Week 1.1: Academic Practice

Although most of my adult career has been in Research and Development, good academic practice is not a discipline I’ve cultivated over the years. This is an area of the course where I expect I’ll have a steep learning curve. Making the transition from writing technical documents such as specifications and processes to adopt a more academic approach and style as needed for my studies may take some time to achieve.

One strategy I’ve decided to use is to think of it more as a documentation model. Just as a technical document will often follow a pattern or template of what’s required so too will an academic paper. Defining and tuning the model over a series of iterations has the potential to significantly simplify that transition. Just as a software engineer needs to adapt to a new coding style when moving to a new company, I simply need to adapt to a new writing style. Before long it will be second nature. The table below shows the difference in structure between a typical technical document, in this case a Software Requirement Spec taken from the Rational Unified Process, and that of an academic paper. The links to both can be found in the Bibliography section below.

My understanding thus far is that good academic practice encompasses several distinct disciplines:

1. Research
2. Idea development
3. Academic writing
4. Citation and Referencing

Research

Background reading and investigation of related subject matter. Good data mining and record keeping skills are essential here. I also believe that irrespective of the archival system or platform I use to store my findings, it needs to be structured in such a way as to simplify finding and extracting the material.

Idea Development

Idea development blends new ideas with the raw material gathered during research and uses it to test the arguments presented, identify further areas for research and generate new theories to test. Idea development is closely coupled to research. They both work together to form an iterative cycle until the desired conclusion is reached and has sufficient evidence to prove that conclusion true.

Academic Writing

Academic writing is the culmination of the above two activities and where ideas, arguments and results are presented and discussed for the reader along with the evidence and justification.

This is the area I’m most nervous about when it comes to developing good academic practice, most probably because its unfamiliar territory and I’m aware I have a steep learning curve here.

Citation and Referencing the Work of Others

Referencing or citing the work of others is always required. In the first instance it gives credibility and recognition to the original author(s) for their work and build credibility for the author’s own findings. Another, and arguably more important reason for the author, is to avoid possible allegations of plagiarism.

To quote the University’s Academic Integrity Policy, , “All use of another person’s work or ideas must be attributed and the sources identified, including where you have paraphrased or summarised.”

The citation format mandated by the University is Harvard. The full visual guide is available here.

Note — At the time of writing, the citations given in the bibliography are not fully compliant with the Harvard format required by the University. I’m in the process of creating a fully compliant style for the ZotPress plugin and Zotero.

Conclusion

I’ve vacillated this week; deliberately delaying writing this post because of all the activities from Week 1, this was the one I was least confident about and furthest outside my own comfort zone. When trying to understand why, the only answer I arrived at was it’s the one I’m least experienced in. That will change over the next two years as I’ve stepped back into the world of a academia.

Now I’ve written this post I can see how many similarities there are with what I do for a living. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel quite so alien anymore.

Bibliography

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