This paper explores the nature of academic research in the Humanities. It questions whether such scholarship has been instrumentalised to a narrowly individualistic, short-termist and action-orientated pursuit -- whether, in simpler terms, there is too much writing and not enough reading. In the first part of the paper, the authors argue that such…

Journal manuscripts are peer reviewed with the hopes that the peer review will facilitate an editor's decision regarding the disposition of the article and that the feedback will be helpful to the authors in improving their manuscript. However peer reviews may not achieve these goals if they lack sufficient analysis and feedback. This article…

Reviewers are humans and might be affected by cognitive biases when information overload comes into play. In fact, no amount of scientific training will completely mask the human impulses to partisanship. And the consequence is that authors may receive incorrect editorial decisions in their submissions to peer-reviewed journals. For instance, the…

In this article we propose a taxonomy describing various types of literature review or theoretical/conceptual articles. We distinguish each article type based on how well they address the "summary" and "advocacy" arguments inherent in all secondary scholarship. Understanding this taxonomy of review/theory scholarship is…

Most universities and research institutions promote the need for researchers to engage in knowledge translation to create impact. Many include this in their organisational narratives, such as strategic plans and research statements, however, the time involved is often not calculated in academic workloads. One impactful way to disseminate research…

As part of my work as an educator, I see the need to surface for discussion what might indeed be considered as acts of oppression on the part of peer reviewers when certain aspects of knowing and meaning are misrecognized, obscured, or suppressed. Drawing on observations concerning coercive and oppressive relational and educational practices found…

At least in the United States, the presentation of scholarship is highly formulaic. The emblematic product of this professional domain--the academic journal article--is less a lump of clay waiting to be moulded than a set of fired jars waiting to be filled. Not only are the jars unyielding to the touch, but even their number and order are fixed.…

ResearchGate appeared 15 years ago and has since become a useful and essential scholar's companion. Researchers can retrieve relevant articles by author, identify those of interest, and follow their research in order to receive timely material. They can also find articles by topic, and in many cases, articles are available full-text. Additionally,…

As the title suggests, this article shows how the authors took teaching-related ideas and developed them -- through the steps of drafting, review, and revising -- into published articles. Using examples of the steps involved, the authors explore options for how others in the field of English teaching might productively write for publication as…

The submission of a traditional postgraduate research thesis (or dissertation) is a milestone achievement that should be celebrated and has been regarded as a rite of passage. This major document has normally occupied a significant amount of mental space and time, often involving a frantic and intense period of writing to meet the submission…

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English…

There are many general books and articles on publishing in peer-reviewed journals, but few specifically address issues around writing for journals focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). One of the challenges of beginning to write about teaching and learning is that most scholars have become interested in exploring these issues…

A commonly held belief is that the more international a university is, the better it is. The internationalization of higher education (IoHE) certainly has the potential to attract more students, improve an institution's programs and financials, heighten its prestige, and provide students with diverse opportunities to engage in intercultural…

This article makes a case for a positive role of tension in the creative process in chemistry. I begin with an argument that there is an inherent tension in what makes molecules interesting--their positioning along various polar axes. One of these, the age-old differentiation between useful (to society and for personal profit) commercialization…

Bias poses a significant threat to the validity of research findings as well as practices and policies based on research. Reforms to academic publishing have been proposed and implemented in other fields to address bias in research. In this paper I review some sources of bias in research, some proposed areas of reform in academic publishing (e.g.,…