writing for publication – on getting it done (with a little why we do it)

Do academic librarians have a love-hate relationship with academic writing?  I mean, we spend a lot of time explaining how to find scholarly articles to our students, and hopefully we also get to spend some time telling them why they should want to?   But that doesn’t always translate into “scholarly writing YAY” when it comes to carving out time to do some of that academic writing ourselves.

In the two-birds-one-stone department — this post from Wicked Anomie on The Academic Manuscript rocks.  Basically, it’s a template for an academic article (specifically – quantitative research in the social sciences).  It’s funny.  It’s useful.  And best of all, amid the funny there’s a fair dose of what each of the sections we tell students to look for (abstract, methods, etc) is really supposed to be doing in a good academic article.

I’m saving this for my own use — I find these types of things useful when I need a kickstart to just start writing the damned article — but I’m also thinking this this kind of approach might lead to better discussions with students about the value of peer reviewed articles than I’ve been having lately.

(plus there’s a bonus link in the post to a book on academic productivity.  Which leads to the question – how is it that I just discovered Wicked Anomie?  She’s awesome)

Which reminds me of some other stuff on the academic productivity scale —

Scatterplot has a similar template for the research proposal.

The sociologists have also started a wiki to share their experiences with scholarly journal publishing.  It doesn’t have a lot of content now, but it does have some potential.  The organization is beautiful in its simplicity.  It’ll be interesting to see where this ends up — there are some job hunt wiki examples out there that can get really speculative and negative – so much so that you wonder if it’s healthy to read them while you’re on the market.  Tenured Radical has a substantive discussion of this idea here.  But for now, I’m thinking moving towards transparency in scholarly publishing is a good thing.

And a recommendation for those interested in scholarly productivity — the Getting Things Done in Academia blog.  This one comes from the sciences (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology).