Page 144 - English for Writing Research Papers

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7.1 What's the buzz?

Look at this extract from a fictitious paper entitled: Do we talk more to people who
are far from us than to those people who are next to us? How mobile phones have
changed the way we communicate , written by Joe Bloggs.

Imagine that your eye fell on this paragraph from the Results section and that this

was the first paragraph in the paper that you had read so far.
Subjects sitting in train compartments on a 60-minute journey were found to spend an aver-
age of 55 minutes either talking on their cell phone or sending messages, watching videos
etc. Only 2% of passengers talked to other people, in such cases merely to say 'sorry' or 'is
this seat taken'? This contrasts with research conducted in 1989 on the same train journey.
Mobile phones were very rare at the time, and the study found that around 58% of passen-
gers spoke to each other in a meaningful way for 10 minutes or more, with the prevalence
being woman to woman, or man to woman. Conversations between two men were also
found to be rare on the line between Copenhagen and Malmö.

Answer these questions:

1. Who found the data regarding the 55 minutes talking? a) Bloggs b) someone else

2. Who conducted the 1989 research? a) Bloggs b) someone else

3. Who conducted the Copenhagen / Malmö study? a) Bloggs b) the same author who con-

ducted the 1989 research, in fact it was part of the same study c) another author
How sure are you of your answers?
How could the paragraph be rewritten so that the reader could answer three ques-
tions with 100% confi dence?
************

In various sections of your paper, you need to compare your methodology or results
with what has already been established in the literature. You must make it 100%
clear to the reader whose methodology or results you are talking about.

If you don’t, you will make it difficult for the referee to:

• identify your contribution

• decide how useful the contribution is

• make a decision as to whether this contribution is worth recommending for
publication
For example, if you say It was found that X = 1 , the referee needs to know whether
you found that X = 1, or whether another author made this fi nding.

This chapter shows you how to make such distinctions.