How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Kinds of Dissemination
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Feedback is scary. As researchers, we struggle privately with our ideas, trying to
bring them out into the light by writing them down as clearly and articulately as we
can. No-one wants to see the outcome of their struggle criticized or ridiculed, and it
is only natural that many researchers are reluctant to expose their work in public. 1
Without feedback, though, we can’t learn which of our views is controversial
and which ‘obvious’, or learn how to communicate clearly, or refine our ideas in
the light of the perspectives of others. Unless we regard our work as perfect—and I
hope it is obvious that no work is perfect!—feedback is essential.
That said, feedback can certainly be unpleasant. After a quarter-century as a publishing
academic, ill-thought or aggressive referees’ reports can still hurt enough to
make me lose sleep. For a junior academic, the wrong kind of feedback can seem
crushing, and it is all too common for paper reviews to be intemperate or based on
lazy reading of the work. Ultimately, though, you need to remember that, however
frustrating it can be to try and get your work in print and get your ideas understood,
all good work does get published somewhere—and ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us
stronger’. The right response is to leave your emotion aside (which may take a day
or two), and get to work on responding to the feedback as constructively as you can.
Kinds of Dissemination
Researchers use four main mechanisms to tell their colleagues about their work:
journal publications, conference presentations, talks in forums such as workshops,
and academic seminars.
The different forms of publication are one aspect of academia that really does
vary drastically from field to field. In some disciplines, only journal articles are regarded
as substantial publications, and conference presentations are little more than
an opportunity to talk about current work. In other disciplines, conference papers
are seen as at least as important as journal papers, and are much more timely. In
some conferences there are fully published, indexed proceedings, and most of the
authors get a chance to give a 15 or 30-min talk on their work; in other such conferences,
most of the authors present their work as a ‘poster’, literally by standing
in front of a large poster they have designed that summarizes what they have done
and explaining it to whoever stops to listen. In such conferences, only a select few
are given a speaking opportunity. Historically, in some disciplines published papers
1
Not all researchers are so shy. I had to stop a PhD student in my group, Dave, from posting to
international mailing lists to announce his latest discoveries—which were not, on a global scale,
all that interesting. I valued his excitement about his work, but his excess of enthusiasm led him to
embarrass himself. He needed to develop the patience to follow the ordinary channels of communication.
In a similar slip of judgment, Dave decided that a particular group of researchers ought
to adopt the referencing style he had learnt during his reading of how-to-write books. He wrote a
stinging criticism of some papers, focusing on ‘issues’ that weren’t really problems at all, but just
differences in style. Fortunately for him, his criticism was simply ignored.