What Does it Mean to Make an “Original Contribution”?
Editor’s note: this article, published in 2016, makes reference to a previous edition of the AUT Postgraduate Handbook that is now out of date. The most recent edition can be […]
Author: Anaise Irvine
Getting Presentation Experience Close to Home
Ah, the international academic conference. Home to heavy-hitting scholars, catering spreads of varying quality, and intimidated postgrad students giving their first major presentations. When I went to my first international […]
Rethinking Research “Impact”
If you’ve ever thought about publishing, you’ve probably heard all about impact factors. Here’s how they work: the impact factor of a journal measures how often an average article within […]
Should I Cite This?
Quality-checking sources is something we start to learn in secondary school or undergrad – just ask my students who felt my wrath when they cited Wikipedia (or what’s worse: when […]
When Data has a Mind of its Own
So you have a hypothesis. You’re really excited about it. You’d love it to be true. You can’t wait to explore it in full detail and spend months or years […]
Reading for Keeps
I just performed a very unscientific study of thesis bibliographies. Of the last 5 doctoral theses published to ProQuest, there were an average of 333 entries per bibliography.* That’s an […]
Five Hundred Pounds: Research and Socioeconomic Privilege
The writer Virginia Woolf famously said that in order to write, all a woman needed was “a room of her own and five hundred a year.” Woolf was making a […]
Practical Tips for Formatting a Thesis
Editor’s note: this article, published in 2016, makes reference to a previous edition of the AUT Postgraduate Handbook that is now out of date. The most recent edition can be […]
Software Review: Scrivener for Academic Writing
Some writers love Scrivener. Some writers hate Scrivener. It’s one of those things, like the taste of licorice or the perceived talent of Nicholas Cage, that is deeply polarising. But […]
The Science of Mental Focus
The other night, exhausted from a day of taxing thesis writing and mentally fried, I collapsed on the couch. In my half-dead state, my brain was mulling how on earth […]
What Can Academic Writers Learn from Novelists?
‘Tis true, the job of an academic writer is very different from that of a novelist. But when you come right down to it, we’re all putting pen to paper […]
How to Handle a Withering Critique
“If you’ve never cried before, during, or after a meeting with your advisor, something is amiss.” – Dr Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In When I signed up […]