Of most papers they looked at the evaluation team concluded
that: ‘their main purpose lies in providing redundancy and
assurance to those readers whose faith in the orderliness of
nature ... needs strengthening’. This meant that in their judge-
ment fewer than one in ten papers in the area genuinely
advanced learning.
The leading American psychologist Robert J. Sternberg sug-
gested that in his field the papers evaluated as out-of-the-ordinary
and particularly useful do one or more of the following:
- report results whose findings can be unambiguously
interpreted; - report experiments with a particularly clever design, which
can be used as a pattern or ‘paradigm’ by other researchers; - report surprising findings which none the less make sense in
some theoretical context; - debunk some previously held presupposition;
- present a fresh way of looking at an old problem;
- report results of major theoretical or practical significance; or
- ‘integrate into a new, simpler framework, data that previously
required a complex, possibly unwieldy framework’.^6
The features in this list need changing a bit and extending for
other disciplines, where experiments may be unknown and
even systematic data may be scarce. In most of the social
sciences it is very difficult to publish case study material, but
easier to get journals to accept papers including quantitative
data relating to more general theories or controversies. In arts
and humanities subjects, papers are often more thematic or
theoretical, and their ‘usefulness’ may depend on their inter-
pretative impact. More of a premium tends to be placed on
good writing and style, plus the pursuit of scholarly norms,
such as originality, novelty, full referencing, new sources etc.
And, unlike the social sciences, journals in some humanities
disciplines (like history) are more likely to accept case study
material. But Sternberg’s criteria above still provide a helpful
first checklist of questions to ask in assessing how worthwhile
your own particular paper will be. And the contrast with the
previous list of things that routine papers typically conclude
provides quite a helpful sieve, which may help you sort out
which of your chapters is worth ‘paperizing’ and which is not.
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH◆ 239