How to write a blogpost from your journal article in eleven easy steps

Posted on February 1, 2016 by policybristol

This piece originally appeared on the author’s Writing for Research blog.

Patrick Dunleavy is Professor of Political Science at the LSE and is Chair of the LSE Public Policy Group. He is well known for his book Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral dissertation or thesis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

You’ve just published a research article – why should you bother writing a blog post about it? Patrick Dunleavy argues that if you’ve devoted months to writing the paper, dealing with comments, doing rewrites and hacking through the publishing process, why would you not spend the extra couple of hours crafting an accessible blogpost? Here he breaks down in eleven easy steps how to generate a short-form version of your research article.

One of the oddest things that people in academic life regularly say to me is: ‘I’m not paid to write blogposts, only research articles. If my department or the grant-funder wants to start paying me for doing posts, then that would be a different matter’. Or alternatively, the argument goes: ‘I just don’t have the time to do blogging’. Or finally, the clinching rebuttal is: ‘Your blogpost just won’t get cited, and in today’s research environment, only citations count’.

Apparently then a lot of folk suffer from some serious misconceptions about what writing a blogpost entails:

They think it takes days, weeks, or even months to produce that difficult bit of text — it doesn’t, it takes two or three hours at most.
They believe that time devoted to a blogpost is time away from your main research — it’s not. Your post is done after you’ve finished and published your journal article — it is just a more readable and hopefully more popular version of that article, with key messages summarized in about 1,000 words.
Perhaps they also think that publishing a blogpost takes the time and hassle involved in submitting to journals, trekking through box after box of obscure electronic publishing bureaucracy, and then waiting weeks or months before seeing a proof, and months more for publication. But publishing a post is not like that at all. You get your 1,000 words finished in Word or equivalent. Include a table or a chart or two, being scrupulous to present them well. Then send it to a multi-author blog with a big readership in your field and a couple of days later your text is online at the blog.

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Amendment to earlier blog post: Are the Conservatives ‘now the Party of Work’? The Trade Union Bill suggests not…

Posted on November 10, 2015 by policybristol

Professor Michael Ford QC joined the Bristol law School in 2015 and specialises in labour law, human rights and public law.

Tonia Novitz is Professor of Labour Law, specialising in labour law, international trade and human rights.

Since Tonia and Michael’s last blog of 12 October 2015, the Government has now abandoned proposed restrictions on unions’ freedom of protest away from the workplace, probably because even the police did not identify a problem with the existing legal framework (see the response to consultation). But the government still wishes to amend the Code of Practice on picketing to cover e.g. intimidation on the picket line and the ‘responsible’ use of social media in strikes, with uncertain legal effect. No wonder the Trade Union Bill has been opposed not only by trade unions, such as Unison and Unite, but also by human rights NGOs. See for example the Joint Statement by Liberty, the British Institute of Human Rights, and Amnesty International.

The original blog follows.

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What does it take to get women at the top? Sex Balancing Party Leaderships

Posted on September 21, 2015 by policybristol

Meryl Kenny is Lecturer in Politics (Gender) at the University of Edinburgh

Meryl Kenny, Lecturer in Politics, University of Edinburgh

Sarah Childs, Professor of Politics and Gender, University of Bristol

The new Labour leader, deputy leader, and both candidates standing for Mayor in London and Bristol: all male. And this from a party whose parliamentary benches are more than 43 percent female and, in Bristol, where all its MPs are women. The newspapers and social media, not unexpectedly, were quick to question the party’s commitment to gender equality. Whatever you think of revaluing the education and health brief (and there’s a lot to be said for it), the absence of not one woman from the traditional top offices of state invited criticism. Some of this was no doubt right-wing commentators finding yet another reason to be critical of Labour’s new leader.

But the feminist criticism was more substantive: a longstanding worry that leftist politics often has too little room for gender equality in policy and personnel terms. Against such criticism, the counter argument: given the number of women candidates standing, party members had ample opportunity to vote for a woman. In short, Corbyn was the preferred candidate, his sex notwithstanding.

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Communicating with the world: top tips for media engagement

Posted on July 15, 2015 by policybristol

Engaging with the media can be tough, as noted by many of the academics who attended the PolicyBristol workshop. Some of the potential barriers they identified included:

– Requirement for research findings to be ‘timely’
– Mismatch of pace
– The feeling of needing to be an expert
– Distraction from ‘day job’
– Fear of misrepresentation

But behind these potential challenges, there’s a whole host of benefits. Getting your research into the public domain is often essential for realising its impact, and can also be an important source of participants/collaborators for your research itself. One could also argue that, from a moral or ethical perspective, change should involve public opinion. As Sue Littlemore, former BBC Education Correspondent, pointed out: it’s not about engaging with the media for its own sake – it’s about ‘communicating with the world’.

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Men experiencing or perpetrating domestic violence linked with two to three-fold increase in mental health problems

Posted on June 11, 2015 by policybristol

Professor Marianne Hester, Chair in Gender, Violence & International Policy

Men visiting their GP with symptoms of anxiety or depression are more likely to have experienced or carried out some form of behaviour linked to domestic violence and abuse, according to a new University of Bristol study. Researchers say the findings highlight the need for GPs to ask male patients with mental health problems about domestic abuse.

The study, led by Professor Marianne Hester OBE, and involving Dr Emma Williamson from the School, and published in BMJ Open, aimed to find out whether there is an association between men who have experienced or carried out domestic violence and abuse with men visiting their GP with mental health problems or who are binge drinking and using cannabis.

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GE 2015: Can electoral decision making be rational?

Posted on May 7, 2015 by policybristol

Colin Davies, Chair in Cognitive Psychology

How do we go about deciding who we’ll vote for? And how should we go about deciding?

For every decision there is, in principle, a rational way to decide. Political scientists have formulated the idea of ‘correct voting’, whereby a voter can be said to have voted correctly if they have selected the candidate or party whose priorities are most closely aligned with their own. If Mr Spock were voting, this is the logical, rational approach that he would take.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, voters are not perfect, rational decision-makers. For one thing, voters typically have insufficient information to make a rational decision, either because politicians haven’t released relevant information (where they would make cuts, for example) or because voters haven’t availed themselves of this information.

But a more fundamental reason why voters don’t always choose rationally is that decision making in general is not rational, as demonstrated by a long history of psychological research, beginning with the Nobel prize-winning work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It’s important to qualify this point by noting that not being rational doesn’t prevent us from — usually — making good decisions. There may be very good reasons for us not to strive for perfect rationality in most situations: a fast, “good-enough” decision may trump a slow, optimal decision.

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GE 2015: Major parties show a lack of corporate institutional imagination

Posted on May 1, 2015 by policybristol

Bronwen Morgan, Professor, Australian Research Council Future Fellow

Mary Phillips, Reader in Organisation Studies, University of Bristol

Nina Boeger, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol

In an article in Cooperative News on 6 February this year, Ed Miliband waxed lyrical on the merits of cooperative forms of enterprise, stating that ‘the cooperative ideal is more important than it has been for a generation’. Yet less than 3 months later, the Labour Party Manifesto fails to follow through on these sentiments, with only a derisively brief mention of charities, mutuals, cooperatives and social enterprises’ pioneering role in the social economy (p. 21), unsupported by any detail or vision. This is a glaring example of a general lack of corporate institutional imagination across the major parties. While lending lip service to current forms of social enterprise, cooperatives and mutuals, their manifestos provide negligible support for enterprise diversity, understood as policies that might lend support to developing more variety in corporate organisational forms and corporate governance models.

Across all the major parties, there is a disproportionate emphasis on the broad issue of finance for social enterprise, cooperatives and mutuals. The Conservative Party lays claim to launching the world’s first social investment bank, and to introducing more social impact bonds than the rest of the world combined – but as the UK Alternative Social Impact Investment Commission’s recent report makes clear, these innovations have inflated expectations over and above achieved outcomes and have not necessarily actually increased the flow of capital to socially useful investment. While the UK has a positive recent history of productive innovation around finance, particularly in relation to community share offers and the right of communities to bid, there is little new in the current manifestos to develop this.

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How to write a blogpost from your journal article in eleven easy steps

Amendment to earlier blog post: Are the Conservatives ‘now the Party of Work’? The Trade Union Bill suggests not…

Communicating with the world: top tips for media engagement

Men experiencing or perpetrating domestic violence linked with two to three-fold increase in mental health problems

GE 2015: Can electoral decision making be rational?

GE 2015: Major parties show a lack of corporate institutional imagination

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…in 2012, over 1.8 million articles were published in 28,000 journals.