“Think about how fascinating this is”: Engagement in academic blogs across disciplines

As a relatively new and rapidly growing academic genre, the academic blog offers an open space for scholars to disseminate their work and discuss research issues. In this new rhetorical context, researchers in different fields try to create interpersonal solidarity to engage a relatively unpredictable readership, which is strongly influenced by knowledge-making practices. In this paper, we explore how bloggers across disciplines engage their readers. Based on 132 blog posts from both soft and hard fields, we examine bloggers’ use of engagement resources. The results suggest blogs in soft disciplines have significantly more reader mentions, directives and questions, while hard science blogs rely on resources which claim relatively more author authority and require more shared understanding. The study not only contributes to our understanding of how researchers create more egalitarian and engaging interpersonal relations with readers than in research articles, but reveals clear disciplinary differences

How the medium shapes the message: Stance in two forms of book reviews

Book reviews on academic blog sites are becoming increasingly visible and important as they give scholars a space to evaluate research and reach a wider audience. While reviews are a familiar genre in academic journals, their similarity to this more recent incarnation is unclear. While it appears to be the same genre with the same purpose to explicitly evaluate a published text and the contribution of its author, the blog book review operates in a very different interactional context. The question arises, then, whether this is the same genre. Does the channel of communication introduce particular communicative constraints and affordances which make this a different kind of text? Based on 30 book reviews in journals and 30 in a respected academic blog, we explore the similarities and differences in reviewers’ use of stance in these two forms. Findings show that all stance resources were employed by both sets of writers but were more frequent in the blog book reviews. The study thus has important implications for understanding the concept of genre, for analysing rhetorical stance choices, and for novice writers embarking on reviewing in new platforms

Stance in academic blogs and three-minute theses

This paper reports a cross-genre study of how academics show authorial stance in two increasingly popular but underexplored academic genres: academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations. Based on a corpus of 75 academic blogs and 75 3MT talks from social sciences, we explore how academics represent themselves and their research to non-specialist audiences in two very different contexts. We found that the 3MT presenters used more stance resources and took stronger positions, largely by indicating certainty and creating a more visible authorial presence. Academic bloggers, on the other hand, preferred to downplay their commitment and highlight affect. The variations are explained in terms of mode and context, especially the time-constrained and face-to-face competitive nature of the spoken genre and the potential for critical feedback in the blogs. The findings demonstrate the salience of stance in the two genres and role of context in academic communication. It has important implications for scholars who are seeking to take their work to new audiences in perhaps unfamiliar genre

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid-19 research

Covid-19 was the greatest public health crisis of a century, accounting for millions of deaths and initiating an urgent surge of published biomedical research. In this climate of social anxiety, researchers scrambled to publicize their work and achieve a medical breakthrough. The use of journal highlights, a brief bullet pointed list summarising the novel results of a study, is an important tool in this promotional endeavour. In this study we focus on the stance taken by authors in this genre by examining 300 highlights dealing with the virus and comparing them with 300 from articles in the same 16 journals on other issues. Our results show significantly greater use of stance markers in the Covid highlights with hedges, boosters and self-mention particularly marked. Our study offers both a description of stance in highlights and an understanding of the potential impact of the intense, high-stakes competition generated by the pandemic in biomedical publishing. We believe this offers a valuable contribution to the literature on stance, academic discourse and rhetorical persuasion

Titles in research articles

Titles are a key part of every academic genre and are particularly important in research papers. Today, online searches are overwhelmingly based on articles rather than journals which means that writers must, more than ever, make their titles both informative and appealing to attract readers who may go on to read, cite and make use of their research. In this paper we explore the key features of 5070 titles in the leading journals of six disciplines in the human and physical sciences to identify their typical structural patterns and content foci. In addition to proposing a model of title patterns, we show there are major disciplinary differences which can be traced to different characteristics of the fields and of the topics of the articles themselves. Our findings have important implications for EAP and ERPP teachers working with early career academic writers

Managing evaluation: Criticism in two academic review genres

Academic blogs are becoming increasingly frequent, visible and important in both disciplinary and ‘outreach’ communication, offering a space for scholars and interested publics to discuss and evaluate research. Like the more traditional book review, blog responses require writers to engage and assess the ideas presented in another, public, text, but bloggers face criticism from both lay and academic readers in ways that may be unfamiliar to them. In this paper we consider how far blog responses are an ‘academic review genre’ like the familiar book review, and compare how writers construct criticism in the two genres. Based on two corpora of 36 book reviews and 270 blog comments, we examine the frequency, form and focus of criticism exploring how the constraints and affordances of each genre contribute to very different evaluative contexts. We show that the medium has a significant impact on the strategies writers use and that blog comments both reflect the directness and informality of online communication while respecting some of the conventions of academic engagement. The results contribute to our understanding of how context influences rhetorical choices and may be valuable to those participating in both blogs and review genres

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field