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.