Writing Human Factors Research Papers by Don Harris

Author:Don Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Company
Published: 2012-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Formatting and Submitting Your Manuscript: End of Chapter Checklist

Interlude IV:

Top 10 Mistakes

Every popular book nowadays must have a ‘top 10’ list in it somewhere (or should that be a bottom 10 in this case)? So, in no particular order, here is my list of the most common mistakes made when preparing a manuscript for submission to a Human Factors journal:

1. Producing a paper that does not have a coherent message all the way through it, which is often a product of trying to say too much.

2. Too much detail in the Introduction: lots of irrelevant references (the ‘I have read it, so I’m going to include it’ phenomenon, or ‘the referees will think that it is a good paper, I have used a lot of references’ fallacy)!

3. Lots of simple description of previous authors’ works in the Introduction and not enough critical analysis and synthesis within the context of the research being described in the paper.

4. Poor description of the Method: an intelligent reader could not reproduce the methodology from the detail provided (failing the ‘Delia Smith’ test).

5. Poor production of figures in the Results section (font too small; lots of use of colour in figures in a journal that will be printed in black and white; poor use of shading; figures too complex to reproduce on a limited page size; use of PowerPoint™ and Excel™ graphs and figures that won’t reproduce or re-size properly – should use .TIF; .GIF; .BMP or .AI, etc.) and many figures irrelevant.

6. Poor production of tables in the Results sections (many using statistical package variable names; too complex; font too small; format doesn’t reflect the hypotheses tested, etc.).

7. Lots of direct use of output from statistical packages, rather than presenting the results of the statistical analyses using the accepted abbreviated form within the main text.

8. Not enough detail included in the Discussion: no explanation and does not link the Results to the material in the Introduction (and this is the important bit – science is all about the explanation and interpretation of phenomena).

9. Failure to follow the required format for the presentation of a manuscript to a journal.

10. Failure to consider everything that they have written from the point of view of the reader, particularly assuming too much knowledge on their part and presupposing that they have a perfect memory for what has gone before.

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