Writing research proposals and publications

After meeting with one of my mentees this week and saying that she should try to write about courses and events as she went along instead of way after the event, I thought I should practice what I preach, especially as I'm working towards my Fellowship.

So here goes..... After studying the PKSB I identified desk research and publication as being an area I was interested in and wanted to work towards for my Fellowship.  One of the reasons being that criteria three asks you to demonstrate what you've done for the library profession.  Research and publications are both ways of achieving that goal.  Not having many written many publications myself, other than brief write ups for various library newsletters, I thought I needed to find out more.

I was fortunate that Cilip ILG (Information Literacy Group) and Cilip LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) organised a workshop on writing for publication in September 2014 at Cilip which fitted the bill.  I must admit I was very dubious about the day as I'm certainly not much of a writer and thought this course might be over my head. 

The course was good and approached the subject of research and publishing articles, step by step:

• decide subject focus
• develop the question
• choose your strategy
• select your method
• arrange the practicalities
• collect data
• analyse findings
• report your findings

Quite a lot of this I knew, in relation to doing a literature review, searching for journal articles, collecting data, obtaining ethics permissions, etc, but it was useful to see the whole process.  As librarians we often help students or researchers find information and show them search techniques which will help their retrieval of articles, however we only see a very small part of the research process.  We don't see how they come up with their research question, or the statistical data they find or how they choose whether to use qualitative or quantitative methodology to analyse their findings.  This course was going to make us do just that! So armed with this methodology we delved deeper into the practicalities of doing the above steps.  I found this much harder than I imagined.

Writing the research question which would help answer our hypothesis was extremely difficult.  It needed to be concise, direct, focused on central issues and could be broken down into multiple smaller questions.  I think I failed miserably and was very grateful to the rest of my group who seemed to have more of an idea than me.  (It was at this point that I felt a lot of the other participants had done a lot of research already in their library roles and I felt out of my depth.)  For the rest of the morning we went on in groups to focus our question and think about the methods we could employ to find out the information we needed.


We also talked about the importance of doing a literature review to see if someone else had already done that research. We discussed what to do if your findings confirmed other studies and how a new angle could be looked at instead.  We also talked about finding that your piece of research broke new ground and the importance of identifying gaps in subject areas that hadn't been looked at previously.

The afternoon turned to writing proposals.  A good research proposal needs to be:

• pitched correctly
• clear and concise
• have the wow factor
• be achievable and realistic
• feasible
• have a degree of originality
• be intelligible to readers with no jargon
• *follow the guidelines given*

We then practiced writing that killer headline, like the Daily Mail which has an immediate impact, followed by a longer sentence with the key points.  Again this wasn't as easy as it sounded.


Writing for publication was next.  The presenter spoke about where to publish, who our audience was and most importantly to read the journal guidelines.  Another tip was to read other articles from the particular journal to give you an idea of how others had written their articles.  We were also told that if you were collaborating with other writers that it was easier for one person to write the first draft and the second person to review it, rather than trying to write it together. Otherwise the article could sound like it had two voices rather than one.  This was useful advice and I will hopefully put this into practice.


The day ended with a run down of some of the library journals we might want to publish in:

• Journal of Information Literacy
• Library and Information Research
• Innovative Practice in Higher Education
• New Review of Academic Librarianship
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

The course was very useful, although at the end I wondered if this was more in depth than I wanted. The research and teaching skills course which we had done over the summer, wasn't going to fit into this model as we hadn't sought ethics permission and come up with a research question and proposal.  Perhaps writing it up for Cilip Update or on a blog would be better.  Although if we were doing it a second time perhaps we could think about getting these things ready in case we wanted to publish something.

Having said that in November we did write a proposal for LILAC 2015 to talk about our in-house teaching skills course for librarians, as I felt it was a gap in the information literacy area.  The writing proposals section came in handy for this and must have helped as our submission was accepted.

The presentations for the course are all on slideshare:
Getting started - Alison Brettle

Writing a research proposal - Geoff Walton & Graham Walton

Tips for aspiring authors & meet the journal editors - Jane Secker & Angharad Roberts