TAA Member Dr. Brian R. Shmaefsky, Professor of Biology & Environmental Science at Lone Star College – Kingwood, received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage students from a Hispanic-serving institution to write Wikipedia biographical entries of Hispanic scientists who are underrepresented in Wikipedia. The goal is to improve the visibility and reduce citation inequity of scientists from marginalized populations.
TAA Member Phil Wankat: Notable Cartoons from the ‘TAA Report’
The second installment of TAA Member Phil Wankat’s curation and commentary of the archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), Cartoons, is now available.
Wankat selected articles that have information that is still valid today, and included commentary on each. We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” over the next few months. The articles are organized into 10 categories, including Authors Needed, Cartoons, Contracts, Ethics, Money, Production, Recognition and Rewards, Software, Textbooks as Scholarship, and Writer’s Block. The first installment was Authors Needed.
Long-time TAA Member Phil Wankat Goes Back Into the TAA Newsletter Archives and Finds Gold
TAA Member Phil Wankat, who joined TAA in 1989, pored over his archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), selected articles that have information that is still valid today, and included commentary on each. We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” over the next few months. The articles are organized into 10 categories, including Authors Needed, Cartoons, Contracts, Ethics, Money, Production, Recognition and Rewards, Software, Textbooks as Scholarship, and Writer’s Block. The first installment is Authors Needed.
Busy TAA People: Jean Murphy Under Contract For First Book
TAA member Jean Derricotte-Murphy, D.Min., Ph.D, is under contract with Cascade Books to publish her first book, A View From the Balcony: Opera Through Womanist Eyes, in early 2024. Excerpted from the book’s abstract: “..this work offers the reader a historical glance at the philosophical and religious underpinnings of systemic racism by presenting a new healing hermeneutic, a Balcony Hermeneutic, from which to view, critique, assess, correct, and reverse the devastating effects Anthropological Poverty has inflicted upon the world.” She will also be presenting the paper “Beloved, Margaret Garner, and the Desperate Flight to Freedom” at the November 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio Texas. Congratulations Jean!
Busy TAA People: TAA Member Margarita Huerta’s Work Reaches the 1,000 Mark for Citations
TAA member Margarita Huerta, PhD, writer and Founder of Real Academics, reached the 1,000 mark for citations on her Google Scholar profile on August 25, 2023.
Her top three most cited articles (out of 20 articles tracked by Google) include:
- “Graduate students as academic writers: writing anxiety, self-efficacy and emotional intelligence” (2017), M Huerta, P Goodson, M Beigi, D Chlup, Higher Education Research & Development, 36 (4), 716-729. (205 citations)
- “The effect of an instructional intervention on middle school English learners’ science and English reading achievement” (2012), R Lara‐Alecio, F Tong, BJ Irby, C Guerrero, M Huerta, Y Fan, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49 (8), 987-1011. (184 citations)
- “Connecting literacy and science to increase achievement for English language learners” (2010), M Huerta, J Jackson, Early Childhood Education Journal, 38, 205-211. (62 citations)
Don’t Kill Your Chance with a Publisher By Making This Mistake
Gregory J. Privitera, PhD, Professor of Psychology at St. Bonaventure University and author of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (3e), Essential Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (2e), and Research Methods for the Behavioral Sciences (3e), said that in his experience, one big way to kill/challenge a chance with a publisher is to come to them with a fully written book: “At least in the textbook publishing space, editors want room for the development of a project. So, they prefer a few sample chapters and a proposal, over a fully written book–with some exceptions, such as if that book was published already, but the author is ‘shopping’ for a new publisher to print the book.”