Writing for Publication: Transitions and Tools that Support Scholars’ Success - Mary Renck Jalongo, Olivia N. Saracho 2016

Errors in Reviewing
From a Class Paper to a Publishable Review
Conference Proposals and Article Types

The worst mistakes in reviewing—and ways to avoid them—are discussed below.

· Plagiarism—take notes carefully and document all sources. Clearly differentiate between your thoughts and others’ ideas in notes. Check your work using a free plagiarism detector such as Turnitin to get a similarity score with published work; your score should be less than 5—8 %. When graduate students get much higher scores, they often are shocked but, even if your sources are documented, using too many long quotations will bump up the percentage of similarity with published sources.

· Inadequate sources—choose the appropriate data bases, work with an academic librarian, select scholarly sources (reputable, peer-reviewed publications) rather than popular sources, develop effective search strategies, discuss your idea with an expert in the field, search within your discipline and in other disciplines. Novices sometimes rely on professional opinion pieces or textbooks (which are secondary sources) rather than seeking out more authoritative sources with research evidence that can be more arduous to read.

· Weak argument—learn more about the common fallacies in logical arguments and how to avoid them, use authoritative definitions from the professional literature (rather than the dictionary), support assertions with evidence, supply concise examples to illustrate key points.

Online Tool

For a humorous look at logical fallacies, see “An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments” (Almosawwi, 2013) at https://bookofbadarguments.com/.

· Errors of fact—Use primary sources; check, check, and double check everything; present a balanced view and include conflicting findings; include more details on the findings from major studies; and synthesize the findings of less important studies.

· Listing— avoid boring lists in which each paragraph begins with a name and a date; chunk information and strive for meaningful synthesis; compare, contrast, and critique rather than merely report; cluster minor studies with similar findings together; and strive to emulate the writing style of published literature reviews (Jalongo & Heider, 2014). Table 5.3 highlights the types, functions, and questionable practices related to citing others’ work.

Table 5.3

Source: West and Stenius (2009)