New technology allows us to collect rich and voluminous data about refereeing--something that was not possible before. In this quantitative study, we consider data about the dates of sending (1) suitable papers to "BJET," (2) the papers to referees and (3) when the referees' reports are returned to the editor. To do this, we examined…

This article presents the author's suggestions on how to improve thesis abstracts. The author describes two books on writing abstracts: (1) "Creating Effective Conference Abstracts and Posters in Biomedicine: 500 tips for Success" (Fraser, Fuller & Hutber, 2009), a compendium of clear advice--a must book to have in one's hand as one prepares a…

There is little research on the use of titles in academic articles, and even less on different types of titles. In this article Crosby's taxonomy of titles [1] is brought up-to date and extended. Twelve types of titles are distinguished. The author argues that it would be helpful to discuss these different types with student writers.

In this paper I examine the citations in recent review articles in applied linguistics to point out that there appears to be a distinct lack of overlap between references to work in four inter-related areas--reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I then point to areas of research where I think it particularly important to consider these…

Background: Considerable evidence suggests that structured abstracts in scientific journal articles are more informative than traditional ones, but no one (to our knowledge) has written about asking psychology undergraduates to write structured abstracts for their laboratory reports. Aim: Our aim was to assess whether or not the quality of such…

Background: Previous research suggests that there are advantages to writing in groups or in pairs compared with writing individually, and that men write differently from women. However, as far as we know, no one has yet used new technology to assess published academic articles written in these different modes. Method: We assembled 80 papers from…