April Book Display: English & Academic Writing

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Redpath Book Display

April may be a busy time while you are completing your term papers and exams. It may also be a great time to reflect and determine what you want to accomplish in the upcoming summer vacation. How about uplifting your academic writing skills? No matter what level of study you are doing or what role you are playing in academia, good writing undoubtedly makes a positive contribution to your work. Not only does it help to make your ideas more precise and persuasive, but also it aids in your reasoning, analyzing, and critical thinking.

With that in mind, the McGill Library created a virtual book display entitled “English & Academic Writing”, consisting of recent print books, ebooks, e-videos and website resources on academic writing and English communication. They are useful for both instructors and students of various disciplines, including those whose mother tongue is not English. Selected print titles are now available for borrowing on the Redpath Book Display on the main floor of the Redpath Library (aka. the northern part of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library) during the entire month of April.

Here are some of the titles that you may want to start with:

100 tips to avoid mistakes in academic writing and presenting

100 tips to avoid mistakes in academic writing and presenting, Adrian Wallwork & Anna Southern, 2020, Springer

This ebook contains one hundred typical mistakes relating to papers, proposals, oral presentations, and correspondence with editors, reviewers, and editing agencies. While it is primarily intended for non-native English speaking researchers, it is also useful for those who are revising their works in order to have them published.

How to fix your academic writing trouble: a practical guide, Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth, and Shaun Lehmann, 2019, Open University Press

This print book explains common feedback students receive from their instructors of a writing course, such as “Your writing doesn’t sound very academic” and “Your writing doesn’t flow”. It also provides advice on how to fix those issues.

Writing for engineering and science students: staking your claim, Gerald Rau, 2020, Routledge

This ebook is a practical guide for both international students and native speakers of English undertaking either academic or technical writing. It uses writing excerpts from engineering and science journals to explore characteristics of a research paper, including organization, length and naming of sections, and location and purpose of citations and graphics. It covers different types of writing, including lab reports, research proposals, dissertations, poster presentations, industry reports, emails, and job applications.

Academic writing for university students, Stephen Bailey, 2022, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

This print book is designed to help with writing essays, reports and other papers for coursework and exams. It consists of four parts: The Writing Process: From finding suitable sources, through to editing and proofreading; Writing Types: Practice with common assignments such as reports and cause-effect essays; Writing Tools: Skills such as making comparisons, definitions, punctuation and style; and Lexis: Academic vocabulary, using synonyms, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.

“They say / I say”: the moves that matter in academic writing: with readings, Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Russel K Durst, and Laura J Panning Davies, 2021, W.W. Norton & Company

This text has been used in many writing courses to teach students how to structure a scholarly conversation while building their own arguments. It provides practical rhetoric templates that are useful for citing different views in the literature, for example, “In discussions of………………, a controversial issue is whether……………… . While some argue that………………, others contend that………………. .” It is definitely a helpful guide for writing your literature review.

Becoming an academic writer: 50 exercises for paced, productive, and powerful writing, Patricia Goodson, 2017, SAGE

This print title is a workbook of 50 exercises, covering both linguistic basics (e.g. grammar and vocabulary) and writing specifics in different sections of an academic work, such as abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion and conclusion.

For those whose mother tongue is not English, also feel free to watch some e-videos listed in the “Study English” and “English Composition” series.

Since it takes effort and time to improve your writing, why don’t you start the journey with a book from our book display today?

These student papers are the best

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Excellence in

Written Communication

I am delighted to present to you three of our Communication in Engineering, Excellence in Written Communication Award winners! These are the best student papers from past terms of CCOM 206. They have been added to eScholarship@McGill and they are well worth a read.

Nathan Robbins – Performance of Nose Cone Geometries on Sounding Rockets

Read the full paper on eScholarship

This investigation compares the performances of several nose cone geometries and their suitability for flight on a high-altitude sounding rocket. Many geometries have been proposed to mitigate the extreme aerodynamic forces and phenomena encountered during such high energy ascents. The geometries in question include the conic section, Haack Series nose cone, and the aerospike nose cone; all of which are evaluated according to their coefficients of drag, heating characteristics, and several outstanding factors such as wall shear stress, pressure distributions, and useful internal volume. The investigation concludes that the aerospike nose cone is well suited for high-altitude sounding rockets because of its capacity to reduce drag, its exceptional ability to reduce heating, and its larger useful internal volume. Through this unique combination of performance and volume, the aerospike nose cone is a likely candidate for the forebody of high-altitude sounding rockets for future missions.

Katia Rosenflanz – Biodiesel Production: Advancing Lipid Extraction to Fuel our Future

Read the full paper on eScholarship

The use of diesel and fossil fuels to power the globe’s increasing energy demands have caused large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, negatively impacting the environment. This has led researchers to investigate alternative energy sources. Biodiesel, a renewable, biodegradable, and environmentally-friendly resource, shows promise; microalgae, which consume large amounts of carbon dioxide, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases, has been introduced as a potential supply for the necessary oils. Because of algal cells’ strength and chemical properties, however, the physical extraction of lipids is difficult. This paper compares three methods to improve lipid extraction: microwave radiation, osmotic shock, and bead beating. They are assessed based on dry weight lipid output, efficiency, and scalability. Based on research, bead beating has high energy consumption and relatively low lipid production; thus, it is unadvisable for mass production. Osmotic shock has high output and no energy consumption, but is fairly inefficient due to a large time requirement. Microwave radiation performs fairly well in terms of lipid output, efficiency, and scalability, making it the most viable option, but microalgal biodiesel is only now entering the picture as an alternative energy source. Further research and resources must be invested in order to introduce these techniques into the global energy market.

Allan Reuben – Nanomagnetic Logic Circuits as an Alternative to Silicon CMOS-based Circuits for use in Extreme Environments

Read the full paper in eScholarship

As hardware and software technology improves, sending robots to do research in extreme environments is increasingly frequent. This shift creates a need for computer chips optimally designed for those environments. Computers that operate in extreme environments must account for limitations and requirements not present in consumer or corporate uses such as: extreme power management, high radiation exposure, and high computation reliability. Silicon-based computers have become the accepted standard in computing for every environment due to their high speed and ease of manufacturing. Nanomagnetic logic circuits are a promising new technology that may help engineers optimize computers for use in extreme environments. These two systems are compared based on their durability from radiation, power utilization, and clock speed. For mission-critical computer operation in extreme environments, nanomagnetic logic circuits offer many advantages over traditional silicon-based computers.

Restoration Continues Apace

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Dozens of representatives from all trades and occupations in the construction industry are making great progress with the restoration of the Macdonald-Stewart Library Building, home of the Schulich Library. All demolition work is finished and only construction phases remain.  The work has unveiled many missed and forgotten windows, promising naturally brightened floors. New finishes and increased washrooms will ease your long hours of study.

To shed some light on how this is shaping up, here is a before photo of our very popular group study, 5th floor. Large swaths of floorspace had been closed off with the false walls that covered up our unique windows.

A very full Schulich 5th floor, with temporary walls blocking the windows.

Here is a similar, panned-out view of that section, windows shining through.  Women’s needs were woefully underserved in our building, and this floor will also include a large women’s washroom of ten stalls, as well as two individual, gender-neutral washrooms.

Schulich 5th floor, windows uncovered. Things are looking brighter!

For more information on the renovation project, please see the project page

Metrics 3 x 3

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I wanted to do a review of the 3 big citation indexes (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) at 3 different levels (articles, authors, and journals), since there have been some noteworthy changes this year. Citations are only a part of the story so I will point out when alternative metrics are available, such as views and mentions on social media.

A bit of history: Web of Science was launched as the Science Citation Index in the 1960s, by the Institute for Scientific Information. One thing that they did that set them apart while they were gathering information from journals, was to include each paper’s list of references. It seems like a small thing but it revealed the relationships between papers, and also provided citation counts.

Web of Science did not have any real competition as a citation index until 2004, with the launch of both Google Scholar and Scopus (from the publishing giant, Elsevier). While Web of Science is deep, indexing over 100 years of journal content, it is selective and therefore the coverage is not as wide as Google Scholar or Scopus.
  1. Article metrics

Citation counts may vary between the indexes, depending on their coverage of a subject. It is interesting to explore each one, and necessary to indicate where a count is coming from. The number is often highest in Google Scholar, since it can link to non-journal content like presentation slides.

Citations are useful in general because they allow you to move forward in time, finding newer papers that may be of interest. If a paper is important, you can always set up a citation alert to receive email notifications. Sorting your search results in Web of Science and Scopus by citations will also help you find those seed papers that are often referenced in your research area.

New in beta in Web of Science is the presence of enriched cited references in some records, with specifics on where in the text an article is cited, how many times, and in connection with which other references. They highlight hot papers, those published in the last two years with an unexpectedly high citation count over the most recent two months for their field. They also make it easy to find highly cited papers from the last 10 years.

Item-level usage counts came much later in Web of Science when people became interested in seeing alternative metrics. They count how many times people click on the full-text or export an item to a citation management program like EndNote (EndNote is available from McGill Library!). You can see which papers people are paying attention to in the last 180 days, or all time (really since 2013, when they began counting).

Scopus does have view counts, but they take alternative metrics further by integrating PlumX Metrics with 5 categories: Citations, usage (clicks and downloads), captures (bookmarks), mentions (blog posts, Wikipedia, etc.), and social media (tweets, Facebook likes, etc.).

2. Author metrics

Article citations are used to calculate author metrics. A popular metric is the h-index, where the number of citations an author has received meets their number of published papers (read about this index in Hirsch’s article in arXiv). Some criticisms of the h-index are that it is dependent on the age of the researcher and also on their field, so it shouldn’t be used for comparisons.

When searching for author metrics it is useful to have these identifiers on hand, if possible:

A new visualization in author profiles in Web of Science is the Beamplot, with citation data going back to 1980. Individual points on the plot represent the citations for a given paper, divided by the mean for papers in the same Web of Science subject category from that year.

3. Journal metrics

The Journal Impact Factor and other metrics for journals indexed in Web of Science are published each year in Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science is now a collection of subject indexes and Journal Impact Factor data is provided for journals in the Science and the Social Science Citation Index. This year, Journal Citation Reports has expanded to include the Arts & Humanities and Emerging Sources Citation Index journals, with their new metric: Journal Citation Indicator. It allows for comparison of journals across disciplines. 

There is an updated CiteScore methodology in Scopus with a 4-year publication window (the Journal Impact Factor has 2 years to build up citations). You can choose to rank only open access journals in a subject by CiteScore. You can also find out what percentage of a journal is made up of review articles (reviews are often highly cited), or is never cited at all, by using the Scopus source comparison tool.

Google Scholar does have a metrics page that ranks journals by h5-index (h-index for articles published in the previous 5 years). They can be organized by category and sub-category.

Journal metrics are not meant to be used to judge the research of individuals, but they can come in handy when you are deciding on where to publish your research. Still, they are no substitute for the advice of trusted experts.

I probably went on for too long, so please let me know if you have any questions!

Citizen Science and the Cochrane Crowd

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Are you interested in citizen science and health research?

Consider becoming a member of the Cochrane Crowd! The Crowd is a Cochrane initiative inviting volunteers to contribute to high quality, independent health evidence. Cochrane is a global, not-for-profit network of researchers aiming to gather and summarize research evidence to improve health outcomes. Research output has grown exponentially and there is a significant need to sift through large quantities of research on whether treatments work or how accurate diagnostic tests are, to name but a couple of examples.

Finding and classifying all the research on a given intervention or topic can be unfeasible for research teams with limited resources. This is where the Crowd comes in: Volunteers for the Cochrane Crowd help identify and categorize research by contributing to tasks such as screening records to pick out randomized controlled trials or studies on COVID-19. Just a few minutes a day can make a big difference when many hands make light work. Check out their FAQ for common questions and answers, and join the Crowd. You’ll be surprised by what you learn along the way.

Getting Familiar with the Library

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With the semester in full swing, you might have some questions about resources you might need. Thanks to our Orientation Committee, we have both a webpage and a handbook for you.

Our Library Orientation page is a great one-stop-shop has all of the essential information about the library. This includes links to library hours, where to search for books and other materials, contacting a librarian and more.

Also in our orientation page is the beautifully created Library Matters handbook that has handy tips from fellow students, detailing what they wish they knew about the library when they first started at McGill. The handbook also has some fun activities like crosswords and colouring pages for you to enjoy.
Take a dive in and see you at the library!

Where are the Collections?

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The Schulich Library building may be closed, but our rich collection remains available. Access our thousands of online resources (e-books, e-journals, databases, etc.) anytime and anywhere. EZProxy allows you to log in from off-campus, using your McGill username and password.

You can find our regular circulating titles in the Redpath Basement, while other popular Schulich material is located in the adjacent McLennan Library Building.
Looking for the ASTM Standards? The are located with the McLennan Reference Collection.

Need consumer health information? You will find the Wendy Patrick Health Information Collection on the second floor of the McLennan Library building.
Trying to find your print course readings? Look for them in the McLennan Course Reserve room.

It’s Virtually Science Literacy Week!

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Science Literacy Week will be celebrated this September 20 to 26 with climate as the theme. We can help you become a citizen climate scientist with a workshop on capturing the McGill Observatory’s historical weather logs with DRAW, the Data Rescue: Archives and Weather Project.

You can also learn The Art of Explaining Science to Non-Specialists, or how to turn your research into a business, with From Science to Startup: A Beginner’s Guide to Entrepreneurship as a Researcher.

If you are looking for something relaxing this semester, McGill Visual Arts Collection invites you to a Science Literacy Week edition of their on-going De-Stress + Sketch series.

Our Science Literacy Week guide also has lots of virtual exhibits and links promoting resources and materials at McGill Library and beyond, including the wonderful Ocean School from the National Film Board of Canada.

Join us as we help spread the wonders of science Canada-wide!