Handouts for
Scholarship Made Easier:
Best Practices for
Writing and Publishing
Linda B. Nilson, Ph.D.
Director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation
445 Brackett Hall, Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634 USA
864.656.4542 * nilson@clemson.edu *
www.clemson.edu/OTEI
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
FAST-ARTICLE WRITING
The methodology is oriented towards original research articles published in science journals.
But its overall strategy can be adapted to other common types of articles, such as review
and teaching case articles, and all disciplines. All that is required of scholars is to be
familiar enough with the literature that they can identify the typical components and length of
successful articles in their field.
FAST ORGANIZING
Key to this methodology is the step-by-step organizing of the necessary materials.
1. Dedicate two e-folders or bookcase shelf areas to article writing and label one “In
Preparation” and the other “In Submission.”
2. Dedicate one e-folder or 1” (or thicker) three-ring binder to each article in progress.
3. Entitle the e-folder the key idea of the article, or write the key idea or title of each article
on the spine of its binder (e.g., use a pen on masking tape).
4. Insert as the first document the “article checklist,” adjusted to your discipline, the type of
article, and the journal selected. (Download the model at
http://people.clemson.edu/~eleanam/.) This checklist is the table of contents for the article
with one column specifying the length limits for each section and two more labeled “date”
and “status.” The typical scientific research article contains the following: title page,
abstract, keywords, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion,
conclusions, acknowledgments, references, lists of tables and figures, tables, and figures.
The date and status columns simplify the communication and collaboration with co-authors.
5. Make three sub-folders or sections: 1) Article, 2) Data, and 3) References.
6. Conduct a literature review and insert copies of the most relevant articles in the
References section of the e-folder or binder.
FAST WRITING
7. Select the article that makes the best model for your article. Put it in the article subfolder or article section of the binder behind your article. You may want to flag or bookmark
it in some way for easy reference.
8. If you haven’t already, create an e-folder for the article. Then download and insert the
“article shell” (just behind the article checklist) to guide your writing (available at
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
http://people.clemson.edu/~eleanam/). Modify this shell to accommodate your discipline,
the type of article, and journal targeted for submission.
9. Write your article into the shell, starting with the easiest parts (e.g., title page, keywords,
acknowledgments, reference list).
10. Produce the tables, figures, etc., then write the Results and Discussion, which is usually
the hardest section to write, by simply describing the tables and figures.
FAST RECORD-KEEPING
11. Submit the article, electronically if possible, to the selected journal.
12. Print the submission confirmation/receipt and file it in the article e-folder or binder.
13. If applicable, record the log-in information (user ID and password) for the journal’s
internet portal to facilitate checking on the article’s status.
14. Move the e-folder or binder from “In Preparation” to “In Submission.”
15. Make a spreadsheet listing of the titles of all articles under submission, specifying the
journal, submission date, and the date to check on the article’s status (usually three to five
months after submission).
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
FAST ORGANIZING: ARTICLE CHECKLIST FOR AN ORIGINAL RESEARCH
ARTICLE, FORMATTED FOR MANY SCIENCE JOURNALS
No.
Text
Title
1
Title Page
1 Pages
2
Abstract
1
3
Keywords
6 words
4
Introduction
2-3
5
Materials and Methods
3 (total)
a) Study Area
1
b) Sampling
1
c) Laboratory Analysis
1
6
and
Statistics
Results
and Discussion 2-3
7
Conclusions
1
8
Acknowledgments
2-3 sent.
9
References
20 ref.
10
List of Tables, Figures
1
Table 1
1
Table 2
1
Table 3
1
Figure 1
1
Figure 2
1
Figure 3
1
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
Date
Status/Comments
FAST ORGANIZING: ARTICLE CHECKLIST TO BE FORMATTED FOR THE
TYPE OF ARTICLE YOU ARE WRITING AND YOUR SELECTED JOURNAL(S)
No.
Title
Text Pages
1
Title Page
1
2
Abstract
1,
Conclusions
1
Acknowledgments
2-3 sent.
words
3
References
List of Tables, Figures
ref.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
Date
Status/Comments
FAST ORGANIZING: ARTICLE CHECKLIST TO BE FORMATTED FOR THE
TYPE OF ARTICLE YOU ARE WRITING AND YOUR SELECTED JOURNAL(S)
No.
Title
Text Pages
1
Title Page
1
2
Abstract
1,
Conclusions
1-3
Acknowledgments
2-3 sent.
words
3
References
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
ref.
Date
Status/Comments
FAST WRITING: ELECTRONIC ARTICLE SHELL FOR AN ORIGINAL
RESEARCH ARTICLE, FORMATTED FOR MANY SCIENCE JOURNALS
COVER PAGE
(1 double-spaced page)
Title: maximum of 12 words representing article’s content
J.R. Smith* and M.E. Jones
Department of _______, Anywhere University, ST, USA
*Corresponding author. Current address: Department of _______, Anywhere University,
XXX College Hall, City, ST XXXXX, USA. Tel: XXX-XXX-XXXX, Fax: XXX-XXX-XXXX.
Email address: jrsmith@anywhere.edu (J.R. Smith).
ABSTRACT
(1 double-spaced page, 250 words)
Rationale: 1 sentence. “Limited scientific information is available on…”
Objectives or hypothesis: 1-2 sentences. “The study was conducted to determine …”
Methods: 2-3 sentences. Briefly describe the experiment.
Results: 3-5 sentences. Report your findings.
Conclusions: 1-2 sentences. Summarize the significance of your findings and future
research needs.
Keywords: List up to six words or word combinations in alphabetical order.
INTRODUCTION
(2-3 double-spaced pages)
Brief statement of the problem: Briefly state/describe the problem or hypothesis that
justifies doing the work.
Literature review: Summarize the findings of others that you will develop further or
challenge.
Objectives: Explain the general approach and objectives.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
(3 double-spaced pages)
Study area: 1 page. Describe the study area (location, climate, topography, etc.).
Sampling: 1 page. Describe the sampling procedures.
Laboratory analysis: 1 page. Describe the laboratory and statistical analysis.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
(3 double-spaced pages)
Before writing this section, prepare your outputs (figures, tables, etc.) according to the
journal’s format, limiting them to six. Each table or figure should be on a separate page and
attached at the end of the manuscript. After finishing your outputs, describe your most
important findings in the text, then discuss them in relationship to the literature reviewed in
the Introduction. What did you find new, different, and/or exciting?
CONCLUSIONS
(1 double-spaced page)
Summarize your findings; may list them in order: 1)…., 2)…, etc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(1 double-spaced paragraph)
Acknowledge funding sources and those who helped with sampling and data analyses.
REFERENCES
(Double-spaced with up to 20 for original research, more for review articles) Format
the references according to the journal’s style requirements. RefWorks® (Web- based) and
EndNote® software are tools that simplifies the formatting task.
From: Mikhailova, E., & Nilson, L. B. (2007). Developing prolific scholars: The “fast article
writing” methodology. Journal of Faculty Development, 21(2, April), 93-100.
.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
TIME AND WORK MANAGEMENT TIPS FOR ACADEMICS*
In General
Schedule at least a quarter of your work time to what matters most to your success
(e.g., tenure, promotion, etc.). The best way to know what matters most is to talk to
trustworthy colleagues—a number of them—in your department and college, including at
least a few members of your department’s promotion and tenure committee.
If you have 15 things to do, choose which responsibility or task matters most and give
it at least a quarter of your time until it is finished. Then proceed to prioritize the next
most important and give it at least a quarter of your time. Don’t try to work on all 15 things
equally all at once, or nothing will get done.
Learn to say “no” to non-essential tasks that will gain you little reward—e.g., serving on
committees out of your specializations, reviewing journal articles and textbooks, serving on
professional association committees, and writing lengthy listserv and blog posts.
Limit the time that you will spend in any one sitting on an “essential” task that has relatively
little immediate consequence to you—e.g., going through your email or paper mail,
reviewing a manuscript for a journal or a colleague, composing a test, and grading. Usually
such tasks take as long as you allocate to them. Without a strict limit, they could go on for
hours more.
When you face a lot of relatively minor, short-term tasks, like going through and answering
your email, first tend to those that will take less than two minutes to dispose of.
If you’re untenured or up for promotion, budget time for socializing to make yourself
visible, especially when and where many colleagues gather (e.g., before and after faculty
meetings).
Set up and maintain an alphabetic, subject-based filing system; it’s a time-saving
essential.
Keep folders containing materials relevant to upcoming tasks physically closer to you than
your subject-based filing system. File one major task per folder.
Make daily and weekly to-do lists, and cross out (don’t delete) tasks as you complete them.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
When it’s not your office hours, guard your private work time with your life.
•
•
•
•
•
Lock yourself in your office.
Work by a small, intense light to make your office look unoccupied.
Don’t answer your phone; rely on voice mail.
Turn off your “new mail” alert or, better yet, shut down your entire email program,
along with any discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, and the like.
Or work elsewhere (library, coffee shop, faculty computer lab in another building,
student center lounge). Work at home only if you’re not easily distracted there.
Always have reading work with you, in case you get stuck in a line, traffic jam, etc.
If day-care arrangements are a concern, other parents and pairs of students make good,
inexpensive babysitters and nannies. Having a pair of students provides back-up, flexibility,
and reliability. Ask the students to recruit their replacements before they graduate.
Take good care of yourself physically and emotionally so you can work efficiently and
effectively.
IN COURSE SET-UP AND MANAGEMENT
Put all the course materials that you can on your learning management system (e.g.,
Blackboard), including the syllabus, lecture outlines, handouts, and assignments, and hold
students (legitimately) responsible for downloading and printing these materials.
Use Amazon.com to check in advance if the books you want to assign are in print.
Make your syllabus and assignment instructions as comprehensive, clear, and unambiguous
as possible.
IN TEACHING
Require students to word-process all written assignments.
Find graphics, maps, and visual learning aids by using Google and clicking on Images.
Bookmark or download online teaching resources as you come across them.
Assign learning online exercises as in-class activities or homework as much as possible.
Look for web-based tutorials, mastery learning programs, learning objects, databases, and
collections of scholarly materials in repositories such as:
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
•
•
•
•
•
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) at
http://www.merlot.org/
Wisconsin Online Resource Center at http://www.wisc-online.com/
Project Interactivate (for the sciences and mathematics) at
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate.
Information Technology Services, Brock University, Ontario, Canada
http://www.brocku.ca/learningobjects/flash_content
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Collections of Learning Objects
www4.uwm.edu/cie/learning_objects.cfm?gid=55 (must put in URL window)
IN GIVING FEEDBACK, TESTING, AND GRADING:
Integrate as many sources of non-instructor feedback as possible into your courses:
• online objective quizzes with immediate feedback on answers or overall score
• interactive computer-based tutorials, mastery learning programs, and learning objects
(see “In Teaching” for sources)
• online databases to test hypotheses
• outside experts or reactors on email, discussion board, chat, blogs, or face-to-face
• student peers (e.g., pairs exchange and discuss their reflection papers on the readings
for 10 minutes at the start of class; students justify their self-evaluation to peers.)
Use the course management system’s testing and grading tools to compose and give
low-stakes quizzes. They will get students to do the readings and gain at least minimal
mastery of the material. You might let students take such quizzes multiple times until
they ace them.
Grade minor assignments and daily quizzes 1/0, √/0, or √+/√/0.
Have students write test items/questions as homework after you teach them what good
items are (e.g., require application, analysis, synthesis, and/or evaluation).
Make study/review guides student-group assignments. Or use class time (not your own
time) to run study/review sessions.
Reduce grading by reserving major assignments for groups.
Give feedback to individuals and groups orally in office hours.
Grade writing, oral presentations, and projects using a holistic rubric/scoring guide. Check
for plagiarism using Google.com, Advanced Search.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
Word-process your feedback to students if it tends to be repetitive. At times your feedback
may be one message to the whole class.
If you must give primarily objective tests, try to include one essay question that you will
read and grade only in borderline cases.
Use your course management system to record and calculate grades, to send them out to
students, and to post the correct answers.
Accept grading protests only in writing with justifications (in an essay, not an email)
within a limited time period (e.g., three days).
Reduce time spent on make-up exams by:
• giving one comprehensive make-up at the end of the semester
• counting only best N-1 out of N exams (in make-up cases only)
• moving the weight of the missing exam to the final
IN OFFICE HOURS AND OTHER OUT-OF-CLASS INTERACTIONS WITH
STUDENTS:
Set boundaries around yourself and filter access. Be totally available to students only
during your office hours, or see them by appointment. Being brief with many allows you to
be generous with the truly needy few.
Schedule regular times for asynchronous communication (e.g., email) with your students,
and tell them what times of what days you’ll be responding to their communication.
If you give students your home phone number, restrict the hours they can call you.
You are not a one-stop information, training, and problem-solving center for your students.
Use and refer your students to the appropriate campus resources:
• Computer problems to the campus help desk
• Psychological, emotional, and relational problems to the campus counseling or health
center
• Study/learning problems to the campus academic support center
• Writing problems to the campus writing center
• Research problems to your discipline’s librarian
If your entire class needs training in how to use the library or sophisticated web resources,
ask your discipline’s librarian to conduct this training during a class period.
If your entire class needs training in specific software or web-page development, ask the
campus instructional technology center to conduct this training during a class period.
*Compiled by Linda B. Nilson, 2005-date
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
MAJOR REFERENCES FOR THIS HANDOUT AND WORKSHOP:
Allen, D. (2001). Getting things done. New York: Viking Press.
Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Gray, T. (2005). Publish and flourish: Become a prolific scholar. Los Cruces, NM: Teaching
Academy, New Mexico State University.
Mikhailova, E., & Nilson, L. B. (2007). Developing prolific scholars: The “fast article writing”
methodology. Journal of Faculty Development, 21(2), 93-100.
Robertson, D. R. (2003). Making time, making change. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.
Sorcinelli, M. D. (2004). The top ten things new faculty would like to hear from colleagues.
National Teaching and Learning Forum, 11(3), 4-6.
Women and the professoriate: Balancing multiple roles. Expert panel discussion sponsored
by the Graduate School, Clemson University, April 21, 2004.
Life experience
FIND THE KEY SENTENCE IN THIS PARAGRAPH.
Students frequently view new concepts as isolated and independent and have
difficulty understanding how they relate to each other and to previously learned material.
Mind mapping prevents this problem by clearly laying out the key concepts and
dimensions and the relationships among them in one “big picture” image, enabling
students to see what materials is most important and how the various pieces fit together.
It accommodates even complex, non-linear relationships and cross-references. In fact,
graphics in general facilitate the process of inferring relationships more so than text does
(Robinson and Kiewra, 1995; Winn, 1991).
From: Biktimirov, E. N., & Nilson, L. B. (2006). Show them the money: Using mind mapping in
the introductory finance course. Journal of Financial Education 32(Fall): 72-86.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.
BIBIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES
Belcher, W. L. (2009). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic
publishing success. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Bem, D. J. (n. d.). Writing the empirical journal article. Retrieved April 12, 2011 from
http://dbem.ws/WritingArticle.2.pdf A version of this article appears in Darley, J. M.,
Zanna, M. P., & Roediger III, H. L. (Eds.). (2003). The compleat academic: A practical
guide for the beginning social scientist. (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Berger, A. A. (2008). The academic writer’s toolkit: A user’s manual. Walnut Creek, CA:
Left Coast Press.
Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Grant, B. (2009). Right your writing: How to sharpen your writing and make your
manuscripts ore engaging. The Scientist, 23(11, November). Retrieved April 12, 2011
from http://www.the- scientist.com/article/display/56104/
Gray, T. (2005). Publish and flourish: Become a prolific scholar. Los Cruces, NM: Teaching
Academy, New Mexico State University.
Hartley, J. (2008). Academic writing and publishing: A practical handbook. New
York: Routledge.
Mikhailova, E., & Nilson, L. B. (2007). Developing prolific scholars: The “fast article writing”
methodology. Journal of Faculty Development, 21(2, April), 93-100.
Muirhead, B. (2002). Writing for academic publication. United States Distance
Learning Association Journal 16(12). Retrieved April 12, 2011 from
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/DEC02_Issue/article06.html
Rocco, T. S., & Hatcher, T. (Eds.). (2011). The handbook of scholarly writing and
publishing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Saraswathi, V. (2008). Special concluding essay: Writing for academic journals.
Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 12(3). Retrieved April 12, 2011
from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume12/ej47/ej47a12/
Silva, P. J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Singham, M. (2008). Seven suggestions for becoming a more productive writer. Change
(March/April), 40-42.
Be Inspired. Be Inspiring.