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The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (my reading notes)

As a qualitative researcher who mentors students in conducting research using these methods in a primarily quantitative institution, it’s hard to do both mentoring theses and teaching them skills if you don’t teach the methods courses (which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to).

AcWri at the Comfort Inn Santa Fe Bosques

Therefore, with all the pain in my heart I have to send my students to do independent reading on methods if they choose a technique that is qualitative and in which they were not trained (remember I mentor students from other campuses and universities too). Obviously, I share with them my knowledge base for specific readings and books they ought to check out, and I guide them throughout the process.

One of the books I’ve liked the most throughout my career, (and I learned qualitative methods in graduate school!) is Johnny Saldaña’s “The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers“. This book is, in my opinion, canonical for anyone trying to learn how to code written material and undertake qualitative analysis.

Overall, I believe reading Saldaña’s book coupled with the Ryan and Barnard 2000 classic article should be a good introduction to how to undertake coding for qualitative researchers.

If you liked this blog post, perhaps you’d want to check my reading notes of other books on various topics, including scholarly writing, or my page on reading notes of books geared towards doctoral candidates undertaking their dissertation research. Disclaimer: I purchase all my books with my own hard earned money, and I receive absolutely no cash from promoting, reading or reviewing these books. My intention is simply to help others in academia, particularly graduate students and scholars at the margins.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 1, 2019

Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English (my reading notes)

Since I teach in Mexico and mentor doctoral students in Spanish, but the requirements for a global academia are increasingly international, I am always on the lookout for stuff that I think will help my graduate students. I found Hilary Glassman-Deal’s book “Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English“ during my search, and wanted to check it out.

My full process for writing a paper

I think that overall, this book might help those who are non-native English speakers improve their scientific writing. Though strongly geared towards STEM, I believe it can help those in the humanities and social sciences.

Overall, a nice book that should be useful as well for STEM folks. At some points, I wasn’t completely on board with her methods, but again, I think and read and write in English, so I am not the best at assessing fit for non-native English speakers.

If you liked this blog post, perhaps you’d want to check my reading notes of other books on various topics, including scholarly writing, or my page on reading notes of books geared towards doctoral candidates undertaking their dissertation research. Disclaimer: I purchase all my books with my own hard earned money, and I receive absolutely no cash from promoting, reading or reviewing these books. My intention is simply to help others in academia, particularly graduate students and scholars at the margins.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 1, 2019

Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words (my reading notes)

This is another book that helps those of us who are in STEM fields or publish within the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) areas write more clearly.

Editing a paper

This book by David Lindsay, “Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words” is one of the best I’ve read as far as providing detail-oriented guidelines on how to write well in the STEM disciplines, and its advice applies broadly.

In short, very much worth reading if you’re looking to improve your writing as an academic.

If you liked this blog post, perhaps you’d want to check my reading notes of other books on various topics, including scholarly writing, or my page on reading notes of books geared towards doctoral candidates undertaking their dissertation research. Disclaimer: I purchase all my books with my own hard earned money, and I receive absolutely no cash from promoting, reading or reviewing these books. My intention is simply to help others in academia, particularly graduate students and scholars at the margins.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 1, 2019

The Scientist’s Guide to Writing How to Write More Easily and Effectively throughout Your Scientific Career (my reading notes)

I had corresponded with Dr. Stephen B. Heard about his writing book “The Scientist’s Guide to Writing How to Write More Easily and Effectively throughout Your Scientific Career” a few years ago and he was kind enough to email me a PDF copy. I hadn’t made the time to read it until recently when I began compiling reading notes of books on how to do academic writing, and more specifically, what doctoral students can expect during the gruelling process of developing their doctoral dissertation. As a former chemical engineer and leather scientist, Stephen’s book resonated with me, as his book is oriented towards STEM disciplines.

Coloured pens, scribbling highlighting and writing

My Twitter thread on Stephen’s book is self-explanatory and offers a summary of my overall thoughts on the book.

Overall, a great book for STEM folks.

If you liked this blog post, perhaps you’d want to check my reading notes of other books on various topics, including scholarly writing, or my page on reading notes of books geared towards doctoral candidates undertaking their dissertation research. Disclaimer: I purchase all my books with my own hard earned money, and I receive absolutely no cash from promoting, reading or reviewing these books. My intention is simply to help others in academia, particularly graduate students and scholars at the margins.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 1, 2019

Preparing a research statement and crafting a research trajectory

People keep asking me how to write a research statement and how they can develop a research trajectory. My own pathway has been quite variegated so I don’t recommend following mine (as I have many interests and have done a lot of things). My advice is particularly targeted to those in disciplines, fields and countries where it’s much more common to have the usual linear trajectory (PhD, publishing sometimes and other times, waiting until the degree, post-doctoral fellowship to get some articles out or work on a book manuscript, publish 5-6 articles and a single-authored monograph, and start work on a second project before coming up for tenure).

Pathway

Photo credit: David Mertl on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed Attribution

Since I didn’t want to provide “advice”, I instead chose to tweet a thread of my own research statement and research trajectory. You can read my Research Interests statement here. As I said in my Twitter thread, research trajectories are highly personal. What will interest me in 5 years? I am not sure. I was always interested in cooperation. I think that I study things I did not see coming in 2011, when I first wrote about my own research trajectory. To be perfectly honest, I never thought I would be studying water conflicts now, or water privatization, even if I had already started doing work on the politics of bottled water in 2009.

A research statement, in my view, should state what you’ve studied, how you’ve studied it, and the outputs you’ve generated, as well as a general overview of where your research is going to take you. The research statement, since it’s a document targeted at academic job search committees, should be concise (1-2 pages) and provide an overview of current projects, completed ones, and in-process or about-to-launch ones.

A research trajectory is, to me, a long-term plan/description of how the work of an academic or a scholar has evolved through time, and where it could possibly go. A research trajectory has temporal and evolutionary dimensions: it’s a narrative of where you were at a certain point in your career as a scholar, and where have you moved or what you’ve accomplished.

Here is my Twitter thread.

Also, below you can find some resources on both research trajectories and research statements.

On research statements: see this guide chock full of good tips, UCSF’s suggestions, and this blog post. I really liked how this postdoctoral fellow wrote her research statement.

And on research trajectories, here, here and here. I loved how this scholar wrote his research trajectory, too. Here is an example of a sample research trajectory that serves as a template for what a clinical scholar should do.

I think the core two pieces of advice on research statements and research trajectories can be found in these two tweets:

Addendum: I used text from my Twitter thread to draft my Research Trajectory.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 17, 2019

Planning work over the summer (for faculty and undergrad/graduate students)

Two of my quasi-doctoral students (Cesar Alvarez from University of California Los Angeles and Mariana Miguelez from The Ohio State University), have asked me a few times whether I could write a blog post about how to plan a summer. As doctoral students in the United States, their summer is approximately 4 months (from May through August). Fellow faculty members have asked me for the same. When I used to work in Canada, I would have 4 months, but now at CIDE I have only from June through mid-August. These summer months still assume I’m on campus and thus I should be available for meetings, etc. Because of this shortened summer, I rarely plan anything extended beyond knowing when I should take a holiday (which I usually do at the same time as when CIDE closes over the summer for 3 weeks). At any rate, when I need to plan summer activities, I follow the model I present below.

Drafts monthly plans

The process I follow is approximately the following (as drawn from my thread):

These tweets describe my strategy in more detail.

Something asked me how do I deal with STCUS (Shit That Comes Up Somehow) and here is how: I add those tasks that I either had to do without having planned them, or somebody dropped those commitments on my lap (e.g. administrative stuff that needs to be dealt with for my institution). I use a green coloured pen to mark them as “this came up, had to do it”.

For doctoral students (and Masters and undergraduate too), I strongly recommend that they incorporate a review of their progress in their summer planning. Summers are possibly the only periods (unless they have to teach or work if they do not have funding, in order to make ends meet) when a doctoral student could possibly reflect without having additional pressures. This reflection could help them remap their progress.

You could potentially use whatever is left of the month of April to write a first draft of a DTP and update it every month, or update a file with notes about your progress that could then be reworked into a DTP. If you are a faculty member writing a book, perhaps doing a DTP would help as well!

The following few tweets show how I do the monthly and weekly planning, with actual visual examples.

To recap, my suggestion for planning a summer:

1) Set up a goal for the end of the summer (whichever months that would be – for this blog post’s sake consider May 1st the beginning of summer and August 31st the end).
2) Break down each goal/objective/milestone into achievable tasks and milestones to be accomplished each month/week.
3) Backcast those goals from the end of August backwards through to the beginning of May using a Gantt Chart and printed monthly and weekly calendars.
4) Plan your day using #2ThingsADay, Granular Planning and the Rule of Threes or whichever method you prefer, based on weekly goals to achieve.
5) Drop those commitments in either a Google Calendar or an Everything Notebook or whichever method you best prefer.

Obviously this process can be adapted to plan a semester (either Fall or Spring) as well. Hope this blog post helps people out there!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 14, 2019

How to write the discussion section of an academic paper

This is one of the most challenging questions people have ever asked me, because after looking through dozens of journal articles in my Mendeley database, I could not find a lot of them who used Discussion sections. I believe this idea of the Discussion component of an academic journal article (or book chapter, in some cases) comes from the IMRAD model of publishing, that is, papers that have at least the following five sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, Analysis and Discussion (hence the acronym).

Personally, I neither like, nor do I often write this type of journal article. Even when I was a chemical engineer, I can’t recall that I read many papers in the IMRAD model, as they all had a variation (merging Discussion with Results, or Results with Conclusion, or Discussion with Conclusion). As I said on Twitter, I read engineering, natural science and social science literatures. Thusly, the Discussion sections that I read vary QUITE A LOT.

HOWEVER

All Discussion sections I’ve read are

  1. analytical, not descriptive,
  2. specific in their interpretation of research results,
  3. robust in their linkage of research findings with theories, other empirical reports and various literatures,
  4. good at explaining how a paper’s results may contradict earlier work, extend it, advance our understanding of X or Y phenomenon and, most definitely:
  5. NOT the conclusion of the paper.

What I think is important to remember when writing the Discussion section of a paper, is to really ANALYZE, not just describe. Link theories, methods, data, other work.

As usual in my blog posts, I here link to a few resources that may be of help (written by other authors).

In my Twitter thread, I suggested ways to discern (and learned from) how authors have written their discussion sections.

There are times when scholars blend Discussion and Conclusions, or Results and Discussions sections. This is not even discipline-dependent, it’s author-dependent.

Another example, now from the criminal justice field.

Hopefully these notes will be helpful to fellow scholars writing these sections!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 10, 2019

Preparing for the doctoral dissertation defense (the “viva”)

I did my PhD in Canada, where doctoral dissertation defenses are public, so what I’m going to narrate here is how I prepared for my own defense under the rules and standards of the school where I graduated from (The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada). I won’t cover other systems as I don’t know them well. My own PhD students have had to defend in a similar way to the one I faced when I did my PhD dissertation defense, so I’m combining both in this blog post.

PhD defense

First of all, if your PhD dissertation advisor told you that “the moment you hate your dissertation the most is when you’re ready to defend”, I can 100% certify that this assertion is absolutely true. By the time I submitted my PhD dissertation for external examination (six weeks before my defense date), I was ready to just about not ever look at it again in my entire life. But the truth is that my PhD advisor wouldn’t let me do that. He suggested that I should start preparing for my defense about 4 weeks before the date, which is exactly what I did.

This is the process I followed, and more or less the process my own doctoral students have followed as well:

  • I prepared a summary of the main argument of my PhD dissertation, using the Dissertation Two Pager strategy (DTP).
  • Based on my DTP, I created a 15-20 Power Point presentation. I sent that file to my PhD advisor for review.
  • Once he reviewed it, I cut the presentation to about 15 slides.
  • We met once a week for the first two weeks, and two times the third week. I ran through my presentation with him and made notes of what I did right and what I did wrong.
  • The last week before defending, I did my presentation in the actual defense room with my best friend, who is also a professor at UBC, as the audience. He suggested additional changes to my presentation (particularly, cutting material and making my argument more concise).
  • The day before I defended, I did one more practice run with a group of cohort friends. I did this in the morning so that I could take the evening off, and the following morning as well.
  • On the day of the defense, I did absolutely nothing connected to my research. I had breakfast with my partner, went for a walk, called my family over the phone, brought my laptop to campus (also stored the presentation in a USB as well as emailed it to myself).
  • At the defense, I ran through my talk, and prepared for the questions by having a jug of water and a notepad and pen near by.

Thesis defense (xkcd)

A few tips that I can offer based on my own defense and my doctoral students’:

  • Make your presentation short. Keep any additional material in slides AFTER the final slide of your presentation. This was an amazing piece of advice from my PhD advisor that I have kept for all my talks now that I’m a professor.
  • Practice, practice, practice. By the time I did my presentation, which I rocked by the way, I was the world’s foremost expert in my topic and I could convince people of my findings and argument. My advisor wanted me to do lots of practice runs and I did them, with various audiences. I strongly recommend that one of the presentations is in front of someone who already has a PhD and has gone through the doctoral defense.
  • Prepare a list of potential questions that committee members could ask and write down their answers. I aced my presentation because I was ready for absolutely everything my committee could throw my way. Why did I not discuss this particular body of theory? “Because I wanted to focus on X, but my understanding of the field is as such…”
  • Remember, your committee is on your side. I was frazzled by the time I started the examination, but then I realized I was spending three hours with brilliant people who wanted me to succeed and hear all about my dissertation research. It became a fantastic conversation that ended with comments like “the book version of your dissertation could include X, Y and Z and Famous Press ABC would be interested in publishing it.” and “I think your postdoctoral research could take this trajectory“.
  • Attend other PhD students’ defenses. A few people told me that this wasn’t a good idea, but in fact it is. Not only does it mentally prepare you for the sequence of events that will occur throughout the defense, but also, if you attend your friends’ defenses, you’re providing them with a friendly audience they can look at and with moral and emotional support. They could in turn also be your allies.
  • Make sure your presentation includes all the elements of a PhD dissertation. I covered all the bases: Justification, Context, Theoretical and Empirical Contributions, Studies I Conducted, Findings and Results, Discussion, Limitations and Future Work. I ask that my PhD students cover the same.
  • Remember the elements of what doing a PhD entails and use those to frame your presentation. I ask that my students make VERY CLEAR what their original contribution to the literature is, and what gap they are filling (or how they are contributing to advancing our knowledge, e.g. by developing a new theoretical construct or constructing new datasets and testing new empirical strategies).

    Hopefully this blog post is of some use to doctoral students as they near their defense.

    If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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    By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 13, 2019

    What does Joli Jensen’s “low stakes, constant contact with a writing project” mean in practice?

    One of the best books I’ve ever read about academic writing was Joli Jensen‘s “Write No Matter What“. Ever since I read it, I pondered, “what does ‘constant, low-stakes contact with a writing project‘ mean, in practice?” This notion of regularly contributing to a piece of writing, even if it’s not daily writing, was one of the most impactful statements that Jensen made in her book, perhaps the center piece of her writing about scholarly prose. But I also have wondered, what does Jensen mean by this, and how can this be implemented in practice?

    Workflow at my CIDE campus office

    As anybody who reads my blog knows well, I try as hard as possible to write every day. Writing is a muscle, as Jane Green said, and doing so on a regular basis is what has enabled me to produce what I have published. For me, writing is an integral part of my daily routine – I wake up at Ungodly O’Clock (4:00 am) and write, and I guard my dedicated time for reading, research and writing very jealously. I make writing (even if it’s just a little bit) one of my #2ThingsADay. I like doing AIC-CSED combos (reading and systematizing one paper per day into a row of a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump to stay on top of the literature the literature). But like any human being, there are days when I can’t write for some bizarre reason (usually, jet-lag or extremely booked up days, where I can’t even wake up early to drop a few words on paper or in a Word document). Or, when I fall sick, or I’m in physical pain that I can’t reduce.

    This made me realize that I needed to ponder what, to me, was “frequent, low-stress contact with a project that interests me, in a supportive environment“?

    Here are a few ways in which I stay in frequent, low-stress contact with my writing projects. I should say I am lucky to have supportive environments, particularly right now where I can dedicate entire days to research and writing.

    1) Writing thoughts about my research or taking notes off journal articles, books and book chapters in my Everything Notebook.

    This should be pretty obvious – jotting down thoughts and transcribing ideas are ideal strategies to maintain low-stress contact with a writing project.

    #AcWri on the plane

    2) Highlighting and scribbling a paper, and dropping those notes onto my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump or a memorandum or a synthetic note.

    Generating these notes prompts me to write, and keeps me in touch with my project.

    AcWri and reading - staying on top of the literature

    3) Editing a draft.

    While I find editing drafts very hard I do enjoy checking whether I have cited stuff properly a much more amenable and enjoyable activity.

    My full process for writing a paper

    4) Reading across disciplinary and methodological boundaries and live-tweeting my reading notes.

    These reading notes often either become blog posts or written material for memoranda.

    Stationery, highlighters, pens and editing a paper

    5) Revisiting my projects’ progress and re-planning my writing deadlines and targets.

    This process of reviewing my progress weekly and monthly allows me to shift priorities around, depending on what I’ve received as feedback from editors and journals.

    Reading outlining and calendar cross-posting

    6) Mind-mapping concepts, ideas, connections within my research projects.

    Sometimes, the kind of work packet I need is a mind map of a specific field (read my blog post on how I map an entire field of research) or sub-field, or area of the literature. Drawing this mind-map reconnects me with my writing project and reopens avenues for closer examination, and often prompts me to write.

    Stationery, highlighters, pens and editing a paper

    7) Preparing and giving a talk about a paper I’m writing or one that I’ve already written.

    This process serves a little bit like a reverse outline strategy as Rachael Cayley calls it. Generating the Power Point slides associated with my talk allows me to see if my thoughts flow freely and whether the argument comes out clearly.

    AcWri focus on one thing

    More importantly, while I continue to champion daily writing, I acknowledge that this may not always work, even for me. So I think any written content that allows a researcher to stay in touch with their writing project should be considered #AcWri. Yes, even if that content is within the text of an email to a coauthor, an RA or oneself.

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    By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 7, 2019

    Backcasting a Revise-And-Resubmit (R&R) manuscript

    This morning, as I was reflecting on a topic I’ve been mulling over (what does Joli Jensen mean by “constant contact with a writing project entail”?), I reviewed potential blog posts I could pre-schedule, and realized that there’s one that I give very little play, even though it’s a really good one: my reverse-planning technique for project planning. This technique is is also called backcasting.

    Since I’m currently working on returning Revise-And-Resubmit (R&R) manuscripts to the editor, I wanted to explain how I break projects down into manageable pieces. Basically, I back-cast the entire paper from the deadline, breaking it down in components. For example, I have 2 R&Rs that need to go back by March 18th. I have backcast each component, starting with the response-to-reviewers.

    My revised version of this backcasting diagram includes the fact that I drop every comment INTO my Drafts Review Matrix, and then draw FROM the DRM, dropping every work packet INTO my Everything Notebook, creating daily and weekly task lists, in a very similar fashion to how I do a yearly plan using my Everything Notebook and monthly printed calendars.

    Breaking down an R&R revised

    Knowing what I have to do by when to have a revision resubmitted to the journal editor by a certain date allows me to plan my writing. This process works for revise-and-resubmits, first submissions, theses, conference papers and dissertations. Simply choose the type of project, and then backcast and create task lists from work packets. The beauty of this process is that you can break down the total project in as many (small or smaller) work packets as necessary.

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    By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 7, 2019