the downside of having a Big Book thesis

This is a guest post by Katie Wheat. Katie graduated with a PhD in Psychology from University of York and now works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University. She is currently using brain imaging and magnetic brain stimulation methods to explore aspects of how the brain recognises written words. She blogs at Life After Thesis.

Reading Pat’s latest blog post on the PhD by publication versus a written thesis stirred up many thoughts and feelings that I had been mulling over for a while. I think it is crucial to have an open conversation about the differences between these two paths, particularly in the context of the difficult employment market for PhD graduates. From my experience of these two PhD models, it seems that adopting the PhD by publication model more widely in the UK would need to be accompanied by other changes to the typical PhD programme.

When I embarked on my three year funded PhD in psychology in the UK, there was never any doubt that over the course of those three years I would write what I would describe as a ‘traditional’ thesis. That is, by the end of my PhD period, I would produce a multi-chapter written record of my research. The standard format in my department was three or four experimental chapters, in the style of research articles, sandwiched between a literature review chapter and a discussion chapter. The PhD student handbook provided guidance about the expected format and content of the thesis and a ‘research committee’ (now called a thesis advisory panel) oversaw that the research was progressing towards the end goal of a coherent thesis. This included the upgrade process at the end of the first year, where students were expected to submit a full draft of their literature review chapter, as well as any experimental work completed so far, in order to formally progress from the MPhil stage to a full PhD student. At no stage was there a discussion about whether I would opt out of this traditional process and instead aim to complete my PhD by publication. In fact, although I vaguely knew of this possibility, it never crossed my mind as a favourable option and I didn’t know anyone who had taken this route.

My first experience with the PhD by publication model was as a visiting PhD student in the Netherlands, and since, as a postdoc here. In my department at least, the typical route to a PhD is very different to my own PhD in the UK. There are commonalities, but I would certainly not say that they are equivalent. The most obvious difference is, of course, that students are expected to produce and publish around four original research articles in order to complete their PhD. At least two of these are expected to be published or in press in respected international journals by the time the thesis is defended. Often, all four articles are accepted or at least submitted before the thesis defense. These journal articles are then compiled (in their original format or with some edits) into a booklet, with an accompanying introduction and discussion chapter intended to tie the articles together.

At first glance, the two models described here probably sound very much the same. In the end, a PhD student following either route will have produced a body of work composed of around four research chapters, with an introduction and discussion chapter. However, I think the two routes are actually very different. For example, in the UK, PhD funding usually lasts three years, or 1+3 for a masters followed by a PhD. In the Netherlands, PhD funding is usually four years (although three year PhDs are becoming more common if the student already completed a two year research masters in a closely related research area). This extra year is usually the time when the first articles of the PhD are actually accepted and published and the final articles are submitted. It would be very difficult to research, write, and publish such a body of work in only three years. This means that UK PhDs tend to carry on working on the publication aspect of their PhD long after their funding ends, and possibly alongside their next job. It may even mean that a UK PhD needs to carry on writing these articles without any pay in order to have enough published work to compete for postdoc funding. This would be especially true in order to compete against European PhDs.

Another significant difference between my experiences as a UK PhD student, compared to a PhD student in the Netherlands comes down to money. PhD students in the Netherlands receive a monthly salary on a national pay scale that amounts to roughly twice my PhD bursary. Although I refer to them as students, in actual fact they are research employees of the university, with all of the benefits and responsibilities that accompany this; for example, paid holidays and a company pension come as standard, with the expectation that ten percent of one’s time will be spent on teaching, supervision, and admin duties.

I believe that these differences mean that PhD graduates in the Netherlands are ultimately more prepared for a research career because they are employed as a junior researcher from day one of their PhD. The whole PhD is structured around the realities of life as a researcher, such as writing for publication, the pressures and struggles of the peer review system, teaching obligations, and (usually during the fourth year) grant applications. However, without a full salary, and especially without the fourth year of salary, it would seem unrealistic to expect a PhD student to take on these responsibilities. This makes the UK PhD model seem quite artificial to me; a strange limbo between student and employee.

In sum, if I could go back, I would almost certainly choose the European PhD by publication route. However, I definitely would not choose to squeeze a PhD by publication into the UK’s three year PhD system. I think the time pressures and financial pressures this would create would be unworkable.

PhD by publication or PhD and publication – part two

After my first post about the changing nature of the PhD and the move to PhD by publication I was contacted by a number of people who were doing the by-publication doctorate. They were enthusiastic about it. One group were epidemiologists who noted that this may be a route which suits science in particular; they also suggested that they found writing the commentary/overview/exegesis pretty boring compared to writing the papers. One of them, based in the UK, was not required to have published the papers but rather to have produced papers that were, in the eyes of the examiners, publishable. The different between published and publishable may be important.

Another person commented that they felt that their PhD by publication had given them a head start on scholarly work. Rather than producing a tome that no one would ever read, they would complete their PhD with already published papers. Rather than a text produced for examiners only, they were writing with a real scholarly purpose for a real audience for a real publication – something that, as one Australian comment noted, is the norm of academic work. (It’s perhaps worth saying that one of the Australian doctorates by publication that I have examined did have, as the last of four publications, a paper for a professional readership and not a refereed journal, so a different real audience – this made the claim for potential contribution very strong.)

It’s probably not too hard to guess that, since I’m happy to examine PhDs by publication, I’m generally in favour of them. But it’s also important to note that my argument here is not about favoring one model or the other – I’m actually arguing for more discussion and more thinking about the equity implications of diversifying the doctorate. I’m also arguing for more discussion of the changes that are happening …

I’ve recently encountered more by-publication researchers in my writing workshops and had some discussions with some colleagues in mainland Europe who run Humanities and Social Sciences centres like I do. Putting all of this information together with the conference symposium on the diversifying routes that I referred to in the last post, I’ve come up with a starting list of four issues that seem to me to need a much greater scholarly airing.

(1) which journals to publish in?

None of the PhDs in arts, humanities and social sciences I’ve encountered on the by-publication route were writing for open-access journals. A minority were very concerned to publish in the highest status journal in their field – citation indices were held to be more important than readership. But it seemed that there had been little formal conversation in their institutions about where to publish – this decision remained something between supervisors and doctoral researchers. Unless they encountered them elsewhere, the by-publication doctoral researchers were largely sequestered from current debates about (a) open access versus commercial publication, and (b) the relative merits of different ways of counting citations and how these might/might not matter. Given that scholarship may well be their future, it seems important that the research training provided for all doctoral researchers does include something about the future of academic publishing.

It also seems that at present there is no way of knowing where by-publication route PhDs are choosing to publish. At some point, when someone does the numbers, we will get an answer to the question about who, if anyone, profits from their decisions. We may know if journals have noticed an increase in submissions. We will also have some idea about the distribution of the hidden costs of reviewing, and which peer reviewing communities have done the unrecompensed work of supporting the by-publication route. Sounds like a nice little research project to me!!

(2) are journal articles a better evaluation measure than the book?

Not all disciplines have given up on the book. While there may be debates about open and digital publication versus traditional commercial print publication, the production of the extended and evidenced argument still has value. It is even still ‘counted’ in the UK for audit purposes, although perhaps not as heavily weighted in some disciplines as some academics might think is desirable. The symbolic implication of changing the ‘test’ of scholarship from an extended monograph to the article does concern some disciplines more than others – although all of us ought not to let it pass unnoticed and without consideration.

On a practical level, some academics are concerned that the by-publication route does not include the possibility of a book (except for UK staff members, see previous post) and, more contentiously perhaps, some maintain that researchers will not be adequately prepared for scholarly work if they have not had the experience of producing a long monograph as their PhD. But equally, it could be argued that the monograph does not prepare researchers for writing high quality journal articles and that this also is important. However, there has to date been little discussion and debate about the various affordances of each doctoral genre and the parity between them.

The compromise seems to be – in the UK at least -that many doctoral researchers now find that they have to do both! There certainly has not been nearly enough discussion about the increasing press on the UK doctorate, where there is an expectation of engagement in a range of training modules and involvement in more career training including interning and writing for publication and producing a monograph within a three year time period. This performative creep certainly deserves widespread scholarly discussion.

(3) what are the three papers about?

One of the most important issues at stake in the by-publication route is the decision about the focus of the three papers. In most instances of the by-publication route (saving the UK staff member by publication process), doctoral researchers are still expected to produce a proposal for a research project. They must still do the literatures work and the methodological and methods work in the same way as the PhD by-monograph researcher. Their research might then be staged, with a paper emerging from each of the stages. Or the research might be one larger project from which three distinct papers are taken.

However, I have seen researchers come adrift is in trying to make one paper about literatures, one about methodology and methods and the other about the actual research. Troubles have arisen because the researcher simply didn’t have enough reading and enough experience to write with sufficient depth about them, and didn’t know the fields well enough to be clear about the contribution their literatures/methods paper would make. But this example may not be widespread (and how would I know given the lack of systematic research in the area?). But the example does make me wonder if there are better or worse, easier or harder, ways to sort out the focus for the papers. It seems to me that it would be helpful if there were some kind of forum where by-publication doctoral supervisors and researchers could simply share experiences about the process. There is probably, as is the case with doctoral education more generally, all kinds of wisdom currently locked up in individual supervision relationships and institutions. And it’d be very helpful to make that more public.

(4) the perils of the writing for reviewing process

The most hazardous part of the by-publication – as opposed to publishable papers – PhD opportunity, is obviously bound up with the writing and reviewing process. By-publication route doctoral researchers all have to assume the textual identity of expert and write with the commensurate scholarly authority quite early in their candidature. This is not easy for any doctoral researcher – the imposter syndrome is alive and well – and it would be interesting to know if assuming the expert position is easier, the same or harder for by-publication route candidates.

And it does seem that many of the European PhD by-publication institutions do not offer doctoral researchers additional support for the text work/identity work of journal publication. While they do offer training courses in research methods, less attention is paid to the writing/thinking/identity work of publication. Science doctoral researchers typically get this support in lab settings but this is not the case for most arts, humanities and social science doctoral researchers. This lack of attention to writing is not confined to the by-publication route of course, but it is perhaps something that one might expect institutions espousing the by-publication route to take a lead on, given the critical importance of writing in the journal article route.

The press for completion that is now increasingly the norm right across Europe, not just in the UK, also may have the down-side of leaving candidates no option but to publish quickly, in a timeline which may not match their actual thinking time. The notion of slow thinking/quick writing does not map easily onto any of the current doctoral paths and it remains to be seen which route finds it more of an issue. Perhaps asking in depth questions about publication is something that institutions need to do – they could be routinely talking with doctoral researchers and supervisors about writing and publication, not simply reporting whether it has occurred.

Finally of course, there are the vagaries of the reviewing process. That will be the topic of a future post. I’m going to introduce one of the Norwegian researchers from our symposium. His story of being peer reviewed is not about a cruel reviewer, quite the opposite – and indeed that will be part of the point. However the next post is by Katie Wheat who reflects on her experiences of the UK doctorate in the light of seeing the mainland European by-publication route close up.

the PhD and publication/by publication – a very peculiar practice? part one

It is now increasingly common in parts of Europe for PhDs in the humanities and social sciences to be awarded on the basis of publication. The norm seems to be three, but sometimes four, papers in international peer reviewed journals. At least one paper, but sometimes more, can be written with a supervisor. However, this is not the only way to incorporate publications into the PhD, and there are other issues at stake besides simply writing papers.

About eighteen months ago some colleagues and I decided to get together a symposium on the PhD and publication, and the PhD by publication. We were from Norway and the UK and were a group made up of supervisors and early career researchers. Our group represented some of the diversity of what the PhD by/and publication currently means. Norway has recently embraced the PhD by publication whereas in the UK the monograph still reigns. The UK PhD by publication is relatively uncommon – except for staff members (see this piece in the Times Higher on the state of play). Here is our group – a Norwegian and a UK supervisor plus:

Norwegian researcher 1: PhD as monograph in Norwegian. Published a book in Norwegian while doing the PhD, plus articles in Norwegian. Now working to convert PhD into English language articles for peer reviewed journals.

Norwegian researcher 2: PhD by publication, three papers published in international peer reviewed journals, written in English. Now doing postdoctoral work to extend research.

English researcher 1: PhD as monograph in English. One article in English published during PhD with supervisor, but two more single authored during PhD were subsequently published. Book from PhD.

English researcher 2: Academic staff member doing PhD by publication. One book and ten peer-reviewed articles in international journals plus ten thousand word exegesis were submitted for examination.

It is clear that there are very different experiences of doctoral research and publication distributed over just these four people in two countries. As a symposium we had to ask the question about parity between them.

It was pretty obvious that the UK model for staff PhD by publication was much more demanding than any of the other three. We understood that the UK PhD by publication had developed as a way of recognizing and rewarding staff who came into the university from professional backgrounds and then took up scholarly work in the same way as colleagues with PhDs. The publication route meant/means that they are able to aggregate these publications into an award. But these publications also of course contribute to institutional research performance, for example the REF, in a different way to PhDs.

But the career and post doc competition in both countries meant/means that thesis by monograph researchers were also writing articles and even books, as one of our symposium had, at the same time as producing the Big Book. While this wasn’t a requirement for the award, it was still an increasing practice. How would researchers with PhDs by publication fare in competitive contexts when compared with the PhD-with-the-lot? And is the unofficial ratcheting up of the PhD requirement fair – and what effect does writing other publications have on the monograph itself?

The language question was writ very large for the Norwegian PhDs. Writing in English was an additional requirement and was potentially more difficult than writing in mother tongue Norwegian. And it accelerated the international trend to move scholarly work into the English language, away from the plethora of European languages and their different modes of scholarship and genres of writing.

Our symposium was also interested in the differences between writing a journal article and writing an extended monograph of up to 100,000 words. The sheer challenge of constructing a sustained argument over this many words clearly prepared the PhD for the book in ways that writing journal articles might not. So was there also something here, we wondered, about the PhD by journal publication being a way of preparing the audit ready scholar, already primed to turn out articles for high status journals, as opposed to what might appear as the increasingly less audit valued process of producing a monograph?

It is important to put on record that our symposium wasn’t suggesting that the solution to this increasing diversity should be some kind of monolithic pan-European doctorate, an extension of the Bologna process that would involve massive amounts of moderation, record keeping and audit. This would be the simple knee jerk bureaucratic response to emergent diversity. We did think that there might be a set of questions to discuss about the criteria used to evaluate/examine doctorates, and some work at the edges of what were reasonable expectations and what were not. We were very clear that there ought to be a conversation among the scholarly community at large about diversity and equity – it wasn’t something just for national policy-makers to think about.

The changes we were addressing are of course not the only changes in the doctorate. There are also increasing pressures on narrow nineteenth century definitions of the thesis by monograph brought about via digital and arts informed scholarship, and these too need to be taken into account in any discussions.

At the time we presented our symposium we were thinking about a special issue of a journal, but we were unable to get any Editors interested. It was telling, we thought, that the ‘gateway’ to the academy was changing but it seemed to be of so little interest. We had something to talk about, but no venue. So I’ve decided to put a few of the key issues we talked about into blog posts, so at least some of them have an airing.

Next week I’ll post about the relationship between PhD by publication and the refereeing and publication process which – as you can imagine – is not straight forward.

the cruel reviewer

It’s funny how the bad stuff sticks with you.

I was thinking about this last week as I was giving feedback after a viva and hoping that the candidate was hearing all the good things and not just the small corrections we wanted her to do. But I wasn’t confident that she would remember what we said were the clear and evident strengths of the work. I feared she would go away thinking only about the things that needed a bit more attention.

Now I know that the argument is that our brains are set up to remember traumas because it’s part of the way we survive, but does this really extend to criticism, as well as to massively dreadful events? Well, I gather it does, and the rationale seems to be that it helps us learn. It seems that negative events are necessary and we use them to avoid making the same mistakes again. It doesn’t need to be dramatic, it can be something as apparently positive as constructively worded critical feedback.

While I was thinking about this I saw a twitter conversation about bad reviews. Here’s how it went – and this is quoted with permission from @SDMumford, a colleague and Philosophy Prof at Nottingham.

Read old rejection letter from 1996. Referee could just’ve said no without instead arguing I was a cretin with no clue about dispositions.
Referee’s comments were cruel and venomous as if he wanted me to give up philosophy for good. Clear message that I was an imbecile.
He gave his name quite proudly. I was a nobody.
I know exactly who it was as he didn’t hide his name. Glad I didn’t give up.
Maybe the paper wasn’t great (even though it became a central part of my Dispositions book)
Insecurity on referee’s part?
If I referee a paper I think poor, I say that it needs more thought and you should consider this and that. I don’t say you are a moron.
I had a gem of a rejection not too long ago in which the referee alleged I could barely write English.

Now pretty well all of us can immediately understand what @SDMumford is getting at. The vast majority of us have had articles rejected, and even with the best will in the world and the most careful wording, rejection is one of those negative experiences that sticks with you. And most of us do learn from the experience.

Unless of course you’re a slow learner like me. Confession time. I’ve just been asked to do major corrections on a paper and I have to say that I feel a bit stupid right now, because the problems the reviewers identified are ones that I teach other people to avoid… if I had taken more time over the paper and not rushed at it I would have realised its deficiencies myself. The reviews were OK – the negativity of the experience is simply because I’m very cross with myself. I actually know that it takes time for me to do a piece of theoretical work and any time I try to go too fast the work is always deficient. The problem in this case was that I just didn’t remember what I know about what I have to do to write a good paper and the reviewers found me out.

But it seems that rather a lot of us have had a review which wasn’t just negative, it was just downright rude. As a journal editor I occasionally see some quite awful reviewer responses which never get sent out to authors. One I can remember said simply “This is what gives academics a bad name”.

I’m cheered by the fact that the material that @SDMumford was castigated about did live on. It’s not the first time I’ve heard about people going on from a rejection to write something significant. In the acknowledgements to his book on policy narratives Hugh Miller begins by saying

This project began as an article manuscript that (name of journal and editor) urged me to revise and resubmit in response to anonymous reviewers’ comments. I gave it a try. Problem was, by the time I responded to the issues raised in the reviews, the manuscript had expanded to 50 pages. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that helped get this book underway. (p. vii)

So there really is a reason to see rejection as leading somewhere, even if not to an immediate publication. A well worded and thoughtful review can be a positive as well as a negative experience. It can work to help us learn what to do next – even if like me, you occasionally forget to remember what it is you already have learned that you have to do.

However, there’s absolutely no excuse for poor reviewer behaviour. You don’t have to be rude, arrogant or vitriolic in order to reject a colleague’s work or to help them learn. Just the rejection is negative impact enough on its own.

Oh – and I’ve been fantasizing about a wall of shame of bad reviews. @SDMumford might start us off with his 1996 review, but I really need more examples. Have you had not just a negative, but actually a downright genuinely dreadfully nasty horrible traumatising review you need to get off your chest? I could start a bit of a virtual exhibition if I had enough samples!!

writing a journal article is managing a word budget – or not

We’ve all heard about the importance of balancing the household budget and the horrors of what happens when you get into debt. No, I’m not going off on a political rant here, just trying to connect academic writing with the commonsense domestic idea of the balanced budget being a Good Thing.

You see, we don’t always think of needing to budget words. We don’t usually hear that when we write we have word budgets which work a bit like the monetary budgets we have for our household expenses. Spend unwisely and you’re in trouble.

Nowhere is this clearer than when writing a journal article.

The vast majority of journals do have word limits which they make clear in their instructions to authors. So all of us start writing a paper knowing that there is a maximum number or words that we ought not to exceed. However it’s never just a question of spending our total word budget, any more than it is with our own domestic allowance. It’s also about how the budget gets divided up, so that all the major expenses are covered.

Now with a journal article, the temptation is to just start writing, perhaps even following a rough outline, and then just stop at about the required length. The trouble with doing this is that while we might have reached the right number of words, the paper may not be balanced.

But does this really matter? Well yes, it does. Let me explain.

If you spend too many words writing about the literatures, you may well not have enough for the methods, or the results, or the conclusion. In reality its usually the conclusion that gets shortchanged, and that means that while you’ve outlined in great and luxurious detail what literatures your work draws on and those it speaks to, you don’t actually have the word budget left at the end of the article to show how. So you can’t really say what your contribution to the conversation actually is, or why it matters, because you don’t have enough words left in your budget to do so.

Of course the reverse can also be true. If you don’t spend enough of your word budget on the key literatures, then you do have lots to spend on the discussion and conclusion – but you can’t really connect them to anything, because you haven’t spent words wisely in the beginning.

You can also scrimp on words when it comes to methods, and that means that the reader doesn’t know what you’ve done, with whom, when and why. You might have saved yourself lots of words to use for the results, but the reader doesn’t have enough methods information to trust what you have to say.

But it’s not just a question of balancing the word budget between sections. There’s also a question of balance within some sections too. You need to think carefully about how you spend your word budget in the results and discussion section of a paper. How much description does the reader need in order to make sense of the analysis? How many words can you realistically spend displaying your data and justifying your selection? How much is too much, leaving analytic sophistication sacrificed to empirical detail?

Because it is important to make sure that the sections of an article are balanced, as well keeping within the overall word limit, I often suggest to people that they try to allocate word limits to the various chunks of their paper. This not only means that they can think and make decisions beforehand about what needs to be said where, and how economically or expansively, but they can also think about budgeting the time needed to write each block of words.

A good consequence of thinking about word budgets is that it does focus thinking on the reader – what do they need to know and how many words have I got to do this. It also helps us consider the work that each section of the paper has to do, rather than take the sections for granted.

I know that thinking about word budgets sounds really super-organised, and perhaps even a little anally retentive, but working with a word budget is a good exercise to do every now and then, even if it doesn’t become a habit. Because every article and every chapter has slightly different requirements, one word budget is never exactly the same as the next – just like our household expenses ….

please – not a heroic impact narrative

Recently I’ve seen and read a lot of hero/heroine narratives. But no more than is usual in journal articles I’m sent to review and edit. They now seem to be popping up in research impact plans and claims about impact.

You know these heroic narratives – they are everywhere from nursery rhymes to popular films. It’s the knight on a white charger who slays the dragon, the cowboy who rids the town of lazy barflies, the cop who cleans up the burb and sends all those good-for-nuttin drug dealers and pimps to the big house.

There is a research version of this kind of narrative. You know them too I’m sure. The researcher/lecturer/professional rides into town – usually this is an impoverished neighbouhood/really dumb class/group of people/ hopeless policy agenda. Through the process of intervention/teaching/participatory or action research/evaluation the impoverished neighbouhood/really dumb class/group of people floundering around/hopeless policy agenda becomes improved/enlightened/empowered/transformed. Work done, the researcher/lecturer/professional simply has to write the paper and ride out of town.

These stories create a rather dangerous division between the hero/heroine and the saved. The hero/heroine knows and can do everything, and can do no wrong. Those to be saved know/can do nothing and are destined for a hopeless future until the hero/heroine shows up.

This is rarely the case. Students in a class, residents of neighbourhoods made poor, and people whose life circumstances have not gone smoothly, are highly unlikely to be completely ignorant or devoid of know-how. Policy is often contradictory and only sometimes utterly toxic. The hero/heroine riding in does not know local circumstances, and does not actually know everything. They certainly don’t have control of all circumstances and the context. Change, if it occurs, is rarely a simple affair and can be as much a matter of stumbling about, at least some of the time, as it is linear progression easily amenable to categorisation into ‘stages’ and ‘steps’. Change might happen straight away, it might happen some time in the future or it might never happen because things just don’t go the way anyone thought.

But when I read some of the stories of impact – particularly the ones directed towards specific ‘disadvantaged’ communities – I am reminded of the ways in which charitable Victorian ladies distributed food and Bibles to struggling families who actually needed decent wages, housing, safer work, education for their children, sanitation and clean drinking water… Well you get the point. The big question here is who gets asked what’s needed and who decides.

At a time when funders and policy makers push researchers to produce plans and cases which show ‘impact’ I wonder if we are not forgetting that impact does not mean redemption. While researchers can work for social justice – and ought to in my view, but this means different things in different discipines – and can help things improve/get better/change, it is rarely the case that we do this by ourselves. Nor is it the case that those we work with are simply a blank canvas on which we work our stuff… the people we intend to ‘help’ are able to make decisions too. Nor is our knowledge and know how all that counts… nor is research ever really a straightforward case of us-doing-it-for-them-without-any-glitches as we set it out in a research plan. Research is highly dependent on other people and their good will, knowledge and skills and their capacity to say yes, maybe or – no, go away.

The production of research impact plans and cases as heroic narratives is tempting, but pretty unrealistic and problematic. Well, that’s my view anyway.

So before putting pen to paper to write about how our research will have or has had an effect in the real world, it seems critical to ask ourselves some hard questions. Perhaps these might be a starter:

• Who decides that the research has had impact and how?
• Who gets to tell the story of events, to whom and with what effects?
• In whose interests is this?
• Where is mess in the impact story?
• Who is the hero/heroine of this plan/case? Does the research impact plan/case HAVE to have one?

Perhaps you can think of additional questions that could be asked of impact plans and cases.

writing course day four

Today in the writing course we began with a shut-up-and-write about what needed to go in the methods section.

• What does the journal’s community expect in this section?
• What do readers need to know to trust what you have to say?
• Do you need to situate the study epistemologically?
• What are the methodology and the method. (You may need to say what stance you are taking)
• Provide an audit trail – who, how many, how often, what data
• How was the data analysed?
• What ethical issues were dealt with and how?

We then talked about some possible structures for the ‘report and discuss’ part of the paper and did another longer shut-up-and write about what needed to go into this most important and longest part of the paper – including:

• How much description is required in order for the reader to understand your results?
• If you give examples, why these?
• How does the analysis connect with the literatures?
• Does the journal expect theorisation, and if so how much and of what kind?
• Does the theory frame, and if so do you need a separate section at the outset to explain this framing?

After this we worked on headings that organised this material.

A final shut-up-and-write focused on what needed to go into the conclusion.

We then looked at an article that we’d all read overnight and asked the following questions – these of course are also questions to ask of our own papers:

• Does the article address a question that is significant in the field and/or professional practice?
• Does it bring together interesting literatures?
• If it is empirical, is the research design convincing? Is it innovative? Is it seriously substantive?
• Does the article do more than describe and analyse?
• If it theorises, is it a sophisticated and informative/instructive?
• Does it have an angle that is new/different?
• Does it take the field somewhere?
• Will it be cited a lot? If so by whom?

That was then it. The participants now have to take their abstract, their road map and headings, and the various pieces of holding text produced through shut-up-and-write, and turn them into a draft.

I hope they are all brilliant.