis is the place you get to display every single thing you’ve read. To peacock-like spread out a significant dazzle of texts. Look how much I’ve done. See how well I can summarise it all. Just imagine how good my notes are and how impressive my (Endnote, Zotero etc) must be.

But that would be a mistake. 

Doctoral research is all about knowledge transformation. The PhDer does not read in order to regurgitate, but rather, to do something with their reading.  To understand what this means, it might help to consider the difference between knowledge transformation and knowledge display.

Knowledge display. Undergraduate and postgraduate coursework generally demands students show that they understand a field. The way to show coverage and comprehension is usually via an extended essay. In the essay the writer demonstrates that that they have a grip on both the depth and breadth of a topic. So when the essay is assessed, the marker first of all looks to see that the  student gets the key concepts, standard debates and important developments in understandings. Students can generally garner higher scores by having a point of view, and covering more than has been given to them in lectures, readings and reference lists.

Knowledge transformation, or knowledge mobilisation as it is sometimes called, assumes that the writer has all of that – a grip on the breadth and depth of a topic, a point of view, and has done a lot of independent reading. But they then go further. The PhDer has all of the material necessary to do display – but doesn’t.

The PhDer does have to know the field in great detail. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Instead of laying it all out on the page, they do something with their knowledge. They put it to work. This might be  devising a research problem, designing a study, making sense of analysed data or simply re-reading the field in a novel way. To put it differently – knowledge transformers do something other than simply repeat, no matter how elegantly or cleverly, what they have read. And the doctoral researcher-writer does not simply tell the reader about a topic by writing an essay. They write an argument, not an essay, justifying their particular transformation – what, why and how and how it matters. 

Now, understanding the difference between display and transformation helps you to think about the role of literatures in the thesis. It helps you to understand that there is no point in simply throwing in a few references to something important to show that you know it exists. If a reading actually doesn’t contribute to the larger work you are doing, don’t bother with it. Anything you reference has to help you to build your case and argument. 

Understanding the difference between display and transformation also helps you to understand why it is not acceptable in a thesis to simply summarise huge amounts of a body of literature or to write as if you were explaining the whole field to someone who knows nothing. Readers of doctoral theses want to know how you have put the existing body of knowledge to work in your current project.

And yes, putting texts to work means you have to evaluate and select from everything you’ve read, and argue on the basis of that selection. Of course it’s painful if you’ve steadfastly plodded through a really difficult bit of Continental philosophy and it turns out to be useless for this particular topic and you have to leave it out. But you know you have it now, and it will probably be helpful in the future as well as contributing to your general scholarly knowledge.

Do you get punished for display? Well maybe, maybe not.

The consequences of too much display may not be drastic. Readers can however get pretty bored with loads of essay like summary and/or frivolous bits of name-dropping and get impatient to find out how the material contributes to the study. Who knows where that impatience will go? Maybe nowhere…

But examiners may well ask for details about which literatures were actually important and used. And perhaps they will require some rewriting, so that display becomes less of a focus, and transformation takes centre stage. You can avoid that if you keep transformation at the forefront of your mind.

Posted in argument, essay, knowledge mobilisation, knowledge production, Literatures | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

should you do a “side project”?

What’s a “side project”? A side project is the academic project you do alongside your main academic research. If you’re doing a full time PhD, the side project is another smaller bit of research. If you’re working as a postdoc on someone else’s project and this is is your main work then, alas, trying to do something from your PhD might be your side project. But here I want to talk only about doctoral research.

Now, there are mixed views about side projects for PhDers. Some supervisors are petty adamant that the PhD and just the PhD is all that you should do. Nothing else. Zip, zilch, nada distractions. Other supervisors, and I’m one of them, think that having another little project going alongside the big PhD can be quite a good thing, provided the little one doesn’t take over. Why is that? 

Tthe first thing to say is the extra project can’t be any old project. The side project has to have a helpful relationship with the main project. These side projects are what Joli Jensen calls called “buddy log projects”. Jensen’s metaphor is of a burning log fire, in which the main log is kept going by a smaller one next to it. Sparks and flames move between the main log and its neighbouring buddy. So the side helps the main.

A buddy log side project can help you to see things from a new angle, prompt you to explore related ideas, literatures and/or methods. And you might even learn something from the new project that you couldn’t have predicted would have such a profound impact on your main project. 

Following Jensen, the question becomes not whether to have a side project at all, but whether the side project is one that has a potentially productive relationship with the main project.

Well, I hear you say, that’s all very well in theory, but does this sparking off between projects actually happen? It clearly does for Joli Jensen. And it does for me too. I generally have at least two projects going on at the same time, but very often find that what I am reading and thinking for one is actually also relevant for the other. So n=2 in favour.

And actually the situation of most full time academics is that we always have more than one thing on the go. So we can and do make it work. But there are plenty of PhDers who make the main and side projects work productively together too. See this post by Louisa Penfold and Roma Patel about a side project they did together.

But if you are a PhDer considering a side project then there are questions you might ask yourself to help decide whether what you’re considering is a good idea or not. Here’s five questions to start with.

  • Does the side project deal with the same kind of issue as your main project but from a different angle? 
  • Does it share some literatures? 
  • Does it use the same methods? 
  • Does it help you to acquire a new skill?
  • Does it allow you to learn more about a method, about writing in a particular genre? And so on. 

However, synchronicity is not the only issue to consider in the main-side project decision. The other important matter is that the side project must remain just that, a side project, and not take over from the main. This is not about the side project going off at a tangent, but its about the side demanding so much of you that your main project no longer has the time it needs.

Of course, if you are doing  a part time doctorate, that is you have a job and the doctorate is the side project, then whether there is enough time at all is THE key issue. It is likely hard enough just getting the time to do your main project and a side project may well just be altogether too much.  And if you have caring responsibilities, then a side project is maybe not something you will ever consider.

Finally, for some people at least, having a side project makes their main project less all-consuming. It is not the only thing in your life. You can go away from it for a little bit and come back with fresh eyes, having shut it out of your mind for a while. The side projects acts as a refresher.

So why not at least approach the side project with an open mind?

And a helpful hint from Jensen. If you use the ABC time system then you might think about the side project being B time, and not A time. Save A time for your main project.

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the ABC of organising your time

Lots of we scholarly peeps struggle to find time to write. Time is on pretty well everyone’s list.

So we keep looking for better ways to manage our time so we can get more time to write. My proprietary university software seems to want to help – it now issues a weekly bulletin, whether I want it or not, telling me how much time I’ve spend “collaborating” compared to the amount of time I’ve spent on screen. The stats are pretty misleading given that collaboration seems to include any email I’ve sent – this is an algorithmic joke right – very few emails are actually collaboration. Interaction maybe.

Of course, there are apps which do help keep track of time. I’ve tried a lot of them and none of them work for me. They seem to require time and energy that I’m not really prepared to donate to time-tracking. I did once keep a diary for a week of everything I did which, in the end, didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know.

While a lot of people like time-tracking devices and find them helpful, I’m not one of them. So please don’t tell me your favourite fail-safe time-tracking device, because I’m really not going to go there.

I’m much more your calendar/diary blocking type. Blocking out all of the meetings, teaching, research visits etc so you can see what’s left. And then I apply the old ABC rule. You’ve probably heard the ABC rule but it bears repeating for those who haven’t.

A writing time is when you are at your focused and insightful best – it’s thinking writing, working out arguments, structuring, putting bits and pieces together, composing your tiny text, knocking out a first draft, doing some serious revising, it’s challenging reading. I put peer reviewing and examining PhDS as A time. Preparing research bids and developing teaching courses requires A time too.

B writing time is when you are able to get things done, but the task is not too challenging. You can concentrate but you don’t expect to have to do anything particularly creative or taxing. I put proofreading, entering references into Endnote, searching for literatures, basic summarising and note-taking, reading reports and straightforward texts as B time. Some teaching preparation can go in here as does a lot of marking. You still have to be alert and thinking in B time but the tasks are less demanding of high energy and creative engagement.

C writing time is associated necessary writing. Mundane stuff. Switch off most do the brain stuff. So it’s generally most of the admin and emailing. Interacting emails. Real collaboration via email is probably B time.

Because we can get trapped in C time, as we respond like well-trained rats on a treadmill to the latest urgent request, we often have to take deliberate action to make sure that we have A time. 

But here’s the thing about A time. You have to know when you are likely to be at your best, or when you can summon up something approximating nearly your best. I have no children at home, so I’m a morning A time person. But I know people who are afternoon people, and I know a lot of night people. A lot But whether A time is morning afternoon or nighttime is also always about what’s possible. People with children often do their A time after everyone else, including their partner, has gone to bed. A few can get A time while children are at school, but many carers also rely on squeezing out a few times a year when they can get more consecutive day time to work in A mode. And people who work in most jobs, including we academics, also have to work hard on finding A time.

The key thing really is to make sure that you programme in some regular A and B time so that you can keep connected with your major project and writing thinking. If you can only get A time in blocks a few times a year, then doing weekly B time is generally enough to keep your project on track.

I also now add in a D time to my week. D time is time which appears to be devoted to doing something other than writing or research or teaching or admin, but is actually also time when something might just come to you. Lots of people use D time for exercise. And some also use D time for making. I’m one of the makers. I know I have to balance out my A thinking writing time with high quality D making time. I also block out D time in my diary.

Now I am sure the ABCD approach won’t work for everyone. It doesn’t work for everyone. Any more than those time tracking aps work for me. But it might be of help to some of you. And for those you who want to try ABCD, the thing is to make sure that you block out your ABC and D time, and then stick to these slots for a while to get into the habit of working this pattern.

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Why journal articles are rejected

This is an old post from May 2013. I get asked about rejection a lot so it seemed worth recycling it.

There are some very common reasons why journal papers get rejected, often by the editor. They don’t even make it to review. Here’s the seven deadly paper writing sins:

(1) The paper doesn’t fit the journal. It’s very important to check out the specific journal for which you re writing and tailor the paper to fit it. Journals can be thought of as conversations, and each paper as an entry into an ongoing conversation about a particular topic. That’s why it’s important to always see what other papers there have been on the same topic in the journal you are aiming for. If there’s nothing, there may well be a reason, namely, the journal isn’t interested in the topic.

(2) The paper is overcrowded with ideas. It lacks focus. Most journal papers have one point to make, they work with one idea, one angle.

(3) The paper doesn’t reassure the reader that the research is trustworthy, in other words, that it has been well designed, thoroughly conducted and fits within a recognizable tradition of work. Different disciplines require different levels of detail about how the research was conducted, with whom or what, where, how often, how many … The vast majority of journals require you to write about that is methodology and/or about your methods.

(4) There’s no sense that the paper is adding anything new. The writer hasn’t been able to summarise what’s already known about the topic, and what this paper adds. They might just report a piece of research without being able to say why it’s important, and why people need to know about it or what should happen now that they do. In other words, there’s no So What and no Now What.

(5) The writing sounds very inexperienced. This usually means that the paper is front loaded with too much literature and lacks a strong conclusion that deals with the So What, Now What questions. But it can be because there is too much time spent on method, or the paper is weighted too heavily to results, or there isn’t enough grounding for the study, or enough analysis.

(6) The paper is poorly structured. There isn’t enough signposting to help the writer find their way through the argument. The headings are meaningless or there’s not enough of them, or there’s too many. The argument doesn’t flow. The order of chunks in the paper doesn’t follow

(7) The paper is just too local, too small, too insignificant. Not every piece of research can become a paper, although most can. However, sometimes people slice the research too thin, don’t do enough analysis, don’t make adequate connections with other research, or are just too theory-light for the reviewers to judge the piece worthy of publication.

Avoid these seven things,

It’s quite possible NOT to make these mistakes. Making sure that you avoid them leaves the referees able to engage with your actual ideas and argument which is, after all, why you are writing…

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the IMRaD structure is rarely enough

Imagine you’ve gone out to café and you ask for a salad. What arrives is a chopping board, a knife, a bowl, a lettuce, a tomato, a carrot, a bundle of random herbs, a mystery fruit and sundry bottles and jars. You are surprised. This wasn’t what you were expecting. And you really don’t know what the chef intends that you do with these things. You can see some of it. Lettuce Tomato Carrot. But what is the fruit? And what do you chop and what do you tear or leave as is? And how much of each of the dressing ingredients do you use and how do you mix them together? The instructions are missing so you’ll just have to wing it. Or give up and send the lot back. 

This yet-to-be-salad is the equivalent of the paper or thesis written as IMRaD – Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion. When you write four blocks of paragraphs under each of these headings, you have some recognisable ingredients, maybe some less familiar than others. But your reader isn’t going to know how to put them together. They don’t know why you have chosen these specific things to write about, or what they add up to in the end. That’s because you haven’t provided them with any guidance. There are no instructions about how they are to work through the material and make sense of it. 

You see, IMRaD by itself isn’t sufficient for a paper or thesis. Yes, these chunks need to be there, But stand alone IMRaD is inadequate. But why?

Well, a paper or a thesis has to argue something. A paper or thesis has to present a problem and then make a case for a particular answer. Even if the answer is equivocal, it is still an answer. The case is where the writer tells the reader about the particular approach they took to the problem – how it was understood and why – and why and how the answer was found in a particular way. And what this leaves out. And the writer presents their evidence – this is the “stuff” from which the answer to the problem is produced. Finally the writer gives their answer together with an explanation about why this is the answer and what the reader is meant to understand from it, and do about it. 

And to do all this work, the writer needs to construct a narrative through the four sections. Some people call this narrative a story. Now story is a term which draws attention to the ways in which the writer has to take the reader by the hand and lead them through the sections and however many words there are. The narrative has to keep the reader on track and keep them interested. But there’s a downside to the term story. The not so helpful thing about calling the narrative a story is that the writer can lose sight of the purpose of the paper or thesis – they are persuading the reader through a process of evidenced reasoning. Follow these steps, the writer says, and you too will come to this conclusion. 

Doing the IMRaD set of chunks is risky. If the writer doesn’t focus on their line of argument – that’s where their narrative red thread pulls the reader through the text step by step – then they will have presented a load of detail where the reader doesn’t know what matters most or how it matters. The no-argument-writer leaves their reader wondering how they are meant to interpret all the stuff presented.  And the reader also wonders why the writer chose these particular things to write about and what sense they made of them.  And if you’re writing a paper or a thesis, you don’t want to leave your readers wondering about what you were trying to say.

There’s more negative consequences too I’m afraid. If the writer doesn’t actually say what all the chunks and words add up to and why the sum total is important, and indeed why the writer did this work in the first place and is bothering to write about it, then the poor old reader really is in the dark. They don’t know where the work fits or where it might go in future. They are the equivalent of the diner sitting at the table with a bunch of veg, a knife and a chopping board.

Perhaps they’ll chalk the experience up to bad luck and forget about it. Or perhaps, particularly if they are a reviewer or an examiner, they’ll send the IMRaD chunks back to the kitchen with a strongly worded request for the chef to do more and do better.

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