I’m starting to get back at it, and I’ll be updating the events calender and announcing new seminars and workshops shortly. But I wanted to begin the year by writing a more reflective post about the what it all means. What am I trying to accomplish here? What were we thinking here at the CBS Library when we decided to focus on the “crafts skills” that define academic work?

Well, there’s no getting around a sense of “crisis” in today’s academic institutions. Higher education is more important than ever, both in life of the individual and the in the life of the community. More and more people are getting university degrees, and more and more policy is based on the knowledge that is produced at universities. Universities are being asked, increasingly explicitly and with increasing urgency, to serve its social function, to contribute both knowledge and knowledgeable people to deal with the world’s problems. All this, of course, to be accomplished at the lowest possible cost.

There is now a concern about whether students are learning as much as they used to at universities. One specific area of concern, and one that happens to be the focus of much of my work, is the quality of student writing, which, of course, eventually becomes the quality of writing that is done by graduates, and therefore the state of the written language in society as a such. Another area of concern is the quality of the research that is being published, first in top-tier academic journals and then in high-circulation popular media. One of the most tireless defender of standards here, I should mention, is Andrew Gelman at Columbia, who has a very sharp eye for problematic studies and academic misconduct, and also cares about the standards we hold students to.

I think all these things go together, and I’m proud to have been able to contribute in my small way to what Andrew calls the “replication and criticism” movement. My ambition is to one day be as precise about storytelling as Andrew is about statistics. At bottom, the connection is our sense of the “craft”: the “care” we take in our scholarship, whether as students or as  teachers or as researchers. As I get older, I have to admit, I find myself feeling somewhat “conservative” about the universities, as though there is a greater of losing something than gaining something through “progress”. In fact, universities are, to my mind, best understood as conservatories of tradition not laboratories of progress. I think we have to defend the craft that makes it possible to know something.

Colloquium: Thursday, December 11, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Once you have a found a paper, and have decided that it is of interest to you in some way (because of its results, its methodology, its theory, or whatever) you will naturally also be interested in who else has found the paper interesting. There are a number of ways to find the papers that refer to one you already know, and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

It’s important to remember, however, that there’s no absolute “science” of citation searching. You cannot decide that a paper is “influential” (in the way that interests you), or “seminal”, or “marginalized” simply by asking one or another database. All the databases can do is to help you find the work of other scholars who have read and interpreted the paper in question.

In this session, Liv will help us to understand the resources that are available to us. The three main tools are Web of Science (also known as the Social Science Citation Index), Scopus, and Google Scholar. Each of them differ according both to functionality (the kind of searches you can do) and coverage (the set of texts that are searched). Liv will take you through a number of hands-on demonstrations.

In order to make this session as useful as possible, please bring your own problems and issues to us so we can address them specifically. It will be helpful if you send Liv a mail to give her time to prepare some searches. Be as specific as possible. What text(s) would like to do citation searches on? And why does it interest you?

See you there.

Colloquium: Thursday, December 4, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

The paragraph is the unit of composition in scholarly prose writing. Though there are of course exceptions, in general you don’t want to say anything in a journal article that cannot be said within the form of a paragraph. But what is a paragraph really? That will be the topic of Thursday’s craft colloquium.

The most concrete definition I can give you is that a paragraph is a group of a least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing. The one thing that the paragraph says is stated clearly by one of the sentences and the rest provide the support or elaboration. “Support or elaboration” is a very broad notion. A paragraph can say that the internet has changed the way we do business and support this claim with statistics or historical documentation or an anecdote, or it can describe one or more business practices that has been changed. The important thing is that the central claim, expressed in what we call the “key sentence”, is what the reader takes away from the reading of the paragraph. Understanding it is the point of making the effort of understanding the rest of the paragraph.

A journal article is a simply an arrangement (indeed, a series) of paragraphs, usually about 40 in all. The 40 central claims made by the article provide us with an outline of the argument of the paper. If each paragraph does its job properly it will either convince us of the truth of its claim or (in cases where we already believe) improve our understanding of it. The reader’s task is to read, interpret and absorb about forty claims. The writer’s job is to construct an occasion for each of those acts of reading.

There is the question of how to write a paragraph and the question of how to string them together. On Thursday, if there are no objections, we’ll concentrate our attention of the former. We will look at and edit a number of a specific examples. Feel free to bring your own favorite examples, preferably in a Word document that we can edit.

Yesterday, Liv and I discussed how to make the transition from what I like to romanticize as “hand crafted” reference lists to software-supported reference management. The CBS Library’s default suggestion is Ref Works, and I spent a perfectly pleasant afternoon learning how to use it to reference a paragraph I had written.

It really does seem like it will save me time in the long run. After all, the creation of a reference in the database is usually no more difficult than finding a source in the library’s database and then importing it into your Ref Works account. In the case of a reference to a 1977 piece in the Times Literary Supplement (not indexed in our periodicals database before 1990), we had two options: either create the reference manually, which is of course no more difficult than making an entry in your reference list the old way, or importing the reference from a reference list in one of your sources.

We chose the second method, which means I have to add a word of caution. First of all, you should always examine a source before you cite it. That is, you should never rely on another scholar’s referencing. (See this post for an object lesson.)  That was no problem here since the reference list we imported to my account was one of my own, i.e., all the references from one of my previously published papers. Here, again, there are two ways of going about it. Some publishers, like Taylor and Francis, will let you import a citation along with all the cited references. Alternatively, you can locate the paper in a larger database, like EBSCO or SCOPUS and then generate the cited reference list there. You can then import those references.

We used the first method, which did not work perfectly. It seems the publisher generates the data to export by “reading” the actual reference list and sometimes misunderstands it. That means some entries don’t have titles, for example, or that book chapters are cited like whole books. So you have to go in and clean up the entries. It’s not big deal, and still at least as easy as having a hand-made file of your references. I haven’t tried the other way yet, but I’ll report back when I do. I imagine the information that is exported from an actual literature database will be of higher quality.

I’ve been comparing the trouble you have to take to interact with the software with the default (“manual”) approach I normally use. And, like I say, I think it’s no more difficult to use Ref Works than doing it by hand. But it’s important to emphasize that it now becomes much easier to generate a reference list and, in fact, to keep track of your references (hence “reference manager“) . So it looks like at least a no-loss-win scenario. But before I get too enthusiastic about this (I’m old-school at heart in all things) I want to use it for a while, throughout the writing of a whole paper, and see whether it introduces errors I wouldn’t otherwise have made. I’ll keep you posted.

Colloquium: Thursday, November 27, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

I’ll be in Leicester on Thursday, so I will unfortunately have to cancel our craft colloquium this week. Next week, we’ll make up for it by combining writing and library issues under the heading “sense and references”, which I’ll have you know is a very clever pun for a philosopher.

We’ll spend about one of the two hours discussing citation practices in scholarly writing, i.e., how to quote, paraphrase and (not to) plagiarize your sources. The other hour will be devoted to the seamless integration of reference management software like RefWorks into these practices. As always, we’re going to keep things very practical and hands-on, looking at actual examples and doing live-fly exercises. But I can also promise a little bit of philosophical discussion. Liv (and a number of the other librarians at CBS) have been trying to for years to conquer my resistance to automated reference management. I always recommend making your literature list “by hand”. But let’s see where the conversation leads.

There is an important connection between reference management and citation practices, of course. Not the least is that mastery here will mean making something that many writers find annoying much more enjoyable. And properly citing the work of others shouldn’t actually be a source of irritation for scholars. Proper referencing is not just a bureaucratic demand of today’s citation-fixated research. The sources you cite help to establish a frame of, precisely, “reference” for your own work. Your references go a long way towards determining the meaning of the words you use. Since knowing for academic purposes is always an ability to participate in a conversation, constructing a reference should be as ordinary as constructing a claim, providing support, and implying a warrant. It should be as familiar as constructing a question and drawing out normative implications of your research. It’s part of the grammar of academic writing.