Journal articles: the ‘Thing Explainer’ version

Some while back I had a great conversation with my friend and esteemed library colleague @_moo_ about how the structure of a journal article can be explained in very simple language, even if the thought processes that lie beneath it might feel convoluted. “Look,” I said, putting my beer down briefly, “The ‘findings’ bit is really just ‘what I did’, right, and the methods section is just ‘how I decided to do it’, and if you put in a bit at the end about ‘further research’, well, that’s basically ‘Here’s what I didn’t get around to so, like, someone else should, yeah?'”

That’s a fairly loosely paraphrased version, given that we weren’t on our first beer. But what I remember of the conversation inspired me to have a go at writing a ‘simple English’ version of how journal articles in the social sciences are often constructed. I figured that if Randall Monroe could explain rocket science (or at least the Saturn V rocket) in the most common thousand English words, we should be able to do the same for scholarly comms. (Oxymoronic? Never!)

I showed it to participants at an Information Literacy Group Research Day, and they seemed to think it was OK, so here it is.

Here’s the thing I did	Introduction
This is why it needed doing
Here’s what other people said about this thing	Literature review
·    And what they left out
Here’s how I did it	Methods
This is why I did it that way
·    Here’s someone else doing it this way because that helped me see why it would work for my thing
·    Here’s why doing it this way meant I’d be able to actually learn something from it
Here’s how it might not have worked fully, all the same	Limitations
Oh, and this is why it’s OK to do it to humans	Ethical implications
Here’s what happened	Findings
This is what I think it means for what I started out wondering	Discussion
This is what it means for the rest of us and what we do (or know)
Here’s what else we could do about this	Further research

Note: it’s absolutely not meant to be followed slavishly. Lots of good articles deviate from this structure, especially more theoretical pieces; but it might be a handy springboard for jumping off. Or even a launch pad.

(Updated) downloadable version

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Image: Up Goer Five, xkcd.com (CC BY-NC 2.5)

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Publication without tears: a workshop for doctoral students

I’m a little sleep-deprived at the moment as this week I paid a brief visit to Aberdeen for the iDocQ student conference – up on Sunday night on the sleeper train, left for home again at 3pm Monday afternoon, finally got home at half past midnight on Tuesday … But I had a brilliant time at the conference, especially listening to the ‘One Minute Madness’ presentations where students talked about their doctoral research, and I really enjoyed giving this presentation on publishing.

The first part of this talk is inherited from previous JIL editor (and ANCIL co-conspirator) Jane Secker. It’s designed to be a demystifying glimpse inside the ‘black box’ of publishing – because nobody really knows what happens when you submit an article to a journal! This gives a step-by-step overview of how we work with articles submitted to the Journal of Information Literacy, from the peer review process through the copyediting stage right through to final publication.

The second section invited the listeners to think about their own research and what could be published from it. As this conference was specifically for PhD students, I talked about how theses and articles differ in scope and characteristics, and why it might not work to simply try to condense your thesis. We finished up with some of my favourite tips for managing the mess and uncertainty of the writing process. These include a gem from Jane – think about writing as like eating an elephant: break it down into bite-sized chunks!

Image from Pixabay (CC0)