Format, Flexibility, and Speed: Palgrave Pivot | The Academic Book of the Future. Guest post by Jen McCall – Global Head of Humanities, Scholarly Division and Publisher, Theatre & Performance at Palgrave Macmillan. Jen discusses Palgrave Macmillan’s short-form monograph, the Pivot – what prompted the development of this publishing format; how it operates within current contexts of publishing, academia, and the REF; and how the academic book of the future must be flexible. I have written a book for my research, but it’s not quite a monograph”, our editors would often hear when visiting academics on-campus.
“And it’s too long for a journal article. I don’t suppose you’d accept something 50,000 words long, would you?” Or alternatively, “I don’t have the time to publish a book. I’d better off getting this research out quickly, by splitting it into several journal articles, although that wouldn’t be my preferred option.” The idea for our mid-length research format, Palgrave Pivot, came from conversations such as these. What our authors told us The Birth of Palgrave Pivot. Nonfiction Writing Advice. People have asked me for advice on writing nonfiction online, so here are some tips: 1. Divide things into small chunks Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better.
If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”. Once you understand this principle, you can generalize it to other aspects of your writing. Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. Remember that clickbait comes from big media corporations optimizing for easy readability, and that the epitome of clickbait is the listicle. 2. This is really closely linked to the last tip. Again, the clickbaiters are our gurus – they intersperse images throughout their content. Watch the blue twirly thing until you forget how bored you are by this essay, then continue. Or you can be more subtle.
This sentence has five words. The Winnower | Open Scholarly Publishing. Summer is over, and that means that millions of students are heading back to Universities around the world. Professors are preparing their syllabi and lectures, and students are getting ready for classes (read: spending hundreds of dollars on books). Over the next eight months there will be hundreds of millions of essays written by university students, and graded by professors and teaching assistants (TAs). What does that mean for student publishing? Well, not much. For the most part, students do not publish their work, which makes the professors and TAs the sole readers of hundreds of millions of essays. What if these essays were published online for all to read and evaluate?
“Aren’t you worried about publishing student essays? Arguably some of the essays are not so great, but that is true for all scholars, including distinguished professors. “Why publish student essays” There are various reasons we think students should publish their essays with us. How are we going to do it? Questions? Ly.js Open-Source Announcement. November 17, 2015 A growing number of graphing tools and libraries allow anyone to make beautiful, interactive web-based graphs. By interactively visualizing our data online, we share complex ideas in an exploratory, visual, open, and collaborative way.
Today, Plotly is announcing that we have open-sourced plotly.js, the core technology and JavaScript graphing library behind Plotly’s products (MIT license). It's all out there and free. Any developer can now integrate Plotly’s library into their own applications unencumbered. Plotly.js supports 20 chart types, including 3D plots, geographic maps, and statistical charts like density plots, histograms, box plots, and contour plots. We’re big fans of collaboration, freedom, and perpetual motion. Despite the possibilities that the web offers, the core plotting libraries in scientific software like MATLAB, R, and Python still create static image files rather than dynamic, interactive charts.
Plotly.js was instigated by Dr. Plotly.js Highlights. 43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately. When you’re revising any piece of writing — a novel, a news article, a blog post, marketing copy, etc. — there are certain words you should delete to make the text stronger and cut your word count. When I’m writing a novel, one of my last drafts focuses on cutting these useless words. Removing them helps speed up the pacing of both action and dialogue, and makes your work more polished and professional. While this might not be the ultimate list of all words you should remove, these are the ones I look for when I’m doing revisions, so I thought other writers out there would find this helpful!
Also, my examples below might be exaggerated, but I hope they get the points across. Words you should delete Really, very. That. Just. Then. Totally, completely, absolutely, literally. Definitely, certainly, probably, actually, basically, virtually. Start, begin, began, begun. Rather, quite, somewhat, somehow. Said, replied, asked, and any other dialogue tag. “You have a map,” said Ramona. Could be: Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title. An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, or languish unread among hundreds of millions of other documents on the Web.
Patrick Dunleavy presents examples of frequently used useless titles and advises on using a full narrative title, one that makes completely clear your argument, conclusions or findings. When you want to get your paper or chapter read and appreciated by a wide audience, adopted for courses, and hopefully cited by great authors in good journals — in short, when you want to ‘sell’ your writing to colleagues — titles can play a key role. It is obvious too that a title is how you ‘brand’ your text, how you attract readers. Image credit: sailko (CC BY-SA) Even after other researchers have found and read your text, titles remain important.
About the Author. Designing conference posters - Colin Purrington. A large-format poster is a big piece of paper or wall-mounted monitor featuring a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your novel experimental approach, your amazing results in graphical form, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others — if all text is kept to a minimum (less than a 1000 words), a person could fully read your poster in 5-10 minutes. Section content • DOs and DON’Ts • Adding pieces of flair • Presenting • Motivational advice • Software • Templates • Printing • Useful literature • Organizing a poster session What to put in each section Below, I’ve provided rough tips on how many words each of these sections might have, but those guesses are assuming you have a horizontal poster that is approximately 3×4′.
Adjust accordingly. DOs and DON’Ts 1. 2. 3. Malignant side effects of null-hypothesis significance testing. Thesis Writing. How to write a scientific paper. Several years ago, my long-time mate, colleague and co-director, Barry Brook, and I were lamenting how most of our neophyte PhD students were having a hard time putting together their first paper drafts. It’s a common problem, and most supervisors probably get their collective paper-writing wisdom across in dribs and drabs over the course of their students’ torment… errhm, PhD.
And I know that every supervisor has a different style, emphasis, short-cut (or two) and focus when writing a paper, and students invariably pick at least some of these up. But the fact that this knowledge isn’t innate, nor is it in any way taught in probably most undergraduate programmes (I include Honours in that list), means that most supervisors must bleed heavily on those first drafts presented to them by their students. Bleeding is painful for both the supervisor and student who has to clean up the mess – there has to be a better way. -1. 0. 1. 2. Why are you doing this? 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Related. Daniel Lakens: The perfect t-test. I've created an easy to use R script that will import your data, and performs and writes up a state-of-the-art dependent or independent t-test.
The goal of this script is to examine whether more researcher-centered statistical tools (i.e., a one-click analysis script that checks normality assumptions, calculates effect sizes and their confidence intervals, creates good figures, calculates Bayesian and robust statistics, and writes the results section) increases the use of novel statistical procedures. Download the script here: For comments, suggestions, or errors, e-mail me at D.Lakens@tue.nl. The script will likely be updated - check back for updates or follow me @Lakens to be notified of updates.Correctly comparing two groups is remarkably challenging. When performing a t-test researchers rarely manage to follow all recommendations that statisticians have made over the years. Baguley, T. (2012). Cumming, G. (2012). Jeffreys, H. (1961). Welcome to Journalysis | Journalysis. KIPWORLD : A Brief Outline for Organising/Writing the PhD Thesis: Chapters I, II, & III. How to get published in an academic journal: top tips from editors | Higher Education Network.
Writing for academic journals is highly competitive. Even if you overcome the first hurdle and generate a valuable idea or piece of research - how do you then sum it up in a way that will capture the interest of reviewers? There’s no simple formula for getting published - editors’ expectations can vary both between and within subject areas. But there are some challenges that will confront all academic writers regardless of their discipline. How should you respond to reviewer feedback? Is there a correct way to structure a paper? And should you always bother revising and resubmitting? The writing stage 1) Focus on a story that progresses logically, rather than chronologically Take some time before even writing your paper to think about the logic of the presentation. 2) Don’t try to write and edit at the same time Open a file on the PC and put in all your headings and sub-headings and then fill in under any of the headings where you have the ideas to do so.
Submitting your work. Reproducibility Guide. False-Positive Psychology. Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant + Author Affiliations Joseph P. Simmons, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 551 Jon M. Huntsman Hall, 3730 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104 E-mail: jsimmo@wharton.upenn.edu Leif D. Nelson, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1900 E-mail: leif_nelson@haas.berkeley.edu Uri Simonsohn, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 548 Jon M.
Huntsman Hall, 3730 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104 E-mail: uws@wharton.upenn.edu Abstract In this article, we accomplish two things. Our job as scientists is to discover truths about the world. Perhaps the most costly error is a false positive, the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis. The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom.
It is rare, and sometimes impractical, for researchers to make all these decisions beforehand. How Bad Can It Be? Discussion Table 1. Little-Known Punctuation Marks for National Punctuation Day. Scientific Protocols - A free and easy way to share scientific protocols. COS | Stats. Want to get information about upcoming workshops and new resources? Subscribe to our email list. Free One-on-One Consulting Services Email Consulting: Have a question that you think could be answered over email, or just want to get some general suggestions of resources to look into? Email stats-consulting@cos.io with your questions. We will try our best or respond within 1-2 business days. Online consulting by appointment: Want to talk through your problem in real time? Free Training Online Workshops We offer online workshops on topics related to reproducible research and good statistical practices. On-site Workshops Want a more in-depth, hands-on experience for you lab, department, or organization?
What can we do? We handle a variety of statistical and methodological questions related to reproducible practices, research design, data analysis, and data management. Sample questions: I’m starting a new line of research, so I’m unsure about what the effect size for my studies will be. Yep. T&F Newsroom. Taylor & Francis, the European Association of Social Psychology and the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists, are launching an innovative new social psychology journal, Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology (CRSP) which aims to create a paradigm shift in how research is conducted and reported in this field. The editors, Kai Jonas, University of Amsterdam, and Joseph Cesario, Michigan State University, along with the editorial board, will begin reviewing research proposals in late 2014 for the first volume to be published in 2016. CRSP will be the first social psychology journal to publish only pre-registered papers.
The journal will have a strong focus on methodology and transparency in the research process. Authors will submit their research proposals to the journal and these will be reviewed and accepted on the basis of the proposed methodology. All papers will then be published so long as the studies are conducted and analyzed as agreed in the pre-registered proposal. Recommendations | Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors. 1. Why Authorship Matters Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications. Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.
Because authorship does not communicate what contributions qualified an individual to be an author, some journals now request and publish information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in a submitted study, at least for original research. 2. The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria: All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. 3. Cognitive Science | Research Topics. Topic Editors: Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science, Spain Hanne De Jaegher, University of the Basque Country, Spain Submission Closed. This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. An important amount of research effort in psychology and neuroscience over the past decades has focused on the problem of social cognition.
This problem is understood as how we figure out other minds, relying only on indirect manifestations of other people's intentional states, which are assumed to be hidden, private and internal. This interactive expansion of the conceptual and methodological toolkit for investigating social cognition, we now propose, can be followed by an expansion into wider and deeply-related research questions, beyond (but including) that of social cognition narrowly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article.