Tasty » Adam Sampson's academia bookmarks

How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps | Serendipity edit / delete

"The first sentence of an abstract should clearly introduce the topic of the paper so that readers can relate it to other work they are familiar with. However, an analysis of abstracts across a range of fields show that few follow this advice, nor do they take the opportunity to summarize previous work in their second sentence. A central issue is the lack of structure in standard advice on abstract writing, so most authors don’t realize the third sentence should point out the deficiencies of this existing research. To solve this problem, we describe a technique that structures the entire abstract around a set of six sentences, each of which has a specific role, so that by the end of the first four sentences you have introduced the idea fully. This structure then allows you to use the fifth sentence to elaborate a little on the research, explain how it works, and talk about the various ways that you have applied it, for example to teach generations of new graduate students how to write clearly. This technique is helpful because it clarifies your thinking and leads to a final sentence that summarizes why your research matters."

to abstract academia honours research writing ... on 11 October 2016

How I prepare a peer review | Southern Fried Science edit / delete

Recommended for PhD students.

to academia peer-review ... on 28 February 2016

Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Slate Star Codex edit / delete

"The studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen. They go wrong in ways I didn’t even realize research could go wrong before." Worth reading for this bit alone, but there is a serious (and pretty interesting) point here.

to academia experimental-design research science ... on 23 March 2015

PubCSS: Formatting Academic Publications in HTML & CSS | Thomas Park edit / delete

Nice idea, but: the output looks *terrible*, and it relies on proprietary tools. Maybe if someone knocked up an xmltex-based backend...

to academia css formatting html latex publication text ... on 22 March 2015

Copy, Shake, and Paste: Homebrew Collusion Detection edit / delete

Scanning for plagiarism (or, rather, repeated text, which I guess would also catch things like university boilerplate as well) in a large corpus of theses.

to academia plagiarism research teaching text ... on 13 March 2015

C3TV - Hacking Ethics in Education edit / delete

"At the University of Amsterdam, we have started an ethical committee for the System and Network Engineering Master." Interesting to me because I run the ethics committee for the department I'm in at work (and we're about to pick up a load of security-related student projects). I suspect a follow-up presentation next year might be more interesting, though, since it sounds like they didn't have any ethics framework in place before (?! -- how on earth do they do funded projects?). Comprehensible in audio only.

to academia ccc ethics security teaching ... on 18 January 2015

Academic urban legends edit / delete

"Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. [...] To illustrate this phenomenon, I draw upon a remarkable case in which a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron." It's more complicated than it sounds. Recommended reading for students who wonder why we complain about inadequate references -- and for seasoned researchers who may well have exactly the same problems...

to academia ag0700 citation nutrition referencing research spinach writing ... on 24 August 2014

CitationStyles.org | The Citation Style Language – open and free citation styles edit / delete

[...] "the Citation Style Language (CSL), an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies."

to academia bibliography citation publishing typesetting ... on 26 July 2014

Using Emacs, Org-mode and R for Research Writing in Social Sciences: A Toolkit for Writing Reproducible Research Papers and Monographs edit / delete

Writing using org-mode as an outliner, and embedding analysis.

to academia org outliner research typesetting writing ... on 26 July 2014

A History of Computing at Daresbury Laboratory edit / delete

to academia daresbury retrocomputing science uk ... on 25 May 2014