Through a Tweet poll the community cast their votes on a choice of four topics to discuss this week; finding motivation to write, writing an academic blog, collaborative writing and grant application writing. Interestingly there was a tie for discussing writing an academic blog and finding motivation to write so we decided to go with finding motivation first (which is of course fundamental to all forms of academic writing) and we shall be discussing writing an academic blog next time (come and join us Thursday 24th May 2012, 6PM GMT). We are really keen that the community has as much of as a say as possible about the topics we discuss so if you’re on Twitter, keep an eye out for our links to the topic polls and to the final summaries.

Until then, here is the really useful summary of finding motivation to write:

Image by James Yang http://www.jamesyang.com

PhD2Published has several informative posts about writing journal articles, and more recently has featured a post outlining a potentially revolutionary collaborative peer review process for this kind of publishing. Todays post offers an alternative perspective; that of the journal article peer reviewer. Doing peer reviews provides important experience for those writing their own papers and may help writers consider what they should include based on what peer reviewers are looking for.

At some point in your scholarly career, you likely will get asked to review an article for a journal. In this post, I explain how I usually go about doing a peer review. I imagine that each scholar has their own way of doing this, but it might be helpful to talk openly about this task, which we generally complete in isolation.

Step One:  Accept the invitation to peer review. The first step in reviewing a journal article is to accept the invitation. When deciding whether or not to accept, take into consideration three things: 1) Do you have time to do the review by the deadline? 2) Is the article within your area of expertise? 3) Are you sure you will complete the review by the deadline? Once you accept the invitation, set aside some time in your schedule to read the article and write the review.

Step Two: Read the article. I usually read the article with a pen in hand so that I can write my thoughts in the margins as I read. As I read, I underline parts of the article that seem important, write down any questions I have, and correct any mistakes I notice.

Step Three: Write a brief summary of the article and its contribution. When I am doing a peer review, I sometimes do it all in one sitting – which will take me about two hours – or I read it one day and write it the next. Often, I prefer to do the latter to give myself some time to think about the article and to process my thoughts. When writing a draft of the review, the first thing I do is summarize the article as best I can in three to four sentences. If I think favorably of the article and believe it should be published, I often will write a longer summary, and highlight the strengths of the article. Remember that even if you don’t have any (or very many) criticisms, you still need to write a review. Your critique and accolades may help convince the editor of the importance of the article. As you write up this summary, take into consideration the suitability of the article for the journal. If you are reviewing for the top journal in your field, for example, an article simply being factually correct and having a sound analysis is not enough for it to be published in that journal. Instead, it would need to change the way we think about some aspect of your field.

Step Four: Write out your major criticisms of the article. When doing a peer review, I usually begin with the larger issues and end with minutiae. Here are some major areas of criticism to consider:

-          Is the article well-organized?

-          Does the article contain all of the components you would expect (Introduction, Methods, Theory, Analysis, etc)?

-          Are the sections well-developed?

-          Does the author do a good job of synthesizing the literature?

-          Does the author answer the questions he/she sets out to answer?

-          Is the methodology clearly explained?

-          Does the theory connect to the data?

-          Is the article well-written and easy to understand?

-          Are you convinced by the author’s results? Why or why not?

Step Five: Write out any minor criticisms of the article.  Once you have laid out the pros and cons of the article, it is perfectly acceptable (and often welcome) for you to point out that the table on page 3 is mislabeled, that the author wrote “compliment” instead of “complement” on page 7, or other minutiae. Correcting those minor errors will make the author’s paper look more professional if it goes out for another peer review, and certainly will have to be corrected before being accepted for publication.

Step Six: Review. Go over your review and make sure that it makes sense and that you are communicating your critiques and suggestions in as helpful a way as possible.

Finally, I will say that, when writing a review, be mindful that you are critiquing the article in question – not the author. Thus, make sure your critiques are constructive. For example, it is not appropriate to write: “The author clearly has not read any Foucault.” Instead, say: “The analysis of Foucault is not as developed as I would expect to see in an academic journal article.” Also, be careful not to write: “The author is a poor writer.” Instead, you can say: “This article would benefit from a close editing. I found it difficult to follow the author’s argument due to the many stylistic and grammatical errors.” Although you are an anonymous reviewer, the Editor knows who you are, and it never looks good when you make personal attacks on others. So, in addition to being nice, it is in your best interest.

Tanya Golash-Boza is  Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies at the University of Kansas. She Tweets as @tanyagolashboza and has her own website.

This post is the fourth in a series by Josie Dixon, a consultant with 15 years’ experience in academic publishing, as Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press and Publishing Director for the Academic Division at Palgrave Macmillan.  She now runs her own business, Lucian Consulting, and gives training workshops on publishing and other forms of research communication for postgraduates, postdocs and staff in over 50 universities internationally, alongside her training and consultancy work in the publishing industry. In this set of blog posts for PhD2Published, Josie examines some of the polarities between Planet PhD and the world of publishing, and offers strategies for how to bridge the gap. 

When you have lived with your PhD thesis as work in progress for several years, it’s hard to imagine it as a finished product.  Often that sense of perpetual process infects the language in which the project is framed, and I have often been surprised by the extent to which would-be authors are still writing about their aims, hopes and intentions at the point when they are submitting it to a publisher.  Aims and objectives are perfectly proper in a grant proposal at the outset of your research, but when your work is being published for a paying market, there is an expectation of completion, results, and a focus on what your work actually achieves and delivers.  That requires a good deal more confidence, since readers will look for a measure of authority in a publication; in the minds of commissioning editors and the referees involved in the peer-review process, your work will appear less convincing if your claims are watered down in formulations which suggest that you are merely aiming, attempting, intending or hoping to achieve the desired outcomes of your project.  Nobody’s hopes ever made a selling point in a marketplace as tough as the current one for academic publications.

Arriving at destination publication means completing the journey, moving from process to product, and achieving a degree of closure.  On the other hand, we could also see this as an opening out, from the inward focus on the foundations and analytical processes of your own research which is often characteristic of a thesis (documented in literature reviews and chapters on methodology), to look outwards to what it will now offer to your audience or readership.  This change of outlook is also a change in direction: insofar as a thesis is required to document those processes of your research for the benefit of your examiners, it looks backwards, charting its own development; a publication must look onwards, anticipating its afterlife in the hands of your readers.

What your project will do for its readers may be very different from what it has done for you.  In the second blogpost in this series, I looked at the outward movement from micro to macro, particularly relevant to case-study research.  Here the case study material which formed the end point of a thesis may only be the starting point for a publication, if it is to anticipate the ways in which its readers will be interested in transferring your insights or models for application elsewhere.  That afterlife of your project will be less about the research itself and more about its implications and applications – where does it take us, and what does it yield?  What difference will it make?

Here are five tips to help you ensure you make this transition effectively:

i) Use confident and purposeful language in the framing material outlining the rationale for your project– aims, attempts, hopes and intentions won’t do here.  If you really can’t say categorically what it achieves, then at least strengthen the auxiliary verbs and say what it is designed to do, rather than leaving a degree of doubt.

ii) Cut down methodology sections and literature review (see also Blogpost 3 in this series) to move the focus away from process

iii) Highlight your original research findings to emphasise the outcomes of your analysis

iv) Make explicit the implications and applications of your research

v) Look ahead to the afterlife of your project in the Conclusion – this should not merely recapitulate what has gone before, but point outwards and onwards to articulate where your research

In her latest post for PhD2Published, Claire Warden raises those all important questions about what it is that makes a good journal article.

In the feedback for a recently submitted journal article, the reviewer said that, although s/he liked it (phew!) it was just a little bit ambitious. Alright, a lot too ambitious. So, a little adjustment here, a little tinker there, take out 1000 words and change the focus of the argument completely and I would have the makings of a successful journal article. Rewriting an article is about as pleasurable as toothache so, at first I let out an audible groan and, in typical English fashion, made a comforting pot of tea.

Recently, in the wake of my first book, I have been writing a few journal articles and this has forced me to move academic genres, one of a number of transitions that we often make from book to conference paper, dissertation to article, blog post to review. Getting back into article writing has been a sharp learning curve for me and has forced me to reassess the genre entirely. What is the primary thing to think about when writing a journal article? Are we focusing on the need to improve our publication record, the importance of publications as we apply for those allusive tenured jobs or the joy of writing about something we find fascinating for a few months? I think I probably consider all these things. But more and more I have been thinking about my readership. Who is reading the article? Why are they reading it? What are they hoping to find? Which leads me to a question (yes, another one!) I constantly grapple with: what is my audience? To make an article engaging, this is a really important issue. If the journal is about crochet then you can safely assume that your readership knows about needles and wool. If it is not then you probably need to explain chains and slip stitches at the start.  

My recent article writing extravaganza led me to read a load of papers from different journals in an attempt to discover what an engaging reader-focused article really looks like. I came up with the following checklist:

• A balance of academic rigour and accessibility – if I am going to talk about either difficult or niche topics then there is all the more reason for syntactical clarity and straightforward structure.
• Brevity and specificity – these two important aspects are an anathema to my rather distended writing style but are both vital for article writing.
• Niche but relevant – under-researched topics are fascinating but they need to be framed by recognisable theoretical models.
• Explanatory notes and expository analysis – there is always a need to decide how much your audience needs to know: a full biography, a complete synopsis, a footnote for further study suggestions?

These are the four elements that I’ve noticed in the best articles I’ve been reading recently and often they are missing in the less impressive ones. So, returning to my own article dilemma, fuelled by the obligatory teapot, I got rid of 1000 words, added 1700 and it was accepted.

Since the AcWri live chat officially launched on Twitter recently, Jeremy and I (Anna, PhD2Published) have been summarizing the chats with the aim of generating a useful and lasting resource for all academic writers. From now on, the plan is that each summary will be posted to both the PhD2Published site and Jeremy’s own personal blog so that everyone can access them after each event. The first of the chats have already happened and provide some great information, hints and tips about academic writing. The summaries for these from previous weeks can each be individually accessed using the following links:

Thursday 16^th February 2012: The very first chat initiated by Jeremy: Starting a chat

Thursday 23^rd February 2012: With PhD2Published, the second chat involved further exploration of potential academic writing related topics to discuss during the chats, including some initial discussion about academic writing issues. See the summary here.

Thursday 5^th March 2012: Writing Journal Articles

It is hoped that these provide a great online resource and introduction to the AcWri community. If you are an academic writer, or a writer more generally, please do get involved. The bigger the community, the more ideas and questions we can discuss and the more support we each gain. Acwri live chats are run on Twitter on Thursdays at 6pm GMT every fortnight.

The latest #acwri live chat held on Thursday 12th April 2012 is summarised below and is available here:

It was identified that there is very little information on the subject of actually writing conference papers (P2P found one useful one during the chat and I am sure there are many more – please do share!). Predominantly focus is on presenting them. This is a significant gap given that presentations are so important in trying out new ideas and networking, and are also another form of academic writing: