Part 2 of ‘The Foundations of Academic Organization’ blog series Academic knowledge institutions developed piecemeal over centuries, yet each of seven pre-modern phases have left us with ‘legacy’ practices that are still with us today. Modern academia is thus a ‘layer cake’ of different ways of doing research. Academic development…

An introduction to ‘The Foundations of Academic Organization’ blog series Patrick Dunleavy Perhaps the most depressing maxim of the normally upbeat philosopher Daniel Dennett is: ‘A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library’. The quote perfectly captures the feeling that a lot of us may fall prey to in…

PATRICK DUNLEAVY (Writing For Research) The open science movement has been gathering force in STEM disciplines for many years, and some of its procedural elements have been adopted also by quantitative social scientists. However, little work has yet been done on exploring how more ambitious open science principles might be…

Patrick Dunleavy — @Write4Research and London School of Economics With inputs from: Jane Tinkler (Nine Dots Prize), Sierra Williams (PeerJ), David Ross (Sage Open Access), Kieran Booluck (LSE Impact blog), Beth Clark (LSE Library, Head of the Digital Scholarship and Innovation Group), and Nancy Graham, (LSE Library, Research Support team head)

In the modern external impacts arena, the development of effective knowledge exchange expertise will be spread across up to nine powerful and often well-funded, centrally managed units. These are the university library, its online open access repository, a university press, website and information technology services, the communications (press/media) division, a…

There are sharply divided views about the academic value and role of chapters in books across disciplines, and within some of them between defenders and critics of the form. In some humanities and social science disciplines chapters account for large shares of outputs and are still well regarded. Here ‘a…

‘The distrust of self-citations is completely misplaced’ (Anne-Will Harzing). If relevant, cite yourself, but only up to the norm in your discipline — Academic work is inherently cumulative — and often in tracing the evolution of ideas, methods or evidence an author or research team should cite their own previous work, especially in fields where most work tackles distinctive or applied problems (not widely studied), or follows a particular method not yet widely…

It’s not just about distributing credit where it’s due — The sociologist Robert Merton wrote perceptively about citations: [T]he institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. [Readers] located outside the domain of science and scholarship may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable…

Here is a deliberately brief summary of guidance that some folk have found useful: There two major models for structuring an academic paper: 1. the conventional model; and 2. the design model. Whatever method you use, it is important to set it up right, and plan your paper beforehand. …