Research Archives - Page 3 of 4

Practical Information Policies

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

data management and information architecture

This is a study of information architecture and management – both in theory and practice. It is written with three groups of readers in mind – managers in libraries and information services; business managers and executives; and students of information science, librarianship, and information management. Elizabeth Orna starts Practical Information Policies by explaining why organizations need policies and strategies for managing information – outlining the benefits of having a policy, and the losses of not having one. She offers interesting definitions of the basic concepts she discusses, such as ‘information policy’, ‘knowledge management’, and ‘information management’.

When she moves on to look at how institutions are organized, she presents a very useful checklist of questions. These can be posed to query the efficiency of management systems. For instance, ‘What provision does the organization make for job handover and transfer of knowledge?’ These sorts of questions will be very useful to those people serious about systems analysis, just as they will strike fear into slack managers facing a quality assurance inspection.

These considerations form the basis for the next part of her study, which deals with making an information audit, then interpreting and presenting its findings. She sees individuals as repositories of skills and knowledge, and her basic argument is that they are both the prime asset of an organization and the agents for successfully managing change. The examples she discusses are drawn from real-life instances of ‘change’ such as ‘premises destroyed by bomb’ and ‘hostile takeover bid’.

The second part of the book is a series of case studies in corporate policy initiatives – including the introduction of a comprehensive IT policy at Amnesty International; the management of change at the British Library; and information strategies in the National Health Service, plus organizations as diverse as an advertising agency, the University of North London, and the Surrey Police.

Of course there are no guarantees that conducting even the most searching and intelligent audit of knowledge is going to save an organization from political or commercial doom. One of the case studies discussed here is NatWest bank, currently being swallowed up by the Royal Bank of Scotland. But as Orna finally observes, when dealing with information systems and large-scale corporate developments, ‘a degree of detachment, and a sense of humour are…useful assets.’

It’s worth saying that this is also a beautifully designed and elegantly produced book. It belongs in that rare category of publications which for book-lovers are interesting to contemplate, irrespective of their content. It follows the modern practice – which has its attractions – of placing short lists of suggested reading after each chapter, rather than in one long bibliography at the end of the book.

This is one for information professionals. The message of Practical Information Policies is that successful ‘knowledge management’ depends on knowledge in human minds, expressed in effective action, fed with appropriate information, and supported by the right blend of IT and systems. It offers readers a straightforward way of working out what their organization needs to know to survive and prosper; what information it requires to ‘feed’ its knowledge base; and how people need to interact in using knowledge and information effectively.

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Elizabeth Orna, Practical Information Policies, Hampshire: Gower, second edition, 1999, pp.375, ISBN: 0566076934

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Preparing Dissertations and Theses

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

postgraduate writing skills from start to finish

Many students reach postgraduate studies and have a difficult time producing their dissertations and theses – for two reasons. First, they’ve probably never written such a long piece of work before and second, because they’ve probably never seen one and therefore don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. Bill Allison and Phil Race start off this brief guide to postgraduate writing skills with the first issue which most students are likely to confront – how to choose a research topic.

This needs to be done with some care, because you can be saddled with your choice for anything up to three years or more. It’s not unknown for some people to become bored by their own subject. Fortunately, the preliminary work of looking at the literature and searching the databases of research, is a lot easier these days since most of this information will be available on line.

Next they explain what’s required in a research project – the ability to identify a problem, analyse it, read the literature, develop a research method, select the data, do the work, draw conclusions, and write up the results following the academic conventions of your subject.

The rest of the book is devoted largely to producing the written product which will be the material outcome of the research. This involves understanding the structure of dissertations and theses – knowing the correct order of their parts. This covers items which students often find difficult, such as how to reduce a thesis which might be anything up to 80-100,000 words long into a succinct 400 word abstract.

The other things which may people find difficult are quotations, referencing systems, and bibliographies. These are all worth understanding as soon as possible, because research which is perfectly successful can easily be referred back for ‘further revisions’ if the referencing is irregular or the bibliography doesn’t follow the specified standard.

Next they cover the process of doing the research itself – the actual work of the project and how to keep track of what you are doing. They stress the importance of writing up your work, organising your files, keeping records, and backing up what you produce – which should be easy now that the price of disk space and storage has fallen.

The last part of the book deals with the really small details of the physical object you will create – the page layout and margins, abbreviations, tables, the size of fonts, line spacing, and everything down to the way the finished pages will be bound.

So that covers just about everything. It’s up to you now to do the necessary work – and then you can collect your degree.

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Brian Allison and Phil Race, The Student’s Guide to Preparing Dissertations and Theses, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004, pp.100, ISBN: 0415334861

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Publish your academic writing

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

getting your academic work into print – and on line

If you want to get ahead in the world of colleges and universities, there are no two ways about it – you will have to face the challenges of academic publishing. It might be articles, reports, or the results of a research project. It could be chapters from a thesis, or the whole work itself – re-drafted into book form.

Quite apart from your subject, there are two important things to keep in mind. The first is that your work will be scrutinised not only by the publisher, but by specialist reader(s) who are experts in your subject. They will be looking at the quality of your work in terms of commonly accepted academic standards; and they will checking to see that you have demonstrated that you are up to date with the latest research in your field of study.

If they give your work the thumbs up, the publisher will them be making sure that you have presented your work in compliance with their own house style guides. Publishers are increasingly demanding these days : they use economic arguments to transfer a lot of the work of compositors and editors back onto authors.

Writing for Academic Journals
Rowena Murray is an experienced writer on the subject of academic writing. She is author of How to Write a Thesis and How to Survive Your Viva. What she says in this guide should be encouraging for people in ‘new’ universities, people in disciplines which have only recently been considered academic, and those in professions such as the NHS which are under pressure to become more academic.

She deals with the important issue of getting to know your target publications. There’s really no way round this: you need to know what they’re looking for, and how they want it presented. For those who might not have written a scholarly paper before, she shows you how to analyse one and uncover its basic structure and arguments – with a view of course to constructing your own.

The next part of the book deals with how to find a topic and develop an argument. You can do this by mining your reading notes, expanding a brief presentation, or maybe adapting a chapter from your dissertation or thesis.

There’s also lots of sound advice on planning, outlining, and the art of writing abstracts. She also shows you how to draft your text and create the appropriate style. This is followed by the process of revision and editing,

Although it is aimed at those writing for publication, this book will in fact be useful for anyone who wishes to sharpen their academic writing skills and understand something about the process of preparing a text for its public launching.

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Getting Published
Jerry Wellington starts by looking at the variety of positive reasons why people write and publish – as well as the numerous fears which might prevent others from doing so. He argues largely in favour of publishing in established, printed journals on the grounds that they offer the author more credence and protection. Next comes advice in taking account of the publication in which your writing will appear. You need to take into account its readership, and most crucially the type of article or review and how it will best fit the editor’s requirements.

He then goes through the process of submitting an article for publication – both from the writer’s and publisher’s point of view. Much of this is taken up with the pros and cons of the peer review process. Then comes the case of publishing in book form. After warning quite rightly that you shouldn’t write a word until you have a contract, he then shows you how to prepare a publication proposal in great detail. Finally he looks at future possible trends in publishing – which focus largely on electronic journals and what’s called ‘self-archiving’ – which is covered next.

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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads
This is a review of the arguments for and against electronic publishing of academic writing – largely the work of Stephen Harnad. His argument is that scholars working in what he calls the ‘esoteric’ fields of narrow specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers.

And since they don’t expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn’t they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. Once their work is on the Web, they can invite comment, make whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively. Most importantly, they can avoid the dinosaur procedures and high costs of traditional print journals. As he puts it himself (in characteristically succinct form):

“What scholars…need is electronic journals that provide (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive.”

The more books one reads on electronic publication, Hypertext, and digital technology, the more one realises how convenient, comfortable, portable, and aesthetically pleasing the printed book remains – produced by what Nicholas Negroponte describes as “squeezing ink onto dead trees”. But this does not invalidate Harnad’s proposal: if a text is urgent, hot, and written for a minority – we’ll read it on-screen, add comments, and send it back within the hour, rather than wait for the Dinosaur Publishing methods (and timescale) of ‘getting it onto paper’.

This is a book for specialists, but it encompasses issues which are part of the profound effect of the forces of digitisation and the Internet. The vested interests of commercial publishers and academic institutions may take some time to shift, but their fault lines are remorselessly exposed here. Harnad’s vision and his debate with contemporaries gives us a view of a world which is breaking apart, in the very process of being overtaken by the forces of New Technology.

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Towards Electronic Journals
Carol Tenopir takes a similar view and considers it more-or-less inevitable that print production costs will push academic writing towards digitised publication. The Web was actually created so that academic researchers could share their findings across the Internet – doing so quickly and free from any commercial restrictions.

If you write a paper on rocket science, you can put the results directly onto a web site and announce the fact to special interest groups. That way, you can invite feedback, critical comment, and peer review – and receive it fairly quickly, instead of having to wait up to two years as you would if the paper was put into the slow-moving production methods of commercial publishers.

Scholarly journals take a long time to produce; they are very expensive; and very few people read them. Why bother then, when the same results can be made available fast, free of charge, and to a much wider audience? How much does it cost? What are the trends in scholarly article authorship and readership? What are the overall implications of electronic journals to publishers, libraries, scientists, and their funders? These are some of the fundamental issues underpinning this book.

The argument on costs is overwhelming. Electronic publishing saves on printing costs, re-printing costs, storage costs, archiving, and inter-library loan costs. And all the other arguments return again and again to the obvious advantages of electronic publication.

They point out that readers both inside and outside universities will continue to demand materials in printed form. Which is true. It’s amazing how many people continue to print out documents – for the sake of convenience, and habit. But to quote Nicholas Negroponte again, the future is digital.

This is a study which is aimed at researchers, librarians, publishers, and anyone interested in electronic publication, and they go out of their way to provide hard evidence for decision-makers.

If you are interested in one of the lesser-known but burgeoning forms of electronic publishing – then you should find this a rich source of hard facts for the debate.

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Research for essays

August 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

sample from HTML program and PDF book

1. The amount of background reading and research you are required to do for producing an essay will depend largely upon the level of your studies. Don’t imagine that every essay question requires the same approach.

2. In studies leading up to and including GCSE ‘A’ level (twelfth grade in the USA), tutors will probably be quite satisfied if you demonstrate close acquaintance with the course material (the article, novel, text book, or chapter under consideration). Most essay assignments will be set to check that you have engaged with this material. You are not normally expected to deal with much more.

3. At first year undergraduate level, tutors will be primarily interested in checking that you have grasped the basics of your subject. In further or higher education, most of this subject-matter will come from lectures, text books, and possibly tutorial discussion. [Science subjects may also have ‘practicals’.] The core or set texts will be considered most important, but reading beyond this would be welcomed.

4. At second or third year undergraduate level you will be increasingly expected to range beyond the course materials as a demonstration of your own intellectual curiosity and your ability to understand and discuss the opinions of others. Secondary reading will probably be recommended and considered necessary.

5. At third year and particularly beyond into postgraduate studies, your grasp of the subject will probably be closely related to your acquaintance with the ‘literature’ of your subject. This requires wide-ranging reference to secondary and even tertiary material. You will be expected to show that you are aware of the work of others, and can incorporate their concepts into your own arguments.

6. However, in almost all subjects, the most important point is that you should be closely acquainted in detail with the primary and basic materials of your subject. This may be texts (novels, the Bible, historical studies) works of art (music scores, paintings, films) scientific work (research papers, the results of experiments), or some body of knowledge.

7. In some subjects you may be required to produce a ‘review of the literature’. That is, you are asked to summarise the views of others on a particular topic. This review acts as a demonstration that you have grasped and can discuss the issues of a subject as they are currently perceived. In this case, the range of material you discuss will be determined by what is available. [Keep in mind, however, that discussing other people’s arguments is no substitute for your own insightful reading, first hand experience, or fresh, original enquiry.]

8. How many books should you choose as background support for your essay or project? Many students make the mistake of equating quantity with quality. The strength of your essay will not be simply proportionate to the number of books you take out of the library.

9. Don’t imagine that the ‘secret’ answer to an essay question lies locked away in some secondary text, which would answer all your problems if only you could locate it . This is not true. Most essays simply require the production of a moderately well-informed argument in response to a question, with evidence to support your claims.

10. There is another essay-writing myth of a similar kind. Don’t think that success will rest on your locating the most recent, fashionable, or obscure item from the short loan collection in the library. Unless the question specifically calls for a discussion of the most up-to-date research, this is unlikely to be the case. The majority of essay questions can be answered using standard text books and traditional course material.

11. With the exception of those subjects which call for a review of current research, you should avoid turning your essay into a catalogue or summary of the views of others. An essay which is ssentially ‘X says this … whereas Y claims that … and Z points out that …’ creates a bad impression on two counts. It reads like intellectual name-dropping, and it suggests that you can’t be bothered generating an argument of your own.

12. Remember that the research or opinions of others should be used to reinforce your argument – not the other way round. You should present your own case first, then explain your argument, set out your evidence, and discuss the issues involved. Only when you have finished doing this should you bring in the work of others to support your case.

13. Some students mistakenly imagine that the solution to the problem of essay writing is to borrow as many books as possible from the library. They think ‘The answer must be in there somewhere!’ This is probably not a good idea – because in doing so you burden yourself with too much material to search through.

14. Your time and effort will probably be more effective if you select just a few books which are directly relevant to the task involved. Take a few moments to survey any book before you go to the trouble of borrowing it. If it is not appropriate – leave it on the shelf.

15. You are likely to benefit more by reading and digesting two or three relevant texts, rather than skimming through several in a superficial manner. This will be profitable to you both intellectually and in terms of producing a good essay.

16. In most subjects you should make a clear distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. For instance, in literary studies Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park would be a primary text. A critical work by A.B. Smith called Jane Austen’s Heroines would be a secondary text because it represents Smith’s opinions of Jane Austen’s work. A book of critical theory by C.D. Jones called The Ideas of A.B. Smith would be a tertiary text because it deals with Jones’s opinions of Smith’s opinions of Jane Austen.

17. You can see that each of these texts takes us one step further away from the primary source – which is Mansfield Park. This would be equally true in other disciplines such as history, sociology, and philosophy. [Some contemporary theorists such as deconstructionists would not make these distinctions. For the most radical of such people, all texts might be regarded as primary.]

18. When you are given suggestions for further reading by your tutors, these lists represent possible avenues of exploration related to the topic. These bibliographies should save you time hunting for relevant material. However, don’t imagine that it is necessary to read every one of the suggested titles. Browse through the texts in the library if possible, but select just those which you think will be most helpful.

19. Making these distinctions calls for good reading skills. You should be able to look through a book quickly, making an assessment of its value to your purpose. Take note of what level it is aimed at, how wide or narrow its scope, and what is its relevance to your task.

20. Your reading and research may also take you into the realm of electronic sources – the digital texts, databases, and on-line information of the Internet. Here too you should be realistic and selective. Don’t imagine that just because somebody has created a Web page on your subject, it necessarily contains information more important than the dusty volumes in your library. You still need to evaluate the usefulness and relevance of what you find.

21. Similarly, don’t imagine that hours and hours spent surfing is any guarantee that you will find what you require. Although a great deal of data is being made available electronically, there is still much work to be done in the digitising of information.

22. However, searching the Internet is certainly a powerful form of research. You can recover documents from the other side of the world in a matter of seconds, ‘visit’ libraries without moving from your chair, and download information which was updated only twenty-four hours ago – or less. One resource you might find very useful is other people’s bibliographies. Because the Net has such a friendly and generous population, you will discover that fellow students and academic staff are often willing to share the fruits of many hours’ labour. You might take advantage of this – and put back into the system some of your own endeavours.

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Research Methods for English Studies

April 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

new approaches to literary studies for post-graduates

Research Methods for English Studies is a collection of essays on the subject of research skills, methods, and methodology in the field of literary studies. The essays betray a profound unease which has (quite rightly) begun to infect this branch of academic activity. For they are in a sense answers to questions which are rarely if ever asked in this section of the humanities. Questions such as ‘What exactly is research in literary studies? What methods are used? What validity do the results have? Indeed, compared to other subjects such as biology, history, physics, astronomy, and sociology, what is literary studies about?

Some practitioners can answer these questions by taking fast hold of a vaguely related discipline and writing about the biography of an author, the genesis and publication history of a text, or the nature of its reception by the reading public. But the vast majority of what is called literary studies (and not just ‘English’) is nothing more than one person’s opinions about a text or a body opf work. Even worse, it may be opinions about opinions, or opinions about theories. There will be no declaration of critical method attached to works submitted for assessment or publication, no theory to be tested or conditions which can be reproduced – only a long bibliography of works consulted, packed out with the names and works of currently fashionable critics.

This is the state off affairs that has obtained for a long time in institutions of higher education, and in the prevailing climate it is likely to be coming to an end. These essays, whilst betraying unease, are also in a sense offering a lifeline to those who wish to find a niche for themselves in departments of literature or humanities. They are saying ‘Look! Here’s a new angle, so that you can retain tenure’.

Carolyn Steedman (a historian) for instance offers a chapter on the romance of working in archives, though she has no specific advice on what you might do when you get to it. Mary Evans promotes ‘auto/biography’ as a new approach – but this misses the fact that writing accounts of authors’ personal lives is a form of history, not literary studies. The activity of considering a number of biographies of Sylvia Plath amounts to not much more than a higher form of weekend supplement celebrity gossip, which says nothing about her poetry.

Next comes oral reminiscence. The argument here is that this enables a recovery of lost or forgotten history. All well and good, but there is no explanation of how this applies to literary studies. The example discussed merely compares the memories of a Home Guard volunteer with the accuracy or otherwise of Dad’s Army.

A chapter on visual methodologies carries with it similar problems. It is quite true that pictures can be analysed and interpreted, but since the vast majority of literary texts have no illustrations at all, it is difficult to to imagine how such an approach would help us to understand An Essay on Criticism or King Lear.

Discourse analysis looks more promising, because it focusses its attention on language, but an analysis of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice stretches for a whole page without mentioning the term irony, though it does have space to complain about the text’s ‘focus on heteronormativity’. But at least Gabrielle Griffin goes on to explain how computer programs can be used to analyse texts – an activity which might keep somebody in post via a research grant whilst legitimately claiming to be literary studies.

Ethnographic studies at first seems a possibility, but studies of how readers consume texts, why they choose one book rather than another, and what the significance of their activity might be – all are ultimately sociological questions or matters of private biography. They do not contribute to literary understanding or interpretation.

Catherine Belsey appears to be on much firmer ground with ‘textual analysis’. Indeed, she even offers a practical exercise to demonstrate its efficacy. But her exercise has problems right from the outset. First of all she analyses a painting (Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia) and then she does nothing but raise questions about its meaning, based on nothing more than you could gain from a few minutes in front of the object, with an encyclopedia or Google search open by your side.

With much invoking of Roland Barthes, she argues that meanings in a text are ‘ultimately undecidable’, which she sees as good news for researchers, because it will keep them in business for ever. This is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy that today’s crop of post-graduates would do well to treat with extreme caution when applying for grants funded by tax-payers’ money.

There’s a whole chapter on interviewing authors (more celebrity gossip) and even creative writing as ‘research’ before the collection ends with the most sensible chapter of all – the use of computational technology as an aid to research. This includes the digitisation of primary sources, computer-aided textual analysis, the creation of electronic texts, and the establishment of multi-featured hypertext editions. All of these approaches are of use to other scholars, and they tend to be free of the ‘Look at me’ attitudes which infest much of what passes for contemporary criticism. It’s significant that this chapter has by far the largest and most useful supplement of suggested further reading and follow-up web sites.

So – this rabbit is finally pulled out of the hat at the very end – but anyone following the general advice in this book should be warned. In the current economic climate many of these self-indulgent approaches to ‘research’ are likely to be doomed. Some of the contributors to this volume are likely to be listed for early retirement by the time you come to read what they have written.

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Gabrielle Griffin (ed), Research Methods for English Studies Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0748621555

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Succeeding with a Masters Dissertation

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a step-by-step guide to post-graduate writing

Many students find the idea of writing a masters dissertation at postgraduate level a daunting prospect. And that’s quite understandable. They will probably never before have had to produce a work of 10,000 to 15,000 words; they will be uncertain about its content; and they will almost certainly never have seen what a dissertation looks like. John Biggam’s book is a guide to the entire process of developing postgraduate writing skills, from start to finish, and the most useful aspect of his approach is that he breaks the procedure down into separate steps and explains each of them in detail.

He starts from what is often the most puzzling stage of all – defining the project. Many students know the topic which interests them most, but turning this into a research proposal can be a long and frustrating process. It’s easy to lose a lot of time changing your mind and pursuing ideas which shift amorphously the very moment you think you have pinned them down.

He offers templates to help solve this problem, outlines the key issues at each stage, and even points to the most common traps that students fall into. This is valuable advice – and it comes from a research supervisor who has seen hundreds and hundreds of examples.

His chapters follow the stages of the process of producing the dissertation itself. How to define the project; making a start with the writing; doing a literature review; choosing the right research methods; dealing with the evidence and producing a conclusion; writing an abstract; and how to present the finished work.

Embedded within all this there are other important issues such as how to create structure, how to define your terms, and how to link one part of your writing to the next so as to create a continuous argument.

He also deals with the issue which many students right up to PhD level find difficult – how to quote from secondary sources and use a referencing system accu rately. He recommends the Harvard system as being popular with both students and tutors alike. Also included is how to conduct both qualitative and quantitative surveys, and what to do with the results when they have been assembled.

One of the suggestions he makes more than once which I thought very useful is that students should make their claims clearly and boldly. Your piece of research may be modestly (and wisely) limited in scope, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t treat it as something important, even if it is only to make your purpose clear to the person reading and assessing it.

He also offers some very good tips for dealing with the oral defence of your work – the viva – and he ends with what many students will probably find the most useful of all – sample extracts of introductions, literature reviews, research methods, project structures, and questionnaires.

Read the advice, follow it, even use the book as a source of reference, and I’m fairly confident that it will help you to produce a masters dissertation that succeeds. Just like it says on the tin.

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John Biggam, Succeeding with your Masters Dissertation, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2008, pp.268, ISBN 0335227198

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Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guidance on advanced academic writing techniques

Yet another writing guide. Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers is aimed at post-graduates in the social sciences and education. It covers the process of writing from the first steps in conducting research, through to the production of papers for scholarly journals and full length published books. The emphasis throughout is on work which is non-quantitative – that is, writing which knowingly includes a degree of subjectivity and impressionistic reporting – a side of research Peter Woods describes as ‘ethnography’ and which much of the time seems to come dangerously close to creative writing.

He starts with a chapter describing the problems and pain of writing, with copious illustrations from authors who have found it difficult to make a start and just as hard to keep going. This is intended to reassure those struggling that their experience is not unique. Next he discusses the separate parts of a typical academic article, with illustrations from his own work – though strangely enough, he doesn’t spell out first of all what these parts should be.

On the other hand, a chapter on ‘alternative forms of writing’ [non-standard approaches to academic writing] struck me as more interesting, because it offers practical advice on the manner in which writing projects can be presented. Similarly, the best parts of his comments on editing are those in which he examines specific examples, with plenty of good advice on content editing for bias, ambiguity, weak structure, and even libel – though he has an unfortunate tendency to keep bringing in his own publications as source material. [Readers might keep in mind that in the UK ‘researchers’ are assessed on the number of times their work is cited in published works. This might be one sneaky way of pushing up the score.]

There’s a section on collaborative writing where he describes the benefits and dynamics of working as part of a team – though rather too much of this fell back into personal anecdote for my liking. There are other weakness too. His approach often switches disturbingly between guidance and speculation; the mode of address occasionally wobbles uncertainly between ‘one’ and ‘you’; and his exposition switches from surmise to an analysis built on quotes from other writers.

Too often, his emphasis is on describing problems, rather than showing how to solve them. Sometimes, the subject of consideration in any chapter slithers around alarmingly. Chapter sub-headings fail to clarify the internal hierarchy of contents (though this could be the publisher’s fault) and at one point he even includes a personal anecdote into the middle of a bulleted list. These are not examples of good quality writing.

The chapter which I suspect is most likely to be of interest and use to his audience is the last – ‘Writing for Publication’. In this he provides valuable advice on researching the market, with real-life examples. These include how to cope with rejections and how to learn from examples of readers’ reports – which he quotes. He even includes guidance on submitting book proposals, and on negotiating a contract if you have the good luck to have one accepted (and it is often luck). There are also specimen publishers’ guidelines and a sample book proposal which intending writers, from the field of social sciences and education (and well beyond) would do well to study closely.

So, in a sense, this is a book which gets better as it goes along, though the good advice he offers would be more effective if he had followed his own recommendations on clarity of structure, thematic coherence, and rigorous editing.

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Peter Woods, Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers, London: Routledge, 2nd edition 2005, pp.200, ISBN: 0415355397

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Supervising the Doctorate

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

good practice for supporting research projects

Now that supervisor training is compulsory, this practical, no-nonsense handbook is essential reading for both the novice and the experienced higher degree supervisor. But I suspect it will be just as useful for the serious postgraduate research student as well. It is reassuring to know that the book is based on the experiences of a postgraduate research skills workshop run at Cardiff University, and the authors illustrate the procedures and problems with real life examples – all of which ring convincingly true to me.

They start out by recommending that firm guidelines should be established for the nature and structure of the relationship between supervisor and student. Everything needs to be made explicit, and in my experience students need to be made aware of exactly what they are undertaking. Next comes drawing up some sort of schedule of work which is loose enough to give the student flexibility, but firm enough to prevent wasteful ‘drift’. It’s also essential at the outset to establish if the project is feasible. Can it be done? Are any ethical issues raised?

They then go on to the literature review. How to find the literature; how to read it; and how to write about it, including the all important issue of accurate referencing and citation. If you are a supervisor, they offer some good exercises: if you are a student, this section tells you what you should be doing.

They include advice on what is often the laborious issue of data collection. This includes the interesting phenomenon of using post-doctoral researchers as a bridge between supervisor and student.

There are also personal matters to take into account – isolation, poverty, and low morale- all of which can easily develop in the three years or more of doctoral research. They provide useful and realistic advice on these matters, as well as on what they see as the core issue – developing the student’s sense of judgement and good taste.

Of course for most people the hardest part of doing a PhD is writing up to 100,000 words. It’s not something you do often. Their key advice is good: ‘write early and write often’. And they also offer some useful tips on helping to overcome writer’s block.

Probably the most frightening part is the PhD viva, and since it’s something that only happens once for the candidate, it’s not easy to prepare for. But the supervisor can prepare, and they show some case studies to prove the point.

Finally they offer the bonus of advice for activity beyond the degree – that is, helping successful post-docs to advance their careers through networking, teaching, attending conferences, and publishing their work.

This is a very thorough and a thoroughly decent guide to what is often a long and complex process. It’s written for supervisors, but it’s worth reading, whichever side of the examination process you are on.

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Sara Delamont, Paul Atkinson, and Odette Parry, Supervising the Doctorate: a guide to success, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2nd edn, 2004, pp.220, ISBN 0335212638

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The Doctoral Examination Process

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

This is an ambitious book with three separate audiences. It’s main strength is that it is based on research at twenty British universities – eleven ‘old’ and nine ‘new’. Tinkler and Jackson’s approach assumes that the research has been done and the work has been submitted. So it begins withe the Viva – which the Burnham committee described as ‘one of the best kept secrets in British higher education’. They seek to de-mystify the process by looking at what the viva is for, what the expectations of students and examiners are, and what rules (if any) surround the process.

These are more varied (or non-existent) than you might imagine. It turns out rather surprisingly that at the University of Glamorgan for instance, you can pass the viva even if you are dead. Next comes what examiners might be looking for in the thesis which will be discussed during the viva – followed by advice on how to prepare for the experience, short and long term.

Their suggestions are that you should be presenting papers in the department or conferences, attending training courses, and even publishing your own work.

Next come observations on the selection of examiners. Who chooses them? What are their qualifications? And should your supervisor attend the viva as well?

Despite the mystique which still surrounds this part of PhD examination, there are a lot more open regulations these days. Both students and newly appointed supervisors and examiners would do well to read these chapters.

There are also some fascinating case studies illustrating practices in foreign universities, as well as some cautionary tales from the UK where the ‘flexibility’ in the system sometimes means things go wrong.

They then offer something I have never come across before – guidance to examiners on how to assess a doctoral thesis. They even cover a number of different disciplines in doing so. Then it’s a return to support and preparation for the student – using mock vivas and last minute revision.

Finally, they deal with what happens behind the closed doors of the viva itself. (More case studies of horror stories and triumphs.) How to deal with the questions; how to create a confident impression; how to overcome nervousness.

They are right to stress the range of possible outcomes for which candidates should be prepared. If the result is not what you had hoped for, they even cover the appeals process – as well as how to celebrate afterwards if it’s a success.

I think students will find the quotations and real life case studies really interesting. New supervisors and examiners will get an informative overview with some useful comparative studies from a variety of institutions.

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Penny Tinkler and Carolyn Jackson, The Doctoral Examination Process, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004, pp.228, ISBN: 0335213057

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The Student’s Guide to Research Ethics

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

solving moral dilemmas in research projects

You might not think there is a book-length study to be made of the ethical issues in academic research, but Paul Oliver makes a convincing case that there are moral considerations to be made at every stage of the process – from the original concept to the publication of results. The Student’s Guide to Research Ethics starts off with the need to define terms. Is someone a subject, a participant, or an interviewee? Each term contains its own nuances, and these can have an ethical bearing on the relationship between researcher and the people being studied.

The book is mainly aimed at students in education and the social sciences who might be likely to gather information from interviewing people. However the issues it raises are general ones and might be encountered by anyone conducting a research project or doing market research. Tracing the development of a research project from methodology, through data collection and analysis, to publication, he looks in detail at the moral dilemmas which might arise between researcher and subject – including even people who are dead at the time the information is gathered.

Many of the topics he inspects involve making fine distinctions between the rights and responsibilities of the researcher and the interviewee – and sometimes between the researcher and the information that is being gathered. These issues are explored in what becomes a practical philosophic manner, so that the underlying ethical issues are brought to the surface.

He deals with the difficulties of obtaining genuinely ‘informed consent’ amongst respondents, researching vulnerable groups of people, and dealing with problems of permissions and protocols. Even the manner in which data is recorded can raise ethical issues.

He covers issues of privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, ethnocentrism, differences in gender, ethnicity, and religion, participant observation, and the disposal of data when a research project has been completed. It’s all done in a fair and even-handed manner, without any sense of taking sides or favouring the researcher.

He also looks closely at the potential – and actual – difficulties arising from the funding of research projects, of intellectual property rights, and the dissemination of research findings via publication. Although he speaks against Internet publication earlier in the book, I was surprised at this point that there was no mention of it in his discussion of plagiarism.

This will be of particular interest to students in sociology, psychology, management and organisational studies, communication studies, education, and the health service. And although the title suggests it’s for students, I can think of quite a few supervisors who would profit from considering the issues it raises.

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Paul Oliver, The Student’s Guide to Research Ethics, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2nd edition 2010, pp.224, ISBN: 0335237975

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