Rules of the Academic Mountain Tooling up for Research

‘Academicality’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

‘Academicality’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

Dr Brainerd Prince

We have used the image and metaphor of the mountain as a place to do academic work, away from the city. We find ourselves at the foot of the academic mountain. We have identified a real-life problem and a theme that we are keen on pursuing for research. Although, there was a single academy during Plato’s time, however, with the disciplinary specializations of the twentieth century, ‘academy’ cannot be talked about in the singular and we have many academies, each dedicated to a particular pursuit of knowledge.

Considering this plurality, perhaps we need to talk about a mountain range –- many mountains with each dedicated to a different disciplinary community respectively. For example, we could have a math mountain and a sociology mountain, amongst many others. However, even here, on every disciplinary mountain, there will be several distinct academic communities each one following a certain way of doing academic research on specific themes, following different intellectual traditions.

Therefore, once we have a research problem and a theme firmly secured, we need to begin climbing that particular academic mountain that houses our discipline. 

However, before we begin to think of climbing the mountain, we need to tool ourselves so that we can navigate life on the academic mountain. This is very similar to mountaineering. One doesn’t just wake up and go climb Mount Everest or any other mountain. One must get their gear together and of course do some preliminary training, without which life on the mountain could become impossible. Basic things we do in the city changes when we begin climbing the mountain. Breathing, eating, walking, and many other regular and routine activities that we do in a certain way needs to be done differently so that one may survive the mountain. It is the same with academic life. There are rules and tools we must learn and become proficient in, so that we can efficiently navigate the academic mountain. We can also call these the academic rules and tools for research. I have coined a term for these tools and have called it ‘academicality’ in a collective sense!

I would like to share four skills of academicality that are a must for every researcher who wishes to navigate the academic mountain. They are (a) identifying academic sources, (b) avoiding plagiarism, (c) learning to cite and reference, and (d) using software that will automate the use of academic apparatus.

The academic world has strict rules on what is acceptable as a source for research. In our age of ‘googling’, we are quick to ‘google search’ for any information we may need, and the first page of results of the google search are inevitably our sources of information which we use. However, this is unacceptable for academic research. A source is what contains information that is useful for research. However, the immediate questions that are raised are: is the source reliable and credible? Can we trust this source? Are the findings in the source validated? Most information on google are privately put up and they do not go through any strict process of verification. Contrarily, academic sources go through a very strict process of verification and validation. It is known as ‘peer review’ by those who are in the academic world. The first rule to learn is that academics only value academic sources. These could be monographs, edited volumes, or journal articles, but they need to be published by academic publishers, and must go through a strict peer review process.Academic sources are from the field of academia, written by experts in their field, in mostly ‘peer reviewed’ journals or published by academic publishers. The peer reviewing process makes academic texts credible.

Non-academic sources are not only private or personal opinions, but also include journalistic writings, and trade sources from the industry.Although these might be relevant in certain contexts, but they lack academic rigor. They are not peer reviewed and therefore lack credibility.Popular sources can be a good place to start research, but they cannot be used as an academic source.These texts are written to be accessible and appeal to the masses rather than to provide the most authentic information.

The simplest way for google users to find academic sources is to move away from google search to google scholar search. When you search on google scholar, you will only get academic sources. There are other search engines that will give you academic sources. For example, worldcat, jstor, or University search engines, like SOLO of Oxford University. Using these search engines, you will be able to identify academic sources. The academic mantra is that your work is only as good as your sources. So, learning to identify good academic sources, sources written by giants on whose shoulders you can stand, is a vital skill of an academic.

The second rule of the academia is to avoid plagiarism. From the root ‘plagiarius’ – (Latin for kidnapper), in simple terms, plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s work and presenting it as one’s own without acknowledging the author. In short, it is the act of stealing work that belongs to someone else. The academic world takes very unkindly to this sort of work. The academy thrives on producing new ideas, and when they get stolen, it is not tolerated by the academy. The flipside of plagiarism is having the ability to articulate one’s own voice. Often, we do not have the confidence that our voice will have value. Other times, we are sheerly lazy to do the hard work of research to articulate our voice. And often part of pulling an all-nighter to finish an assignment includes copy/pasting material that is not written by us. But sometimes, it is by accident or a lack of knowledge of how to operate the academic apparatus that one ends up plagiarizing. Engaging with other sources is essential for academic writing. Thus, the problem is not in engaging with other scholars’ works. The problem lies in how we engage them in an academic fashion. There are three rules to remember: firstly, all direct quotes must be put within quotation marks and cited. Secondly, long direct quotes which are over forty words, must be indented and put as a separate paragraph and cited, but there is no need for quotation marks. Finally, when a quote is paraphrased, one must cite it, and, in the paraphrased text if one has borrowed a sequence of four or more words from the quote, then even within that paraphrase, one must put quotation marks on those borrowed words in sequence. Keeping these rules will help us avoid accidental plagiarism to a very large extent.

We already mentioned about citations – this is an important feature of academic writing. In short,by using citations one is giving credit to the works of other scholars which has beenquoted or engaged with in one’s work. There are a variety of citation styles and different disciplines require or prefer a particular style over others. What matters however is to be consistent with one’s choice of citation style. For example, if one has chosen the APA style of citation, then in the same text, one should not use any other style like the Chicago 15 or MLA style. All citations have three or four pieces of information: author’s name, name of source, year of publication and the page number from which the quote has been taken. References or bibliography is the list of sources used, which is appended at the end of the text. While the citation contains the basic information about the source, the reference contains complete information. If the reader wants to verify or follow up on a particular source, the reference acts as the guide and enables her to do so. Citations and references are part of the academic apparatus that sets a text apart as an academic text. One can be charged of plagiarism if one misses to cite or reference the sources one uses.

The final rule is not really a rule, rather a tool that is greatly useful in maintaining academic rigour and consistency. It is the use of software that manage citations and references. There are several in the market. I have personally used Endnote which needs to be bought. Zotero too is an efficient citation management software. The free version is more than enough for the volume of normal academic work. When Zotero is downloaded, an extension gets added to MS Word. Once the information of the source is fed into the software, which can also be automated by importing the citation, it needs to be double-checked to ensure that all the correct information is recorded. Now, the incorporation of citation and listing the reference of that source is automated, thus eliminating human error.

We have looked at how we can tool up for academic research by looking at the basic academic rules of engagement. These rules and tools are what sets an academic and her work apart from non-academics. The use of these rules of engagement ensure to a large extent the academic credibility of the text one has composed. A text that follows these academic conventions gets the status of being an academic source.

Armed with these tools in our bag, we are now ready to begin our climb of the academic mountain.

Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.



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