Tag Archives: Scholarly publishing

Links: Appreciating Feedback, PhD Reflections, Negative Results

Posted on April 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here is a great post from the Hook and Eye blog about the role of reviewers and editors in the writing process. I liked this post for two reasons. First, I appreciate the emphasis on the learning that can happen during the submission/rejection/revision/acceptance process. Throughout this process, there will be feedback on your writing; not all of it will be constructive and helpful, of course, but much of it will. Being open to learning from that feedback is crucial. Second, the post offers a valuable reminder that the writing we read—and desire to emulate—has been through so much polishing. Given how hard we all are on our own writing, we can’t have too many reminders about how much revision published work has been through.

Here is something from Inside Higher Ed on the singular moment of finishing a PhD: what is lost, what is gained, and what we should understand about ourselves as we prepare for the next step.

Finally, an old joke with a thought-provoking punch line from the Crooked Timber blog.

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Links: Journal Article Publishing, Paywall at the Times, Additions to the OED

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

The blog PhD2Published recently ran a three-part series on journal article publishing: getting started; choosing a journal; and dealing with rejection. If you are thinking about publishing for the first time, it is a great idea to expose yourself to as many sources of information and opinion as you can; this blog has an extensive list of academic publishing resources. If you are working in the sciences, you may also be interested in this piece from Science on publishing in scientific journals.

This blog post from The Scholarly Kitchen discusses the new paywall at the New York Times. The author points out that the paywall allows the paper to charge organizations for access. While some individuals may get around  the paywall by accessing Times’ stories through social media or blog readers, institutions will pay for subscriptions, giving the Times the financial support it both needs and deserves.  

Lastly, here is something from The New Yorker Book Bench blog on the new additions to the OED. Ian Crouch has given an amusing account of the predictable outrage that attends any inclusion of novel coinage in an authoritative dictionary. In his words, the OED is a “far-reaching collection of English words, with an eye to history, which aims to be both prescriptive (these words and only these words are correct) and descriptive (these are the words that are used, as here’s how). When historians, linguists, and the generally curious want to know how people spoke in the twenty-first century, it will be useful to know about OMG and LOL, and how the phrases reflected usage that ranged from serious, to semi-serious, to full-on ironic.”

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Links: National Inquirer meets Scientific Research, Social Media and Academics, DIY Academic Sentence Generator

Posted on March 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

This article from Inside Higher Ed describes an attempt by the Association of American Universities (AAU) to defend scientific research from mockery and poorly informed funding cuts. Make sure you follow the link that the article provides to the Scientific Inquirer: it will take you to the inaugural issue of a faux tabloid that the AAU has created to show how easy it is to make valuable peer-reviewed research sound daft and wasteful.

Here is something from The Chronicle of Higher Education on social media use among academics. The author summarizes a new report from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research, a report which found that academics are using social media for “collaborative writing, conferencing, sharing images, and other research-related activities”. Interestingly, the researchers found that the biggest users of social media were scholars from the social sciences and humanities; they suggest that the appeal of social media for these scholars may be the increased speed of dissemination. The Scholarly Kitchen provides a nuanced and critical response to the study, focusing in particular on the fact that ‘social media’ has been defined so broadly in this study as to be potentially meaningless.

Finally, if you have some extra time on your hands this weekend, The University of Chicago Writing Program has a great game for you: Write Your Own Academic Sentence. Here is my first attempt: ‘The linguistic construction of the gaze invests itself in the historicization of agency.’ To get the full effect, you need to use the ‘Edit It’ option on your sentence. Once you are satisfied, you can even get a second opinion from a virtual critic: ‘Your desultory treatment of the linguistic construction of the gaze deserves the obscurity into which it has fallen.’ Hopefully, once you are done playing, you’ll be able to get back to writing sentences that don’t sound like this!

P.S. I mentioned the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities project last week. If you are interested in seeing how this project is shaping up, you can follow blogs from all the participants here.

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Links: Cascading Review, Digital Humanities, Research in Haiku

Posted on March 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here is a blog post from The Scholarly Kitchen that discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of cascading peer review.  In cascading peer review, a journal will forward a rejected article (and its peer reviews) directly to another appropriate journal, thereby allowing the article to be considered by a new journal without the author having to repeat the submission process. This practice certainly isn’t standard but has been adopted by some larger publishers.

Friday, March 18 will be a Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities: “A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, ‘Just what do computing humanists really do?’ Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online.” Click here for an interesting collection of definitions of the digital humanities. I am planning to participate in this project, so I’ll discuss that experience in a future post.

Finally, here is a lovely blog devoted to dissertation research presented in the form of haiku. What makes this blog so enjoyable is that each contributor also provides a more conventional explanation of their research, allowing us to compare the poetry to the prose. I offer this link as more than just entertainment: I suggest trying it at home. Anything we can do to get at the essence of our research (even reconfiguring it as a 17-syllable poem) is likely to give us further insights into our own projects.

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Links: English as a Lingua Franca, Commercial Manuscript Editing, Literature Reviews and Social Media

Posted on February 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the use of English as a lingua franca outside of English-speaking countries. It discusses many interesting issues–such as the cultural dimensions of communication–before concluding with a highly provocative point about the future of English. Although it is often assumed that being a lingua franca is a sign of linguistic vigour, some scholars suggest the opposite: that the English that is spoken as a global lingua franca may actually be a much reduced language and thus a vulnerable one.

This article from  Nature discusses the role of commercial manuscript editing. The author does an excellent job highlighting the various practical and ethical issues associated with commercial manuscript editing services. In doing so, she also tells us something about the priorities of scientific journal editors. These editors want manuscripts that they can send to reviewers without worrying that flaws in the writing will get in the way of assessment. But, interestingly, the flaws that worry them are not just grammatical; they are just as concerned about a poor mastery of the conventions of research articles. Novice academic writers need to understand what a manuscript must accomplish if it is to be considered for publication. The assessment ‘weak writing’ can be used to describe anything from punctuation difficulties to a poorly articulated methodology to improperly presented data; understanding the importance of all these elements will allow writers to see that the work of improving their writing will have to proceed on many fronts.  

Lastly, here is a blog post from The Thesis Whisperer about the similarity of literature reviews and social media. The specifics are Australian, but the general ideas about literature reviews are broadly applicable. And the social media analogy is clever. You really don’t have to be friends with everybody or every article!

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Links: Job Interviews, Being Literal, Scholarly Reportage

Posted on February 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, this blogger suggests replacing face-to-face job interviews with video conferencing. I am not sure whether this is, in fact, a coming trend, but I did wonder what such a shift in practice might mean for how both sides of the equation assess the interaction. Communicative cues are so complex; what would we need to learn to present ourselves successfully via this new medium? Also writing in Inside Higher Ed, Dean Dad makes one particularly important suggestion: all interviews in a given round would have to be conducted via the same technology. It would not be fair for some to have face-to-face meetings while others had to engage in the more complex task of presenting themselves remotely.

This post from Motivated Grammar addresses the difference between prescriptivism and preference. In this case, the author dislikes ‘literally’ when it is used as a general intensifier (and thus not in the literal sense of literally) not because such usage deviates from some rule but because it is hyperbolic. Although most of us rarely need to take a position on the prescriptivism debate, we do need to think about how we make writing decisions. When we argue against a particular usage on the grounds of its actual strengths or weaknesses, we do more for the overall health of our writing than when we protest against its deviance from some imagined norm.

This article from Inside Higher Ed considers whether scholarly reportage–a method of inquiry that combines social theory with accessible narrative–is a passing trend or a credible option for scholarly work. I am curious what a method that blends ‘scholarship, memoir, and journalism’ might mean for writing. Working in multiple genres for a multifaceted audience would demand impressive writing skills. For more on this type of writing, here is an article from Dissent about Andrew Ross and the last twenty-odd years of cultural studies.

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Links: Public Intellectuals, Socializing Doctoral Students, Journal of Universal Rejection

Posted on January 28, 2011 | 1 comment

Here is an article about scholarly communication from Inside Higher Ed that talks about the desirability of public intellectuals, of academics who can also communicate their results to the population at large. I happen to agree, but my interest is actually in the self-awareness of ourselves as writers that this imperative demands. We cannot write for multiple audiences without thinking about audience in a sophisticated way.

Here is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the need for graduate students to have realistic expectations and adequate professional development. Despite my genuine interest in this topic, I hesitated to share this particular article because the tone is so dire. I am sure I will post things from the ‘disastrous state of academia’ genre from time to time, but I do think it is crucial to read them critically. Such scenarios do not always apply: the voices of despair speak of an experience that will not be shared equally across all fields and all degrees and all countries. But we cannot know what we genuinely ought to be concerned with unless we engage with the commentary. The call here for more consistent professional development for graduate students is one that I fully endorse.

Finally, the funniest thing I saw this week: The Journal of Universal Rejection. While it may not initially sound appealing, the journal editor does a great job of selling it. And Kent Anderson gives it this endorsement in The Scholarly Kitchen: “For stringent editorial standards and an untarnished reputation, the Journal of Universal Rejection stands apart.”

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