Re: [Wiki-research-l] Unaffiliated researchers

I’m all for startling sentences – and, given how lazy some reviewers are, put it in the title if you can! To use the Kent Beck example “Network Garbage Collection: Fast and Easy!” Would make a fine title, and note that it contains a colon in the title. Papers with colons in the title are cited more. When I first heard this, I was dubious. One day I happened to have a spreadsheet with all the papers in our university’s ePrints system which included bibliometric data, so I put it to the test and, yes, it seems to be quite true. The titles-with-colons were indeed a lot more cited on average than those without. Why? I don’t know, but I have a few theories – it’s probably a worthy subject for research! But, back to startling sentences. It’s a common technique used in lots of forms of writing to grab and hold the reader’s attention from the first sentence (so they will buy the book or whatever) – it’s usually called “the hook” if you are googling (as in fishing for a reader). “The past is another country; they do things differently there”, “Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again” and the all-time classic “It was a dark and stormy night” (a hook now so famous thanks to Snoopy that nobody even remembers the book).The use of “the hook” is well-known but not it seems in academic writing for which the gold standard is to be as boring as possible :-) Kerry _____ From: Ward Cunningham [mailto:ward@c2.com] Sent: Thursday, 8 November 2012 10:10 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Cc: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Unaffiliated researchers I always liked Kent Beck's patterns for a successful oopsla submission, especially "one startling sentence": http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/papers/HowToGetaPaperAcceptedToOOPSLA/HowToG etAPaperAcceptedToOOPSLA.htm This was from a time that oopsla was big and important. It was also a conference that actively sought industry collaboration. Notice that all of the panelists were from industry. On Nov 7, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Manuel Palomo Duarte wrote: I agree with Kerry, unaffiliated are unusual, but I've never heard of them been discriminated in any way when publishing ... 2012/11/7 Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com&gt; I am not an unaffiliated researcher (but I guess I might be after my imminent retirement). But having been involved in editorial boards and conference programme committees etc, I have never been aware of any restriction on unaffiliated researchers publishing research. I would say though that it is fairly unusual to receive papers from unaffiliated authors and I think the couple of times I have encountered the situation the papers were very poor quality. But they were reviewed in the normal way and rejected on their merits. But had the papers been of better quality, then I presume they would have been accepted. On what basis could a reviewer or editor legitimately discriminate against unaffiliated authors? Kerry _____ From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of emijrp Sent: Wednesday, 7 November 2012 9:12 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Unaffiliated researchers Hi all; I wonder if there are unaffiliated researchers in this mailing list. I know that publishing without affiliation is a bit hard, so I would like to talk with them and learn from their experience. Regards, emijrp -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada http://LibreFind.org <http://LibreFind.org/> - The wiki search engine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Prof. Manuel Palomo Duarte, PhD Software Process Improvement and Formal Methods group (SPI&FM). 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