As we come to the end of the first official week of summer, many of us are a month or more into our summer “break” – a time for tackling the list of things that find their way to “unfinished” during the school year. If your summer to-do list contains interdisciplinary reading, prioritization of your writing projects, qualitative research, research promotion, PhD by publication, or simply keeping up with the latest trends in scholarly writing, this week’s collection has something for you!

While rest and relaxation are also essential components of the break that summer often provides, tackling some of those items on the to-do list, rethinking your schedule for the next academic year, and maintaining a healthy writing practice during these “off” months have advantage as well. Happy summer and happy writing!

The colleague curriculum

Over a 16-week semester, I read 16 books by 16 colleagues. I prioritized books beyond my immediate field. For extra credit, I read an essay by someone whose job security doesn’t require producing monographs and I listened to an album by a faculty member at the music school.

Getting realistic about your endless list of writing projects

This year, I hit an unfortunate milestone: my writing project list had ballooned to nearly 70 entries. These projects ranged from articles accepted for publication and undergoing the final editing process to random ideas collected over the course of a decade. The volume of unfinished projects left me completely unable to prioritize how I should devote my writing time. This week, I finally decided it was time to get realistic and trim the list.

Qualitative research & policy studies: Interview with editors

The American Behavioral Scientist journal published a special issue about Qualitative Approaches to Policy Analysis in March of 2019. Read an interview with the guest editors,  Monica Reid Kerrigan and Ane Turner Johnson, and read these selected articles that are open access until mid-July.

Making the most of your research promotion team

Promotion of research and related publications is now a shared enterprise among authors, publishers, libraries and universities, writes Christine Tulley, yet many authors are unaware of how to play an active role.

The robots are writing: Will machine-generated books accelerate our consumption of scholarly literature?

Last month, Springer Nature announced the publication of their first machine-generated book — an experimental proof of the efficacy and impacts of algorithmically curated scholarly resources. In the age of “robot reporters” and auto-generated novels, Springer intends to lead the way in seriously examining the value of machine learning to aid readers at all levels with comprehending vast volumes of academic literature. This publication — a book synthesizing 150 other Springer books that address the topic of lithium ion batteries — has the hefty goal of piloting the ability of such machine-learning technology to save us the time of reading dozens of resources in order to grasp a new topic.

Graphical & video abstracts: An interview with Tullio Rossi

In a distracted, multilingual world we often struggle to get important research findings into the hands of those who can use what we’ve learned. As Dr. Tullio Rossi of Animate Your Science points out, visuals help us reach across disciplines and across academia-public divides to find new readers. Rossi advocates for graphical and video abstracts as a visual communication strategy. You can read a couple of Animate Your Science blog posts that explain this practice and show examples. Dr. Rossi discussed some of these ideas in this interview.

PhD by publication

I’ve been asked a few times recently about the text that accompanies published papers for the PhD by publication. So who am I to refuse? This is a slide show that I use to raise some key questions that people doing a PhD by publication need to consider. This is necessarily a brief overview.

Writers meet to learn, and to recognize success

We can’t all attend every conference, so as possible, MethodSpace includes stories and resources from relevant meetings. This post relates to the recent conference for the Textbook and Academic Authors Association, held in Philadelphia.

Peer Review Week is five!

It’s hard to believe that this year Peer Review Week (PRW) will celebrate its fifth anniversary. Five years ago, it was literally not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye! So, as we prepare for #PeerRevWk19 (September 16-20), I thought Scholarly Kitchen readers might enjoy a look back at the history of this annual celebration of the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific and scholarly quality.