Tag Archives: academic

The blog so far

We’re now at the end of the academic year. Undergraduates have gone home, staff have gone on holiday or more likely are writing articles, books and presenting to conferences. Me? The department building is getting refurbished, so I’m working from home.

Quite a lot has happened to me since I started my PhD last year. I’ve presented a proper paper at an academic conference for the first time, and then had that paper accepted for publication. I’ve officially graduated from my Masters degree. I’ve had ten months of PhD study, writing about party organisation theory, party system theory, and designing a questionnaire for distribution. I’ve also started and maintained this blog, and I’d like to share some thoughts about it has evolved so far, and how it might continue to evolve. Continue reading The blog so far

Publishing academic work

Newcastle University’s Politics department hosts a professional development seminar series. The series is very useful, offering helpful advice to postgraduate students across a range of issues, from setting up a research radar, to getting funding for your PhD, to publishing your work and getting a job in the academy, there are many things that postgraduates might want to know more about, but are not sure where to start. For more info, click here.

Today’s seminar was titled ‘Meet the editors: getting advice about publishing from the journal editors in Politics‘. Newcastle is fortunate at the moment to have four members of staff in the Politics department that edit academic journals. Martin Coward and Kyle Grayson edit Politics, Alistair Clark is one of the editors of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Anthony Zito is one of the editors of Enviromental Politics. Together, they offered their advice to postgraduates in the seminar, and I’d like to post some of their thoughts on this blog today. Wherever I can, I’ll try and group them into specific sections. I’ll refrain from attributing specific ideas to specific people, because I think they all concurred with each other sufficiently to make that unnecessary. Whilst all of the comments below are helpful and important, I do not take any credit for them. This blog is written with postgraduate students in mind. Continue reading Publishing academic work