Skip to content

Identifying what an undergraduate thesis, a Masters’ thesis and a doctoral dissertation entail, and based on that, narrowing the research thesis topic

As I was leaving my office to head to the airport to fly to Mexico City for a workshop on conflicts in extractive industries, I saw the completed printout of Rafael’s dissertation sitting on my desk. Rafael is my soon-to-graduate PhD student. I felt an extreme amount of pride, while also realizing what an enormous amount of work this doctoral dissertation has entailed. Rafa did ethnographic fieldwork for two years analyzing three cases of water conflict, plus a quantitative analysis of a global dataset. I think it’s a testament to his effort that his thesis is already being referenced as a key source for the topic. But reaching the point where we could narrow his topic wasn’t easy. Most of my students have extremely ambitious goals for their undergraduate honors and graduate (Masters and PhD) thesis. Often, I worry if this is because I’m a demanding supervisor and they feel they need to do grandiose, ambitious, all-encompassing projects or because we all face a challenge trying to narrow a topic. I think it’s more the latter than the former. We all tend to want to do research that is broad in scope.

My office at CIDE Region Centro during and after writing a paper

This morning, I mused on Twitter that I found my students to be over-eager and really excited about their research topics, and that they often want to “solve the world’s problems” with their theses/final papers/dissertations. You can read my Twitter thread here and the excellent responses to it.

Obviously, there are a few things that I want to highlight about doing a supervised research project that I think are worth remembering, in particular because my students often ask me “so, how narrow is narrow?”. This is a question that necessitates an in-depth discussion between each individual student and their advisors.

Many students come to me wanting to do broad-ranging, ambitious topics. I always tell them to be focused on a narrowly defined project. I find that it’s easier to expand the scope of a project than to narrow it. I also worry when the project is vaguely defined and unclear. There are clear differences between types of research and writing projects.

1. A doctoral dissertation

In my view, a doctoral dissertation is a long-term piece of research that demonstrates competency in conducting independent, in-depth scholarly investigations where the domain knowledge is broad, and where the research contribution is original and quite clear. This is challenging for a lot of students because the “what is a contribution” question pops up. I believe you can make theoretical and empirical contributions, and PhD dissertations often have both, but they need at least one of these. One reason why the 3 papers model for a PhD thesis is so popular is because it allows the student to demonstrate competency, depth and originality in a broad range of topics. Depth and breadth of insight are usually tested through doctoral qualifying/comprehensive exams (though I’m well aware of the British model that doesn’t involve comprehensives).

In my view, two elements are fundamental to the development of a doctoral dissertation: independence and degree of dominion of the knowledge domain. As a doctoral researcher, you should be able to conduct your research independently, even if the advisor is there to guide you. You should also have covered the literature broadly and deeply enough. At the doctoral thesis’ defence, it should be obvious that the student has now become the master at the topic.

The SOCK test (specific, original contribution to knowledge) is a good one that should be applied to doctoral theses all around.

2. A Masters’ thesis

In my view, a Masters’ thesis (as its name indicates) is supposed to demonstrate mastery. We may define mastery in different ways, but I do believe you need to show that you’re competent at investigating a particular research topic and at undertaking theoretical or empirical work that moves our understanding of a phenomenon forward. For example, for me, a Masters-level thesis is an empirical examination of patterns of bottled water consumption. Or a collated and analysed set of stories about consuming bottled water and the rationales behind them (both of these are Masters’ theses of two of my students).

The problem with Masters’ students wanting to do PhD-level kind of work (or too broad of a project) is that they are often given a shorter time frame, which often requires them to rush through courses and do their thesis under financial duress and time constraints. Thus the importance of narrowing the research topic.

It’s also important that the Masters’ student supervisor/advisor is realistic in terms of expectations and ability to achieve goals within the shortened time frame, and often within tight budgets or the risk of facing a shortage of funds.

While it’s important that the topic is adequately covered and that the contribution is original, it doesn’t need to be a grandiose or far-ranging contribution. As Dr. Prieto indicates in her response to my tweet, an in-depth case study or an application of a theory to a different dataset could be an original contribution.

It IS important that the topic of the Masters thesis is narrow in scope, but competently executed.

3. An undergraduate (honors) thesis.

I teach in the undergraduate program in public policy at CIDE. My undergraduate students tend to be REALLY ambitious and want to change the world, and I am grateful for that. But that’s not the goal with their undergraduate theses. For me, an undergraduate thesis can be a systematic literature review, an application of a research technique to an interesting topic, a test of a theory or an empirically-inclined paper using data that are often not available. An undergraduate thesis doesn’t necessitate an original contribution in the sense of a Masters’ or PhD- level one.

There are various reasons why undergraduate students (or even graduate ones) want to do very broad topics, resulting in thesis that are not narrow enough.

But as discussed above, you can do a perfectly competent undergraduate honours thesis just by doing a systematic policy analysis, a solid literature review, an interesting exploration of a known quantitative or qualitative research technique, an empirical (or descriptive) case study, etc.

4. A seminar research paper

Seminar research papers tend to also be overly ambitious, as Dr. McConnaughy indicates below.

What I have done in my seminar courses is create a blueprint, a template for students to do their final papers. That way, I define the scope of the project in very narrow terms, I give them the tools they need to apply and I let them do the empirical testing or the archival or secondary source searches (though some students of mine even collect primary data!)

A few other things to consider and pieces of advice to remember:

Narrowing the research topic should entail a conversation with your advisor. You can start reading broadly, but you should be able to pare down the topic asking a few questions such as:

  • Can this study be undertaken within a reasonable (12 months/24 months) time frame?
  • Do I have the necessary funding for the entire period of time that this study will require me to do work/fieldwork/laboratory experiments?
  • Am I trying to do more cases than needed to prove the hypotheses I’m testing or answer the research questions I’ve posited?
  • Are the research questions posited aligned with time, budgetary and resource constraints?

Again, and let me reiterate this: narrowing the topic should be a dialogue with your supervisor. You’re not alone in the process.

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.

Posted in academia.

Tagged with , .

2 comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 15, 2017

2 hours of research in the morning or 2 hours of #AcWri? Choose what’s best for you.

One of the reasons people with whom I talk to gets frustrated is because they can’t find the time to write, and they ask me how I can write for 2 hours every morning. Well, turns out, some days (luckily not EVERY day), I am so busy with administrative and busywork that I just have to maintain a “2 hours of research in the morning” strategy to keep me afloat. Instead of getting frustrated because I can’t put words on a document (though, do check my posts on getting your academic writing unstuck and my 5 “prompt” strategies to get some words out). I still keep with my “no email before noon” rule, and my “no meetings before 11am” rule, but at least I can count on the fact that I can move forward with my research.

I have spent the better part of the first three days of this week in meetings after two weeks of travelling (one week in Singapore at the International Conference on Public Policy, ICPP3, and one week in Valle de Bravo, at a workshop with policy makers on water governance in Mexico, and right now I’m at a workshop on conflicts in extractive industries). This is perfectly normal as I’m in the midst of deploying a large team of researchers and research assistants to undertake fieldwork for my project on water conflicts in Mexico. But it was a tad frustrating. Three. Full. Days. Of. Meetings.

Talleres de Etnografía y Entrevista

I’m growing used to this. I’ve transitioned from the “early career scholar” stage of my career to the point where I am managing a full lab, coordinating a large grant-funded project, and collaborating with a dozen coauthors in different papers and various projects. But managing a research team is really taking a toll on my actual “scholarly time”. Not entirely “senior professor”, but senior enough. While before I could spend ALL DAY reading, highlighting, scribbling, annotating, looking at datasets, running models, transcribing interviews, now I need to spend A LOT OF TIME simply managing research – looking at and signing contracts, negotiating budget lines, making decisions on equipment purchases, etc. Even though I have an amazing team of research assistants and a fantastic research manager, I *still* do a lot of administrative stuff.

Building habits that help me do rigorous research and continue publishing even under adverse circumstances has been very hard, but also something that I’ve needed to learn how to do. I’m someone who has so many interests that I often get distracted, so I had to build strategies to regain focus. I had to learn how to Move Every Project Forward Every Day so that I could make a little progress on everything I have on my plate. Despite the fact that I’m really well organized and I plan my entire year every December, there’s always something that can potentially derail me. Thus, I have learned to be content with myself when I’m so overworked that I can’t write 2 hours every day, and be just happy that I have 2 hours of research time every morning.

Despite my increased service and administrative workload, and my travel schedule, I’ve continued my routine of waking up early every morning and maintain a “2 hours of research” policy even if I can’t do my usual “2 hours of #AcWri academic writing” every single day. I try (but I’m not always successful) to write generative text, but I still read at least two academic journal articles each morning. I’ve done a few edits to three of my research papers (an activity that definitely should count as academic writing). I have been planning the data collection strategy for my bottled water project. This doesn’t mean I’ve been able to write for the entire 2 hours I block for my #AcWri, but it does mean that I still have 2 hours of research every single morning.

Handwritten notes in academic research

These past few mornings, even if I haven’t written 2 hours consistently every day (some days I’ve been able to), I have been thinking about which changes I’m going to have to make in an R&R and two recently rejected papers. I’ve been drafting notes to myself regarding my expected scholarly output and deadlines for the fall. Maybe I haven’t written for the entire 2 hours, but I’ve definitely done 2 hours of research every morning, before I need to head to campus to deal with administrative and managerial tasks.

#AcWri while travelling

Again, this is quite important. Do what works best for you under the circumstances. You can’t follow the “Write Every Day” mantra if you’re always running against the clock (though I hasten to add, my friend Jo Van Every believes, and I concur with her, that even 15 minutes of writing every day can help you move forward – take her 15 Minutes #AcWri Challenge!)

New writing setup on campus

Using the “book 2 hours for my research every morning” strategy allows me to stop worrying about the scientific and technical component of a project and start using that time to think through my research. Yes, in an ideal world, I’d be able to write every morning for the entire 120 minutes period. But sometimes my body doesn’t respond that way. Nobody’s body does, despite building routines, I think. Thus, in closing, I do not believe we should berate ourselves if we can’t write generative text every day.

If we haven’t been able to write for a while, the best strategy we can apply I think is to start reserving 2 hours every morning for research purposes, and THEN start doing exercises (such as the ones proposed by Patricia Goodson in her book “Becoming an Academic Writer”) to start increasing the time one spends writing scholarly research. And even if you can’t block 2 hours every morning, you could start by blocking 30 minutes just solely for research and then build from that.

That’s what I’ve been doing myself.

Posted in academia.

No comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 14, 2017

Common mistakes to avoid in academic job market submissions

I did a poll on what the topic of my next blog post should be, and by and large, job market advice has been the most sought after. I’ve been on both sides of the search committee table: I’ve applied to lots of academic jobs, and I’ve participated in and chaired search committees. Thus, I have some experience dealing with application documents. I don’t want to repeat what other people have written about, though (look at how many blog posts already exist on the issue of mistakes that are often made when writing and preparing academic job applications).

Writing

Photo credit: Reuben Ingber CC-licensed on Flickr

Earlier this year I sat on a job market panel at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) and offered some advice, which I noted here in bullet points. The mistakes I note here are errors I have actually found in real applications, so none of these are made up. BUT, more importantly, SEEK OTHER ADVICE. Don’t take my suggestions here as gospel of truth. Your mileage may vary.

1. Address the cover letter to the right person.

To be on the safe side, address it to the search committee chair. Make sure NOT to address it to the departmental secretary!

2. Demonstrate that you have done your research on the department and each of the department’s faculty members

Don’t make it clear that you didn’t even look at what other faculty do and which courses and programmes they teach.

a. Do you know which courses you would be able to teach?
b. How does your current training help the department and their teaching needs?
c. Can your teaching be quite versatile and are you able to adapt to departmental needs?

3. The RIGHT FIT discussion is always very important. How do YOU fit in a department?

Don’t insist on being the best thing since chocolate cake in a department where your expertise would probably be already well represented.

a. Make sure the fit flows (e.g. do NOT make the assumption they should be loving you because you are you, but DO sell yourselves as your work IS in fact valuable)
b. Fit relates to current and potential (future) needs. Maybe they’ll need an experimentalist or an ethnographer in the near future?
c. How can you expand the skills set, or the knowledge area (or areas) in a specific department?

4. The content of the cover letter – don’t re-summarize your doctoral dissertation, but do offer some insight into how your project fits with the overall department

Don’t republish and summarize the entire CV in the application letters. One page or page and a half should be enough.

a. Make sure that your letter is short. Long letters take more time to be read.
b. Do NOT undersell yourselves. You may have adjuncted or be a sessional or contingent faculty, but that does not make you any less of a PhD or any less valuable. Do NOT put yourself down for being a contingent faculty member. You are still faculty.

5. Which additional skills do you bring to the department and to the institution?

Don’t apply to a department where your methodological and research expertise would probably already be very well represented. Look for areas where you can contribute. Make clear connections between your expertise and that of the others, and show complementarity with other faculty members and their research.

a. Languages (beyond English and the mother tongue of the country where you are applying)
b. Computer training
c. Spatial analysis (GIS)
d. Social network analysis
e. Writing
f. Coaching
g. Networking skills
h. Multiple research methods – and how you are not just following the same method and model as others do (please don’t always do field experiments)

6. Don’t assume anything about money, or salary.

Don’t talk money from the get-go.

a. Do talk about your willingness to travel and/or relocate
b. Salary conversations are usually reserved for AFTER a campus interview and a job offer. That’s where negotiation begins.
c. Be honest from the start. Don’t tell the department you’ll take the job and then leave them hanging or drop them swiftly.

7. Teaching statements are more than philosophical love letters.

Don’t offer grandiose statements about how much you love to teach and then show you don’t know which courses and degrees this institution offers.

a. Make sure you KNOW which courses are being taught at all levels
b. If it’s a multi-campus institution, know what you’d be expected to teach and where you’re expected and able to teach these courses. Think about logistics beforehand.
c. Examine syllabi of courses offered at the institution you are targeting, and offer examples of your own syllabi, quotations from former students’ evaluations, positive and negative.

8. Research statements need to be brief but also show your potential as an independent researcher.

Don’t rely solely on your dissertation work and show how you can do work beyond, and how well you’ve thought about it already.

a. How does your research go beyond your doctoral dissertation?
b. Do you have a clear pathway and know exactly what your next steps will be?
c. Where do you see yourself in X years?
d. Which journals you are planning to publish within?

typing

Photo credit: liss_mcbovzla CC-licensed on Flickr

A couple of additional points:

  • Make sure someone else reads your documents and gives you feedback.
  • Look for mentors and ask how you could get your CV and research statement and teaching statements to be stronger.
  • Attend career-focused workshops and panels at your discipline’s major conferences. ASK QUESTIONS.
  • Remember: the academic job market is atrocious. Don’t despair, and be prepared to move laterally to non-academic jobs if you need to.

A few additional blog posts I’ve read on the topic are linked in here, here, here and here.

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.

Posted in academia.

Tagged with .

No comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 8, 2017

Becoming an Academic Writer (Patricia Goodson) – my reading notes

Even though I write a lot about Academic Writing, I rarely read books now on #AcWri. Not because I don’t want to, but because I have so much stuff that I need to write myself that I end up shunning any other type of reading other than my scholarly work. HOWEVER, I had heard so much about Professor Patricia Goodson’s book “Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive and Powerful Writing” that I had to actually buy it (I could have asked for it as a review copy, but I figured it was important to pay for the product itself if I benefit from it).

As my brief Twitter-sized comment above says, I found Goodson’s book quite compelling. Goodson is quite clear in that her book is more of a workbook than a textbook. I strongly believe that the fusion of workbook-type exercises with more theoretically-grounded accounts of the basis for each exercise and/or routine that Goodson presents is quite compelling. Goodson actually encourages the reader to seek a deeper understanding of why we procrastinate when we actually should be writing, and how to overcome roadblocks (also well known as “writer’s block”).

There are obviously points where I agree with Goodson, and one or two areas where I definitely have my disagreements. For example, while I am a big advocate of considering anything that pushes our research forward, “academic writing” (e.g. writing emails about a paper or datasets to a coauthor or a student, writing summaries of articles and books, etc.), I am definitely not on board with considering the writing letters of nomination or recommendation or providing feedback to students actual AcWri. I may be alone in my assessment of what should be considered #AcWri, but that’s literally the very one disagreement that I could find with what should be otherwise read as a fantastic workbook.

Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer” is a logically-structured, fast-paced read. I literally devoured the entire book in one sitting (though Goodson explains how to best use the book). I would skip Chapters 1 and 2 and go directly to Chapters 3 onwards to the exercises. I haven’t tested them, but having read them and suggested similar stuff in my blog posts, I am completely on board with using Patricia Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer” as a workbook to teach how to improve your academic writing. The other book I think you should consider reading, and I’ll be writing a set of reading notes on that one too is Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success

I’m not the only one who sings Patricia Goodson’s praises. Dr. Pat Thomson wrote a review of Goodson’s book here. Her post provided me with a good reminder – I should mention that I paid for Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer” on my own dime, so I have no obligations to provide a nice review. I just loved her book! And I thoroughly recommend it, both for my own students and for anyone (established or up-and-coming) who wants to improve their writing with systematic exercises. You can read more about the underlying logic of the POWER method that Goodson preaches here (link to a PDF of one of her talks).

UPDATE – Grateful to Shalini Sharma and Marieke Riethof for useful and insightful feedback on the issue of whether writing letters of recommendation and student feedback notes should be considered #AcWri.

I clarified my position on Twitter, as I think what Goodson’s book is about is teaching you to self-motivate to do your academic writing. I don’t need motivation to do stuff for my students!

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with , , .

1 comment

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 8, 2017

A step-by-step guide to writing a research paper, from idea to full manuscript

As anybody who reads my blog may know, I often write blog posts upon request. Many of them I’ve written because my own graduate students, undergraduate students or research assistants ask me to help them out with a particular component of the research process. Others, I write because faculty, students or practitioners ask me whether I can outline a particular component of the research process. Dr. Pamela Scully (Emory University) asked me if I had written a full protocol on how to write a paper, from having an idea to developing the full manuscript. Here is my blog post version of a Twitter thread I posted in response to her request.

As I said in my response to Dr. Scully, there’s at least two methods of going about writing a paper. The first one I have outlined in my blog post here, on the From Idea to Paper Protocol.

My second method is as follows (note the sequence of my tweets)

1. Generate an idea for a paper through brainstorming.

My blog post on how to generate ideas for new papers can be read by clicking on the link. Generating ideas is not always easy because we academics seem to have this crippling fear that somebody already thought of our brilliant idea. Maybe they have, but maybe they have not.

2. Evaluate whether you have found a gap in the literature.

Doing a citation tracing process on specific papers that you deem important helps find whether there is a gap in the literature. You run your citation tracing and then evaluate whether all the literature converges on one particular idea or set of ideas once you’ve reached conceptual saturation.

3. Start reading and synthesizing the literature you find.

You can use several methods for reading and synthesizing, as I’ve written before:

I’ve also written on how you can expand your synthetic note and make it into a full-fledged memorandum. There are obviously cases where will want to collect all your synthetic notes and create an annotated bibliography. That depends on the type of scholarly output and research product you are trying to generate.

4. Use the AIC Content Extraction Technique if pressed for time and throw into your Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump.

When you are dealing with a new field, you often find that you need to read A LOT of sources before converging on the right ones. One strategy I use when this happens to me is that I run AIC Content Extractions on all the pieces I am supposed to be reading, and then I dump each AIC item into a row on the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump I created for the topic or for the paper.

Tweeting for environmental NGOs Excel dump

5. Remember that AIC is the most minimalist reading strategy, but you may need to vary accordingly.

There are pieces that are worth skimming, others are worth engaging with at the meso level, and others need to be read in-depth. You are the only one who can decide when you’ve read enough and when you’ve done a deep enough literature search and review. But remember, AIC is the absolute, bare minimum you have to do.

6. Once you have a bank of research products, you can decide what to do with them.

Remember, only you can decide what you’re trying to write. Is it a literature review? Is it an annotated bibliography? Do you need to provide someone (a granting agency or your students or colleagues) with a bank of rhetorical precis or a database of synthetic notes? Is the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump enough? This is a very personal decision. You can decide what type of scholarly output or research product you’re looking to generate.

7. Follow these 8 steps to structure a paper.

I find that often times, going through this eight step sequence helps me create at least the very bare bones of a skeleton of a paper. As you can see, I am someone who tends to start with the abstract and expand the paper from there.

8. Once you’ve written your paper, revise it using the Drafts Review Matrix

This matrix is useful both when you’re doing a Revise-and-Resubmit or when you have asked someone to read your draft paper and you want to make changes they’ve suggested. Or when you’re polishing a draft of a document.

9. When your paper is ready, have others look at it and #GetYourManuscriptOut

Perhaps the most challenging moment for me is when I think a paper is ready for submission. Or when I’m doing a revise-and-resubmit. Crippling fear can creep up and make me think “no, this paper isn’t ready for submission”. What I do is I ask friends to read the paper and then make the changes they suggest. The #GetYourManuscriptOut crowd really helps me out with this, because it’s very motivating to see that others are working hard to get their own papers out too.

AcWri at my Mom's house

As you can see, I combined what I’ve written on reading strategies, literature reviews and academic writing into one single protocol. For faculty, I hope this helps you show your students how to write a paper. And for students, I am hoping this document will provide guidance on a topic whose mechanics are often problematic to grasp!

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with , , .

1 comment

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 30, 2017

How many sources are enough? Six questions on breadth and depth of literature reviews

The first question I posed in the title of my blog post is one that all of my students (undergraduate and graduate) and most of my research assistants ask me: how do I know when I’ve read enough for a literature review? The answer is never clear cut, unfortunately. I am someone who loves reading, and who needs to read broadly because his own work is interdisciplinary. I’m also quite systematic in how I read, and I prefer to err on the side of having TOO MANY sources rather than be accused of not knowing the field.

I also realize not everyone has the time to be on top of the literature, particularly with teaching, service, family and caring and research obligations. I am going to answer the top six questions I get asked on breadth and depth of literature reviews, and in doing so, I am going to suggest a few shortcuts that may help narrowing a literature review search and finding the “sweet spot” where you’ve read enough that you feel confident enough to start writing your paper, chapter or thesis.

Reading and #AcWri on the plane

1. How many sources should I read for my literature review?

This is an absurd question that is prompted by arbitrarily setting a random number of sources as “enough”. If you read the right five sources, you’ve probably covered a full field. But if you read 40 sources that all tend to pull in different directions, you’ll still be unable to cover all the sources.

Here’s my totally non-scientific take for coursework-related materials: a final research paper should at least use 13 additional sources to those in the syllabus (one additional paper per week) for an undergraduate class, and an in-depth literature review for a graduate course should be in the realm of 26 (2 additional papers per week) to 39 (3 additional papers per week for PhD students). If somebody writes a final paper for my courses that only use the readings we did during the semester, it shows they didn’t go any further and I’ll probably penalize them.

2. Where do I get sources for my literature review if I am starting up a new topic? Well, here are a couple of strategies:

  • Read literature summaries and reviews published in journals.
    There’s plenty of journals now that provide reviews of the literature. Three I’m well aware of are WIRES (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews) and Geography Compass, as well as Progress in Human Geography. When reading Progress in Human Geography, you probably want to look for the “Progress Reports”.
  • Search for “a review of the literature” or “a meta-review” type of articles (either Google Scholar or other online databases). These articles will usually provide a pretty extensive range of sources. Given their goal and scope, they’re also probably comprehensive enough. Meta-reviews tend to be more synthetic and provide a research agenda and specific research questions that need to be looked at in future research.
  • Ask specialists (or look for their work) for key citations from where you can do citation tracing. For example, if I were to do a search on water ethics, I would ask Christiana Peppard, Jeremy Schmidt, Lucy Rodina for suggestions. Or I would look for articles citing them. If I were to do something on climate politics, I’d look for Kathryn Harrison, Sarah Burch, Max Boykoff, Mat Patterson.

3. “When should I stop reading and start writing?”

My answer to that question is: you should be reading AND writing. Apparently, a lot of people feel like they need to Read All The Things before they can write a literature review. That’s why I always suggest that when you process a reading (a PDF or a printed source), you should generate at the very minimum a row entry in your Excel conceptual synthesis, and a synthetic note (or a rhetorical precis). Obviously, you gain a lot more if you write a full-fledged memo, but you may want to wait to write the memo up until you’ve read a few sources. But you should ALWAYS be writing as you read. You may not assemble the full literature review, but at least you can start with an annotated bibliography.

4. How do I know when to stop reading/researching/seeking more sources?

This is again a very tough question. Having mapped a very broad survey of the literature on informal waste picking, I can assure you that I felt I could not stop even after reading 50 articles. There is just simply too much published. But one of the reasons why I encourage my students to stop when they reach conceptual saturation (e.g. when they start seeing the same themes repeated over and over again) is because I don’t think you gain too much, marginally, from reading yet another paper on the same topic but using a different case study.

For example, I recently wrote a series of memorandums on the urban commons. I had basically mapped the entire body of works on urban commons using the first 10 citations I found on Google Scholar. However, I wanted to see how much more I could go in depth on the topic. What I found was that there were many case studies, but all using the same conceptual framework. So that’s when I stopped. When I saw that basically every other paper was a variation of the same central 10 ones, but using different case studies. I added those sources to my bibliography, but I didn’t need to incorporate them to my literature review.

Another way to respond to this question is: read enough to answer your questions properly.

Reading

The two biggest questions that probably would encompass the previous ones are related to breadth and depth.

5. How far reaching should your literature review be?

Scoping a literature review, as Dr. Pat Thomson shows here, is not an easy task. It requires us to search through many months or even years of published literature. I always do Google Scholar searches at least 7 years into the past (e.g. 2010 articles would totally be welcome, as would be books published in 2010) because of the very long lag-time that exists between submission, acceptance and publication. My citation tracing process also looks at the last 7 years of scholarship of key authors.

Then you have the other associated question – what about the “seminal” (I prefer the word fundamental) articles or books?

For me, this is the most challenging component. When I know a field very well (for example, agenda-setting theory in public policy), I can easily decide which authors I will be seeking (Stuart Soroka, Michael Howlett, Baumgartner and Jones, Kingdon). If I am doing policy design, I’ll go with Helen Ingram, Ann Schneider, etc. And then based on doing a citation tracing exercise, I will go to those younger scholars who are citing these key authors. But again, this requires you to know the field already.

This is where a supervisor, a coauthor, a colleague or a trusted scholar on Twitter may be helpful with narrowing the search scope. You can ask “who are the key authors I should be reading on Topic A” or “which are the key citations I should be looking at to get a grasp of Field B“. And then use those authors to create a map of the literature.

Stationery and research and reading

And the last question, which just about everyone asks me:

6. Do I need to do an in-depth reading of All The Things?

This is completely a question that has arbitrary answers and a broad range of parameters to work around. It also depends on what type of literature review you are writing. If you are, for example, preparing your doctoral comprehensive examinations, you DO want to read EVERYTHING and do so IN DEPTH. You need to demonstrate that you know your field of study, broadly and deeply.

However, if you are writing a literature review, for example, of agenda-setting theory and its applications to health policy, you may want to read in depth 5-10 articles on health policy, 5-7 articles on agenda-setting theory, and then start writing from there. Again, in-depth reading is correlated with the extent and degree to which you need to demonstrate that you know a field.

My method, as most people may have noticed, is usually as follows:

  • I read 5-10 citations that I find key. This reading is usually in-depth.
  • I create the set of questions I want to answer. I choose 3-5 citations around each question. All the reading associated with these questions I do using the AIC method, or skimming and scribbling unless I find key ones that need to be read in depth.
  • I write a memorandum for each one of the questions I’m trying to answer. In this memorandum, I assemble a mini-literature review that answers the question.
  • I fuse all the memorandums into a larger document where I have mapped out how each question (and answer) relates to the overall topic.
  • I read my entire literature review and restart with citation tracing until I reach concept saturation.

Hopefully this post will help those who are struggling with literature reviews, as the summer approaches! You may also want to revisit my Literature Review posts.

Posted in academia, research.

Tagged with .

5 comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 17, 2017

Taking back your own time: No e-mail before lunch (noon)

I know I’m privileged in that my own institution and my colleagues are very respectful of my time. They’re also extraordinarily considerate of my schedules. I am very vocal about my routines, so anybody who either follows me on Twitter or interacts with me on a regular basis know a few things about my schedule.

  • I wake up very, very early (4 am) to start writing.
  • By the time I hit 11 am, I’ve already almost put in a full day of work.
  • If you want my undivided attention, schedule meetings with me any time after 11 am (preferably 12, 12:30 or 1pm).
  • I won’t be attending meetings scheduled 24 hours in advance. I simply won’t. My schedule fills up weeks in advance.
  • I break the rule above only with real emergencies, particularly when it has to do with students, payments, etc.
  • I tell people my response time is anywhere between 24 and 72 hours. If I don’t respond, send me a friendly reminder 3 days after your first email.

I remember Dr. Jo Van Every (a good friend of mine, and well-known academic coach) telling me that there are no emergencies in academia, and for the most part (99% of the time) I agree.

I’ve instituted a “No Email Before Noon” rule for a very long time. If you REALLY need to communicate with me, you probably have my iMessage, my Telegram, or my cell phone.

The problem with letting someone else control your day by sending you an important email BEFORE noon is that you are no longer in control of what you need to do. Write on your planner or your Everything Notebook those emails you need to respond to by a certain date.

I shared my “No Email Before Lunch” rule with my friends Dr. Josh Gellers and Dr. Amanda Bittner.

One thing that is important as numerous friends of mine ask me – is it ok if you only read or do research before noon or when you wake up early? I think it’s perfectly valid. Anything that moves your research forward (coding interviews, typing notes into your Excel conceptual synthesis, reading and scribbling, assembling or cleaning datasets, cleaning references in Mendeley) should be considered solid work.

A lot of people ask me if I do the same (no social media before lunch). I pre-schedule most of my content tweets, so I actually am writing or doing research while many of my tweets come out. I like answering to people because I think Twitter is and should be a conversation, so often times I answer tweets before noon while I’m having breakfast or commuting to work. But yes, no email before lunch is the best time saver I’ve found.

Posted in academia.

Tagged with , .

1 comment

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 16, 2017

The transnational life of Fiji bottled water

Fiji bottled waterFor my research on the politics of bottled water, I have been doing a lot of reading across different disciplines, from public health to environmental engineering, but I always come back to the excellent work of anthropologist Martha Kaplan. Professor Kaplan is at Vassar College and has done extensive work on bottled water, the local-global nexus and the nexus between rising consumption of bottled water and reduced usage of drinking water fountains. Professor Kaplan has looked at how different cultures value water and what these valuation processes look like in terms of strategies to engage with the worrisome global trend of growing consumption of bottled water. I have been thoroughly enthralled by the work of Professor Kaplan, and I find myself particularly fascinated with the ways in which she explores the global and local elements of bottled water consumption.

Fiji bottled waterI find myself weirded out by the sale of Fiji water anywhere in the world, but especially in a country like Mexico, where per capita bottled water consumption has risen to the point where Mexico is now the global leader. Obviously, packaging and selling the vital liquid in plastic bottles is big business in Mexico, and there is a clear interest on the part of transnational corporations in maintaining their market dominance. For me, it’s even more jarring that we effectively IMPORT bottled water given its price (a small bottle costs 46 Mexican pesos, which is about 2 dollars given the fast fall of the Mexican currency vis-a-vis the US dollar). This is one of the reasons why I find Professor Kaplan’s work on the transnational life of Fiji bottled water so fascinating.

Admittedly, Professor Kaplan assigns non-human agency to water itself (which I find slightly weird). Anybody who knows my work will know that I am not really well versed in, nor fond of, the material culture, actor-network theory literature. Nevertheless. I find Kaplan’s writing extraordinarily compelling and insightful, and I draw important lessons from her research for my own. I am particularly engaged with her piece writing a transnational biography of Fiji bottled water (using New York City as one of the locations for her analysis).

$2 USD may seem like a small price for a bottle of water, but given how much it actually really costs and the huge profit margin that bottling companies gain from extracting and packaging the liquid, I remain puzzled that some people in Mexico actually buy Fiji water. I am well aware of how consuming certain brands of bottled water may be seen as a status symbol (“for show off”) but paying $46 Mexican pesos just to look good consuming Fiji water seems a bit irrational and the price tag, a tad too steep.

I have previously written on how the mere existence of the bottled water industry means that we are effectively commodifying the human right to water. But nobody is really exempt from consuming bottled water anywhere in the world. Even in countries and cities where tap water is extraordinarily safe (like the case of Vancouver), I witnessed and documented an increase in consumption since 2009. One of the main reasons for the growth in bottled water consumption is a fear of the tap, as the recent Flint (Michigan, USA) case showed. Other reasons include structural barriers to encouraging tap water consumption, such as the lack of widely available public water fountains in public spaces, and the absence of refilling stations in malls, schools and other areas. These stations can be used by individuals to transport water across in portable bottles.

Bottled water

I have also argued before that ensuring and enacting the human right to water would signify the end of the global bottled water industry. Quite obviously, this may not sit well with the transnational corporations whose big business is packaging the scarce and vital liquid to profit from its sale and consumption. Moreover, these multinational enterprises are able to sustain dominance over domestic markets with the introduction of locally-producing water-packaging branches. These facilities produce at the local level, but their profits benefit the global company.

This dialogue between the global and the local is quite well described by Kaplan’s discussion of the consumption of Fiji bottled water in New York City:

“The politics of bottled water in both Fiji and the United States involve tense, interesting confrontations about public and private interests, legacies and opportunities, profit and meaning. It is not a simple story of Fijian noncapitalist purity and Western depredation. When it comes to water, like all commodities actually, neither demand nor supply are given, and how they relate to each other is something historically made in a dialogical process.”

Kaplan’s viewpoint is very well taken, and resonates with my own work. As I’ve argued elsewhere, understanding the politics of bottled water necessitates a dialogue between the local and the global. We need to broaden our understanding of how domestic consumption patterns are entangled with global economic forces and driven by policy failures as well as domestic political climates that encourage commodification of a human right rather than working together to solve local water utility problems through innovative delivery models. We need to work on understanding why Fiji water is perceived as “pure” whereas other brands may not enjoy this high status. Kaplan’s work helps understand how this phenomenon occurs as she finds that consumption of Fiji bottled water is not only acceptable but also encouraged in highly commodifying contexts (such as cities where status is perceived as an important individual quality – New York City, for example).

Posted in academia, bottled water, research.

Tagged with , .

No comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 4, 2017

Writing a memorandum based on a synthetic note

In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion as per the AIC method), and memorandums (longer, 1000-2000 word briefings that synthesize the content of an article, but also engage with the broader literature). Recently, a number of people have asked me how they can extend a synthetic note and write a full-fledged memorandum based on it. This post is intended to explain my process.

I used an example of an article I was reading recently (Alida Cantor’s discussion of the material, political and biopolitical aspects of California water law in regards to wastewater) and live-tweeted my reading from it. I also tweeted examples of how I write the synthetic note and how I can draft the full-fledged memorandum based on the synthetic note. Below is the process I follow. You can also read the entire Twitter thread to check how I highlight and scribble, though I’ve written a post on my method that you can read by clicking on this hyperlink.

1. I highlight and scribble using the AIC method.

I focus primarily on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion, as per my post. I think it’s important to be strategic about how we read, because otherwise we get overwhelmed with information. Since I’m attempting to write a synthetic note first, and then evolve it into a memorandum, I focus solely on AIC.

Note that while I focus on AIC, I ask four main questions:

  • What are the goals of the paper?
  • How do the author(s) do their analysis?
  • What are the main contributions of the paper?
  • What are the main findings of the research?

2. I type the full citation and abstract at the top of my memorandum (or synthetic note)

This is important as it allows me to quickly remember the main details of the article by reading the abstract. Having the article’s abstract available at the top, as well as the citation, allows me to copy and paste in case I need it for a larger document, like a paper, or an annotated bibliography.

3. For the synthetic note, I write the notes I scribbled on the margins and draw key quotations, but I ONLY focus on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion.

This is important because I can get bogged down in details if I write my notes from the middle of the paper, or if I read and highlight the intermediate components. Remember that I usually write synthetic notes when I am being strategic about what I read. Therefore, if I am doing skimming and scribbling, and I want to get just the gist of a reading, I type a synthetic note.

From synthetic note to full-fledged memorandum

Here is where the process diverges from synthetic note to memorandum.

4. For the memorandum, I re-read the paper, but go through the intermediate parts (highlighting and scribbling, too)

I noticed as I was highlighting the Cantor article that I was writing a lot of notes and highlighting key quotations beyond the Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion. That’s usually a give-away for when I need to delve deeper into a paper and go beyond meso-level reading to engaging deeply with the document.

From synthetic note to full-fledged memorandum

5. As I transcribe my notes from the middle of the paper, I create tables, summaries and link to the literature and other authors.

How do I know when a reading merits a longer memorandum?

That’s a great question. The Cantor 2017 case is a perfect example. It’s an article that is very rich with theoretical discussions (the definition of wastewater, the different theoretical perspectives one can take with regards to waste, the implications of merging geographies of waste literature with legal geographies scholarship), PLUS has great empirical components (focusing on California’s water law, given recent drought events and how California offers a great laboratory for testing theories of water governance). Below is my rule of thumb for choosing when to write full-fledged memorandums.

A reading where I write lots of notes on the margins, change colours throughout quite rapidly and draw several key quotations (several being more than 3), and where I find lots of interesting details in the middle of the paper (that is, beyond the AIC components) is definitely a document that will merit a full-fledged memorandum. See my notes on Cantor’s introductory pages and concluding pages.

Finally, one important thing that I do when I read is that I maintain Excel, Mendeley and Word all open at the same time. This is important because as I draw key quotations, I can copy them from the Mendeley-hosted PDF and paste them into the memorandum AND the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump.

Hopefully this post will help my readers understand the process I follow to expand a synthetic note into a memorandum.

Posted in academia, research, writing.

Tagged with , , .

1 comment

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 27, 2017

They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (my reading notes)

When I wrote my blog post on how to properly teach our students how to do Description vs Analysis in their academic writing, I linked to a number of resources. The one that Dr. Omar Wasow (Princeton University) recommended was “They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing“, edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein.

Workflow

I do not teach argumentative writing (though CIDE, my institution, has a series of courses on this – which probably follow a different model because CIDE is a Spanish-speaking institution in a Spanish-speaking country), but I do teach courses in public policy where I need my students to conduct analyses. Since I teach all my courses in English, I needed a different model, particularly because I have noticed that sometimes students do not know how to write good analysis instead of providing very descriptive texts.

Omar’s recommendation is sincerely amazing. They Say/I Say is a relatively short book of templates that dissects how academic writing should engage in dialogue. I think the book is very well summarized in the following direct quote off of the text (p. 3):

“For us, the underlying structure of effective academic writing – and of responsible public discourse – resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind”

While the book offers a number of templates, the underlying logic of They Say/I Say is to enable students (and writers) to use those templates to create their own writing structures. That means, students can practice through adapting the They Say/I Say templates to the specific contents, disciplines and materials at hand. As Graff and Birkenstein say, you need to be “putting in your oar” (getting yourself involved in the writing)

#AcWri at the hotel in Copenhagen

Graff and Birkenstein author a large portion of the book, though a couple of chapters are invited. The first part of the book introduces models and templates to present others’ views and introduce what They Say. I’m not particularly fond of a few of the models they use to introduce ‘Standard Views” (“many people argue”, “since the dawn of time”, etc.) on pages 23 and 24, but the overall gist of the book is excellent and examples provided are super helpful, not only for students but also for early career scholars.

I particularly enjoyed Chapter 2, “Her Point Is – The Art of Summarizing” (pages 30-40) because one of the skills I teach my research assistants and undergraduate/graduate students is how to write rhetorical precis and synthetic notes. This chapter provides students with templates for how to write solid summaries that then can be converted into full-fledged memorandums.

Chapter 3, “As He Himself Puts It – The Art of Quoting” (pages 42-50) should be mandatory reading for students, particularly because of all the recent cases of plagiarism in academic writing. This chapter teaches students how to properly do quotations and highlights the importance of attribution.

I also think these two chapters should be read in conjunction (if I may be so bold to suggest) with my posts on writing memorandums and the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (where you would be dumping your quotations). These chapters are also very good at helping students find the specific quotations they may need (particularly when the student is pressed for time and strategically triaging his/her reading packet for relevance).

Graff and Birkenstein show (in Chapter 4, “Yes/ No/ Okay, But – Three Ways to Respond“, p. 55-67) three different models of engagement with the literature (i.e. with what “They Say”): agreeing, disagreeing and somewhere in between. I tend to do a lot more contrasting in my own scholarly writing (i.e. “X argues that Z. However, I find that W”), but it’s very nice and useful to read different ways of engaging others’ arguments (AND the empirical evidence, which we often do not write about).

Home office in Aguascalientes

Perhaps the most important chapter for graduate students (not terribly important for undergraduates, in my view, but fundamental for Masters and PhD candidates) is Chapter 5, “And Yet – Distinguishing What YOU Say from what THEY Say, pages 68-75″. This chapter is key because the biggest challenge that graduate students tend to have in their writing (in my experience) is showcasing what THEIR own contribution is. This ability to produce text that highlights the writers’ own contributions is key when teaching description versus analysis in academic writing. I am also very glad that Graff and Birkenstein emphasize the importance of writing in the first person (“I find”, “I argue”, “I show”).

Chapter 6, which involves “inserting a naysayer into the conversation” wasn’t that appealing to me, to be perfectly honest. But Chapter 7 (“So What? Who Cares? Saying Why It Matters “, p. 92-100) helps the reader explain why the analysis presented throughout the paper may be useful. I am particularly fond as well of Chapter 8 (“As A Result: Connecting The Parts”, p. 105-117) because in this chapter Graff and Birkenstein demonstrate how to effectively tie an argument together by connecting all the different parts of an argument.

Graff and Birkenstein’s four strategies to connect sentences may make some educators cringe, because they use some of the connectors that often appear in lists of “words that should be banned” (also known as “wordy ways of saying things that you could more easily say in this other way”). Nevertheless, in my opinion, Graff and Birkenstein’s strategies are solid and I reproduce them right here (taken from page 108):

  1. Using transition terms.
  2. Adding pointing words.
  3. Developing a set of key terms and phrases for each text you write.
  4. Repeating yourself with a difference.

My office at CIDE Region Centro during and after writing a paper

Chapters 13 (written by Christopher Gillen) and 15 (by Erin Ackerman) offer really excellent advice on how to use the They Say/I Say model in the natural sciences (Gillen, p. 156-174) and social sciences (Ackerman, p. 175-192). I will definitely use Chapter 14 by Erin Ackerman to teach my undergraduate and graduate students how to use the They Say/I Say model in public policy writing.

Overall, the Graff and Birkenstein “They Say/I Say” book is a fantastic introduction to how to write arguments and craft text that will be read in both natural and social sciences. Adding Gillen and Ackerman’s chapters was a genius move by Graff and Birkenstein, because the examples they provide are specific to natural sciences and social sciences/humanities. The chapters I have highlighted in these reading notes could possibly be used in a short course on academic writing based on the They Say/I Say model, although an instructor may want to also add the “But Don’t Get Me Wrong – The Art of Metacommentary” chapter 10, p. 129-137.

While I think Graff and Birkenstein is most suited to teaching how to do academic writing in the English language, I am sure you could adapt some of the lessons the authors present to Spanish (a language in which I will be teaching this fall). Hopefully my reading notes will be useful to educators who teach academic writing and how to write research papers.

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with , , .

1 comment

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 13, 2017