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Please email Mike with any feedback or suggestions for any part of this document.
SCRG Working Practices
These are guidelines to help create an effective and pleasant working environment, maintain a work-life balance and support creativity.
Healthy working principles
SCRG members are not expected to read or respond to emails outside of normal working hours. Some SCRG members prefer to work ouside the normal working day, for example, due to carer responsibilities, but this is never required.
SCRG members work self-managed flexitime.
SCRG members are encouraged to request support to help their work and careers, such as childcare help when attending conferences or disability-related help.
SCRG members are never given short term deadlines that override personal prorities. A healthy work-life balance and flexible working are priorities and the group understands that life sometimes has to take priority over work. Members are always allowed to restructure their own work to deal with life issues.
SCRG members are encouraged to identify training and development needs and request funding for it. Any development that supports the long term career of a member, whether at Wolverhampton or elsewhere, is welcome.
The SCRG supports the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers at the University of Wolverhampton.
Ethical working and research integrity
All research must follow ethical approval procedures. Usually this applies most to studies involving questionnaires or interviews, which will require infomed consent and official approval from the faculty ethics committee before starting.
SCRG members must follow best practices for ethical research in the discipline, including avoiding plagiarism, double submissions, and care over the accuracy and quality of data.
The SCRG supports the Concordat to Support Research Integrity at the University of Wolverhampton.
Publishing style guidelines for journal articles and conference papers
These are guidelines rather than ruleas and are to help starting researchers over a number of common tasks.
Abstract
Should summarise why the research was done, how it was done, what the findings are and what the implications are.
Introduction
-Start with explaining the importance of the research problem
-Continue by summarising previous relevant research very briefly
-Finish by describing the research gap to be filled
Don’t list the paper contents at the end of the discussion.
Literature Review
-break into subsections with headings
- organise by theme rather than historically
Research Questions
Either at the end of the introduction or as a separate section after the literature review
Methods
-Describe in enough detail that what you did can be replicated. Only include software names if you think that the software used may be an issue in the accuracy of the results (e.g., a complex statistical result).
-Be obsessive about the accuracy of your data and check everything that you do for mistakes. Use sanity checks on anything new to make sure that it gives the type of results that you would expect for small sets of data that you understand.
Results
-Only results that help to answer the research question; any results that are interesting to you but that do not answer the research questions should be left out.
Limitations and Discussion
-mention as many factors as possible that are limitations of the methods from the perspective of answering the research questions
-discuss the extent to which the research questions have been answered by the results, and relate the findings to similar work, without repeating the literature review at all.
Conclusions
-summary of key results and implications for practice
Things to keep Mike happy:
- Avoid the words/phrases: present, presented, aim to, aims to, etc., namely, WWW, would suggest, would appear, deem, deemed.
- Avoid first person "we" and "I" if you can, please. Some fields like them but I think they are better left out in our field.
- Table and figure captions should be descriptive enough so that the tables/figures can be understood without reading the text.
- Only use quotes if you are going to criticise the text, never to make a point.
- Author names should always be inside brackets. Not "Jones (1998)", but always "(Jones, 1998)" – rewriting the sentence so that you don't mention the person. Also try to avoid phrases like "research shows that X" or "a study found that X" and write instead just the "X" because the reference that you give for X is also an implicit statement that some research or a study found out X. All the rules in this section are to focus on the information and not on the source of the information.
- Never use the reference as the object – so don’t write anything like "(Smith, 1977) showed that.."
- Don't start the introduction or abstract with obvious and general information that just wastes the reader's time (e.g., "In the information age the amount of information on the web is rapidly expanding…")
- Don't justify the paper on the basis that other people are investigating the issue (e.g., "there is increasing interest in …".) but only in terms of the importance of the topic.
- Avoid double spaces between words or sentences.