Publishing papers and giving talks

• PRACTICE
• APA- style: go into when published, changes
• Follow the Hourglass style
• Review previous research
• Methods and Results section:
• Clear, concise - Need to stick close to what your data tells you, don’t make wide generalizations.
• Methods: provides details about the participants, the instructions, procedure, and dependent measures: want others to be able to replicate your study.
• Results: detailed, concise, summary of relevant findings (possibly post-hoc) and discuss some criticisms of research before others can (it is possible that my sample size was too small).
• General discussion:
• Broaden scope, offering some theoretical and practical insights – what do your findings mean? Summarize your findings and give directions for further research.
• To improve the quality of your research papers:
• Be correct: Double check your paper and have someone else do it too. Spellcheck!
• Be clear: you are explaining to people who don’t know this topic as well as you do. Must make it as clear as possible. Get rid of unnecessary words, some people like to show off their extensive vocabulary but this just makes it difficult for others to read. Always give the full name of an abbreviation first. Don’ t use jargon (i.e., USD, ANOVA). Be comprehensive: don’t manipulate your findings or omit results, include references for everything you cite. Need to give credit where credit is due – they may read it and then you are in trouble.
• Be coherent: you need to use headings to organize your paper. See APA headings, you do not list study by study. This is what many beginning individuals do, this makes it difficult and boring to read. Need to have reasons and flow for listing things. Clump those authors together that all contribute too.
• Be cautious: "hedge" on your results. What you don’t say (my findings weren’t supported in this realm) the critics of your article will. Avoid drawing sweeping conclusions. It may be that…
• Be creative – can give a little bit of a personal touch
• Watch your wording – offensive wording (i.e., gender etc.).
• Giving a good talk in psychology:
• Have an organized plan for your talk
• Background
• Hypothesis/research question
• Procedures
• Findings
• Interpretation
• Relevance of findings
• Implications in the "big scheme of things"
• Don’t read it if you can help it – memorize if you have to

• Tell them the plan in the beginning (just a sentence or two). Here’s what we are going to do today.
• Visual aids – very important to keep people’s attention
• Don’t make them complicated or flashy though (graphs for data are nicer to look at then a lot of numbers)
• Try to get the main theme across – want them to go home with this
• Try to speak clearly – no uhs, umms, etc.
• Pacing – watch out for this
• Humor a little, not too much though – want to be serious about what you’re talking about
• Answer questions politically

• Checklist of concerns – end of chapter 9

• Describing the results of statistical analysis:
• determined by the analysis used – read through the chapter, point out APA style for graphs etc. reporting results – bring SPSS book with results section
• Always hedge – if correlation – may report – may indicate – participants reportedly…
• Different terms used for different stat. techniques.

• See example on pg. 148 for example of ways people can be slightly dishonest in reporting their results.
• Give the context of the number
• More examples of being dishonest by playing with the numbers – pg. 149
• How to see if things are real: page 154