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How to design a completely uninformative title

Guidance, Publishing

On the LSE Impact of Social Science blog this week, was an interesting post by Patrick Dunleavy on choosing a better title for your article – ‘Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title’.

Dunleavy believes that 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 and that 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. He illustrates his point by presenting examples of frequently used useless titles and advises on using a full narrative title, one that makes completely clear your argument, conclusions or findings.

Now that we’re in the assessment period for the next REF exercise (likely to be REF2020) we need to focus on personal publication strategies which Julie blogged about earlier this month in the post ‘Strategic approaches to getting your work published’. One of the key tips for writing and publishing a journal article is all about getting the title right. This post shares Dunleavy’s key messages and advice:

1. Consider Alternatives

Look seriously, critically and comparatively at a range of possible alternatives. Make a resolution not to be too vague, general, or convention-bound in choosing what words to use. Try and think things through from a reader’s point of view: How will this wording be interpreted by someone scanning on Google Scholar? What will attract them to click through to the abstract?

Generate a minimum of 10 possible titles and print them out on a sheet of paper for careful consideration. Compare these alternatives with each other and see if recombining words from different titles might work better. Type your possible titles as search terms into Google Scholar or subject-specific databases and see what existing work comes up. Is this the right company you want to keep?

2. Link-up the title and content

Look at whether your title words are picked up in the abstract of the the article or chapter, and in the internal sub-headings. It’s a good sign if the title, abstract and sub-headings all use consistent, linking, meshing or nesting concepts and vocabulary. It’s a very bad sign if the title words and concepts don’t recur at all in the abstract and sub-heads, especially if these other elements use different, rival or non-synonymous concepts or wording from the title.

3. A Full Narrative Title

Consider using a full narrative title, one that makes completely clear what your argument, conclusions or findings are. Narrative titles take practice to write well. And they rarely work at the level of whole-book or whole-report titles. But they are often very effective for articles and chapters. e.g.  ‘New Public Management is Dead — Long Live Digital Era Governance’ (full example in original post).

Or

4. Provide some narrative cues

If you reject a full narrative heading, this compromise solution is to at least provide some narrative cues in your title, some helpful hints or signs for readers about the conclusions you have reached or the line of argument you are making. If you have an empty box or an interrogative title already, then ask, how can I make this more informative? So: ‘For Mill, should giving women the vote precede or come after implementing ungendered education?’ does not quite tell us your answer. It hints at a potential difficulty, but it does not yet tell us how you think that Mill addressed it.

Good luck!

BU paper shortlisted for the UKLA/ Wiley-Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award 2014

Congratulations to Associate Professors Julian McDougall and Richard Berger in the Media School who have had a paper (Berger, Richard and McDougall, Julian (2013)  Reading videogames as (authorless) literature.  Literacy 47 (3): 142-149) shortlisted for the UKLA/ Wiley-Blackwell Research in Literacy Education Award 2014. 

This is an output from Julian and Richard’s AHRC funded project on how the videogame L.A. Noire (which was released for Playstation 3 and XBOX 360 in May 2011) can be used to teach the English Literature curriculum (see our previous blog post: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2012/02/01/bus-richard-berger-wins-an-ahrc-grant/).  This was an open access publication, funded from BU’s Open Access Publication Fund.

The award is given annually for papers published in each of UKLA’s journals – Literacy and Journal of Research in Reading (JRR) – judged to be exemplary in terms of the following criteria:

  • Relevance to readership – taking account of an international readership
  • Accessibility to a knowledgeable readership
  • Original content which contributes significantly to existing knowledge or the development of new knowledge, policy or strategy
  • Clear theoretical position
  • Methodologically sound research processes /design appropriate to the theoretical standpoint
  • Sound level of critical analysis
  • Relevant and appropriate citation base 

The shortlists will be announced online next week.  Good luck Julian and Richard!

You can download a copy of the paper on BURO here: http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/20847/

Website training sessions

Training

Screen shot of new website

I just wanted to remind colleagues that we are hosting training sessions for the new research webpages on Friday 7 February and Friday 14 February.

These 90 minute sessions are open to all BU academic staff, post graduate research students and those supporting researchers in their communications activity.

During the session you will learn the following:

  • Why BU has new research webpages
  • How you can upload content to the website
  • How the site can be used most effectively to maximise exposure of BU research.

Sessions are informal and if they fall over lunchtime, do feel free to bring a sandwich!

To book on one of the following sessions please use the links below…

Friday 7 February 2014 12:00-13:30 – S103 Studland House, Lansdowne Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 10:00-11:30 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 14:30-16:00 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

If you have any questions about the website or training sessions, please email the research website team.

 

Workshop by Dr Falko Sniehotta entitled “Behaviour change techniques to promote healthy lifestyles”

Training

Dr Sniehotta is visiting BU to provide staff and postgraduate students the opportunity to participate in a workshop on behaviour change techniques.  The session will give colleagues a flavour of the kinds of techniques one might use to help people make changes to adopt and sustain healthy lifestyles.  After an introduction, the workshop will mainly be spent giving colleagues hands on experience with testing out some of the evidence-based techniques currently in use, and will finish with a presentation from Dr Sniehotta on his current research.  There will be some preparation required before this event of reading  journal articles that  Dr Sniehotta will provide.

Date:      4 March 2014
Time:     10.00 to 12.00 (12.00 to 13.00 free lunch and networking with Dr Sniehotta)
Venue:   Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy Suit, Talbot Campus

Places are limited so you are encouraged to book on line with Eventbrite to avoid disappointment.  Should you book on line and for any reason have to cancel please let Michelle O’Brien know on mobrien@bournemouth.ac.uk or 01202 962771 to offer the place to someone else.

 

Profile of facilitator:
Dr Falko Sniehotta is a behavioural scientist. His research programme aims at developing and testing a) theory of behaviour change and b) interventions to change behaviours relevant to health and health care. This research is conducted with his colleages in the IHS, the Newcastle Health Psychology Group and colleages nationally and internationally.
He is president of the European Health Psychology Society, Associate Editor of Health Psychology Review, and member of the editorial boards of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Psychology & Health and the British Journal of Health Psychology. His post is currently funded by Fuse, the UK CRC Centre for Tranlsational Research in Public Health and their research is funded by the Medical Research Council, the National Institute of Health Research and other funders.

BU PhD Studentship Competition – Round 2

The Graduate School is delighted to announce Round 2 of the 2014 BU PhD Studentship Competition is now open. Potentially, there will be up to 29 studentships available for Matched Funded Projects only.

At this stage, Academic Staff are invited to submit proposals for studentship projects which, if successful, will be advertised to recruit PhD candidates for an January 2015 start.

Full details can be found on the Graduate School Staff Intranet

Submission Deadline:

Applications should be submitted on the Studentship Proposal form to the Graduate School – email: phdstudentshipcompetition@bournemouth.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on Friday 4 April 2014. Funding decisions will be made in line with the Studentship Policy within 3 weeks of the deadline.

 

BU Graduate School Santander Scholarship awarded to SciTech PhD Student – Mahmood Hosseini

PG research

Mahmood Hosseini, a first-year SciTec PhD student, was recently successful in securing a BU Graduate School Santander Scholarship Award with a total value of £2,500.

This Santander grant will provide Mahmood with the unique opportunity to visit four research groups in Software Engineering across Europe: the Open University in the UK, Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Utrecht University in Netherlands​.

 
Mahmood is currently working on setting up a framework for acquiring and studying users’ feedback in software systems with an eye on the quality of the obtained information. These four visits will allow Mahmood to present his work and interact with scholars in these four groups and do joint work especially in the areas of requirements engineering, model-driven development, and utilizing crowdsourcing to involve a broader assembly of users to play an active role in contributing knowledge useful to evolve software.

Mahmood’s research is part of the SOCIAD project, funded by an FP7 Marie Curie CIG grant and Bournemouth University, and his supervisory team consists of Dr. Raian Ali, Prof. Keith Phalp and Associated Prof. Jacqui Taylor.

If you have any comments, or would like to contact Mahmood, please contact him at: mhosseini@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Grants Academy Diary – Day Two

Grants Academy, R & KE Operations

After completing my homework, I arrived for day two of Grants Academy ready to watch my ‘one page proposal’ get ripped apart. Day one provided a new bag of tricks and background knowledge on funding bodies and their remits. Yet, rather than feeling more confident, I seemed to have developed a sudden outbreak of academic imposture syndrome. Taking a seat around our workshop table, I quickly realised I wasn’t alone. It seemed most of us participating in the Academy went home for a round of self-doubt:  Did our research really have any benefits? Were there enough people in our research networks? Do any of us actually have the skills (or time!) to coordinate a major research project?

Day two’s session was focused on locating benefits and articulating impact. Facilitator Martin Pickard once again dove right into the murky grant-writing world: The days of academic freedom are long gone. The only way to win funding is to wade into the dark waters and train for competition.

Our first job of the day was to learn how to uncover and articulate the outward-facing values of our research. While many of us in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities fear that impact must be financial, Martin showed us RCUK’s list of possible beneficiaries and impacts to diversify our thinking. These include the environment, health, society and citizenship among others. While all bids must clearly identify impacts to beneficiaries, our job is to ‘potentially impact,’ not to promise world change. Most of our research is making a minor contribution to a bigger problem. The task then is to make a strong case for the minor contributions we make.

To examine how an impact agenda reshapes the ways we present our projects, we workshopped Dr. Hywel Dix’s research proposal. Hywel and his collaborators are bidding for a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for a pilot study. Their research plan proposes to re-evaluate the tacit assumptions that work produced by contemporary authors late in their career is of inferior quality to their earlier work.

Martin put Hywel on the hot seat, asking him to identify impacts and beneficiaries.  At first it seemed difficult to think about this English literature project through the business-oriented language of impact agendas. But through collaborative brainstorming we came up with concrete ways groups of people would potentially benefit from Hywel and his team’s research:

Beneficiaries – Re-evaluating Literary Production in Later Life

  • Academic: scholars in literary studies
  • Cultural sector: contributes a new evaluative framework for making aesthetic judgement around authors work (i.e. impact prize competitions, Arts Council grants)
  • Students/Teachers: inform ways canonical literature is selected for curriculum and testing
  • People in later life:  placing value on these literary productions has the potential to impact people in later life with dementia and Alzheimer’s as writing and reading improves health and wellbeing

After lunch it was time for the dreaded peer reviews of our ‘one page proposal’ homework. Working in the silos of our own departments, on a day-to-day basis we rarely exchange ideas with colleagues across schools. As Communication Scholars read a Computer Science bid and a Business researchers evaluated a Social Work proposal, we realised what it takes to write clearly and convincingly outside our comfort zones. Having seven pairs of interdisciplinary eyes on each of our proposals was terrifying but invaluable. The peer review highlighted the importance of Martin’s advice to give reviewers exactly what they want to see. Use the remit and criteria to structure your arguments so a reviewer does not need to search through the document with a fine tooth comb to find key elements.

The peer review also pushed us to explain the basic tenants of our research. We easily come to take the big picture of our research for granted, when this is often what actually needs the most justification in our proposals.  We are accustomed to disciplinary conferences and peer review journals where we argue the fine points of theory, method and approach. While this does belong in the application to show rigour and expertise, without a clear case for why our research matters, we can’t win.

Anna Feigenbaum is a Lecturer in the Media School. As part of her CEMP Fellowship she is creating a diary of her time at the Grants Academy.  You can read here Day One Diary post here. 

Sport PhD Student Emma Mosley To Be Trained At Top International Research Institute

Fusion, PG research, Training

Congratulations to Emma Mosley, a ST PhD student in Sport, who has been successful in gaining a substantial Santander Mobility Award. Emma will be venturing to Germany for one month in spring to research at the prestigious German Sport University Cologne within the Institute of Psychology.

Emma’s thesis, supervised by Dr Ian Jones and Dr Jo Mayoh, aims to discover the psychophysiological effects of approaching athletic competition stress in a positive manner through the use of heart rate variability (HRV).

In Germany, she will be researching under the supervision of Dr Sylvain Laborde who is an expert in the area of psychophysiology and HRV and works in a large team of internationally renowned sports psychologists.

Whilst at the University Emma will gain experience in HRV data collection, data analysis and the writing of scientific papers in relation to HRV. She will have the opportunity to join on-going research projects as well as conducting her own research.

Dr Tim Breitbarth, the Coordinator for Internationalisation of Sport at BU, said, “The visit offers Emma the chance to start engaging with leading and well-connected experts in her field while receiving first-class training in the most modern equipment at the same time. Also, her visit will help to deepen our established international research, teaching and student exchange partnerships from which BU benefits in terms of reach and reputation.”

For details about her research and international endeavour contact Emma at Emma.Mosley@bournemouth.ac.uk

Your chance to influence research and knowledge exchange support at BU – deadline looming

BU Challenges, R & KE Operations

The deadline is looming for your chance to influence how you receive research and knowledge exchange support! The RKE Operations team are implementing improvements to the way we work and we want your feedback. Contribute by completing this short survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GTHQG3F by 9th February 2014 – and we’ll do our best to make sure you receive the kind of support you want.

Jenny Roddis

BU Graduate School Santander Scholarship awarded to SciTech PhD Student – Alimohammad Shahri

PG research

SciTec PhD student Alimohammad Shahri has been successful in securing a BU Graduate School Santander Scholarship Award, to the value of £2,500.

The grant will support Alimohammad to visit three research groups in Europe: the Open University in the UK, Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, and Simula Research Lab in Norway.

Alimohammad’s PhD thesis research investigates novel methods for the obtainment and analysis of users’ feedback on the quality of software systems and the utilization of that feedback to improve the service and plan the evolution of a system. The visits will allow Alimohammad to present his work and interact with scholars in the three groups and do joint work especially in the areas of requirements engineering, model-driven development, gamification to motivate users to play an active role in contributing knowledge useful to evolve software, and datamining techniques of users’ feedback to infer their collective judgement on the role of software in meeting their requirements.

Alimohammad’s research is part of the SOCIAD project, funded by an FP7 Marie Curie CIG grant and Bournemouth University, and his supervisory team consists of Dr. Raian Ali, Prof. Keith Phalp and Associated Prof. Jacqui Taylor.

For further information regarding Alimohammad’s research please contact him at ashahri@bournemouth.ac.uk:

 

 


Grants Academy Diary – Day One

Grants Academy, Training

For most of us the world of grant-making elicits more fear than inspiration. Like many colleagues, I struggle to keep up with the ever-changing cycles of remits, impact guidelines and highlight notices. Carving out the time to write a journal article already feels like a feat. So it is difficult to imagine spending months writing a document that will never be published, to enter into a competition with 1 in 12 success rate. But, whether we like it or not, the reality of budget cuts, promotion tracks and ever-growing data sets has made grant-writing an essential component of research activity.

While I’d like to claim enthusiasm brought me to the Grants Academy, it was more this ambivalent combination of frustration, fear and facing reality. Grants Academy is a staff development programme on bid writing offered to us by R&KE OPs.  After acceptance, an 18-month long membership kicks off with a two day intensive training workshop providing background knowledge and strategies for bid development. The workshop is currently run by Dr. Martin Pickard, a highly experienced and trained consultant.

Arriving at our first session, Martin began by exploiting our fears and delivering some harsh truths: Grant writing is a competition. Funding bodies are businesses. We have to sell our research. For those of us academics who still carry a critique of the marketisation of Higher Education, these words are difficult to swallow. If there ever were good old days of scholarship for scholarship’s sake—they’re certainly over.

But, Martin reassured us after dramatic pause, this doesn’t mean we can’t do the research we want. It just means that if we want funding, we have to learn how to play the grant writing game. Like all competitions, to win we need to train.

Throughout the first day of the workshop we learnt a number of different skills, including how to: use grant language, structure our research projects into measurable tasks, and move from sounding interesting to sounding necessary. For one of our hands-on activities we were asked to write a 10 point summary of why we should get grant funding. Below I offer a glimpse into how much changed in just a few hours:

Here’s an excerpt from 10:30am:

This project is on less lethal weapons which are used on a daily basis around the world to quell protest and dissent.  There is a lack of information on the human and environmental impacts of less lethal weapons in real-world situations. Through a collaborative research network, the project bridges quantitative and qualitative methods, bringing together researchers with medical practitioners, lawyers, investigative journalists and humanitarian field workers.

By the end of the day, this was shaped into my Unique Selling Point (still a work in progress):

To respond to the need for more cross-sector knowledge exchange and publicly accessible information regarding the effects of less lethal technologies, this AHRC Research Network project brings together, for the first time, a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Communications, Geography, Law, International Relations and Medical Sciences. Employing a stakeholder-oriented approach to research networking, the project is designed to connect academic researchers with those who regularly face the real-world impacts of less lethals on civilian populations: medical practitioners, security professionals, journalists and humanitarian field workers.

While it was a long day of attempting to move from interesting to necessary, there was plenty of caffeine and amusing anecdotes to get us through. Plus, in place of triangle sandwiches, we were treated to a hot lunch in lovely Green House Hotel dining room.

—

Anna Feigenbaum is a Lecturer in the Media School. As part of her CEMP Fellowship she is creating a diary of her time at the Grants Academy. 

CMH visit to Lund

PG research

 

 

 

 

 

 

Members of the Centre for Media History (Hugh Chignell, Kristin Skoog, Kathryn McDonald, Tony Stoller and Megan Davies) are currently visiting the University of Lund to develop our ties with media historians there.

We are talking about our research at a seminar on Wednesday evening at which we will focus on public service broadcasting and how it has been interpreted in the UK.

Conversations are taking place between us and staff and students in Lund and planning for future events.

Gender Equality in Asian Workplaces Workshop

Fusion, Women's Academic Network

Happy Chinese New Year! May you all have a successful year of horse ahead!

Today is the 4th day of the Chinese new year and it is only appropriate to invite you to this one day workshop jointly funded by BU Fusion Investment Fund and the British Academy of Managment (BAM).

Descriptions

The rise of Asian economies in the last few decades has created unique opportunities for women to develop. Yet, compared with Western women, Asian women often find it more difficult to progress in the workplace because of inherent cultural and societal barriers. This one-day workshop adopts a cross-disciplinary perspective, looking at women’s employment and careers in five Asian societies.

When: This event will take place on 8th May, 2014.

Who should attend: Researchers and students who are interested in gender issues in Asia

Benefits of attendance

  • Enhanced cross-cultural understanding
  • Recent debates in women’s development in Asia with insight from leading academics in the field
  • Networking opportunities with scholars and practitioners from Gender in Management SIG

Location: Bournemouth University, Business School, Executive Business Centre (Room 708), 89 Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth, BH8 8EB

Contact: Dr Huiping Xian, Lecturer in HR/OB, Bournemouth University Business School, hxian@bournemouth.ac.uk

Booking Deadline: 30th April, 2014

Programme

10:00-10:30 Welcome and coffee
10:30-11:15 Gender Equality in India: Constitutional Challenges and Contesting DiscoursesProfessor Ratna Kapur, Jindal Global Law School, India
11:15-12:00 Women Managers’ Careers in China: Theorizing the Influence of Gender and CollectivismProfessor Carol Woodhams, University of Exeter, UK

Dr Huiping Xian, Bournemouth University, UK

Dr Ben Lupton, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-13:45 Contextual Emotional Labour: An Exploratory Study of Muslim Female Employees in PakistanDr Jawad Syed, Kent Business School, University of Kent, Kent, UK

Dr Faiza Ali, Kent Business School, University of Kent, Kent, UK
13:45-14:30 Does Nationality Impact Identification with Prevalent Models of Career Success?: The Case of A Global Bank.Dr Savita Kumra, Brunel University, UK
14:30-14:45 Tea and Coffee
14:45-15:30 An Investigation of the Determinants on Women’s Career Advancement in China: A Large Sample Analysis of Chinese Listed CompaniesDr Li Cunningham, Cass Business School, City University, UK

Dr Xiancheng Shi, School of Economics, Nanjing University, China
15:30-16:00 Plenary Discussion
16:00 Close