Resource of the Week #66: “Writing the Empirical Journal Article”

Hello again. Our current Resource of the Week is a guide to writing journal articles. Although intended mainly for researchers in psychology, it also can aid in writing articles in other fields.

I first learned of this guide in the 1990s, when some graduate students showed me an earlier version of it. The graduate students, who had taken a course from me, were in the business school. However, they found the guide very relevant.

This week, I was pleased to see this guide mentioned in a post on the AuthorAID discussion list. Versions of this widely cited guide now are openly accessible from the website of the author, psychology professor Daryl J. Bem.

The guide, which is titled “Writing the Empirical Journal Article”, contains the following parts:

• “Planning Your Article”
• “Writing Your Article”
• “Rewriting and Polishing Your Article”
• “Some Matters of Style”
• “Publishing Your Article”

The part on writing an article includes advice on preparing each main section of an article.

Conveniently, Professor Bem has provided versions of this guide in single-column format (“easiest to read in a browser”) and double-column format (“easiest to read offline”). Clearly someone who cares about communication!

Until the next post—

Barbara