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Project management for academics I: Managing a research pipeline

I am always honored when fellow scholars mention my name as someone worthy of being followed for advice on planning.

I am a very systematic planner and I love having my life neatly organized and planned (I am a Virgo, a Type A and an Upholder).

Drafts monthly plans

While I have taken Masters-level project management courses and have read the entire Project Management Institute PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), I have a very particular set of processes that work for me, and sometimes, work for other folks.

The one question I saw on Twitter today regarding how to do research planning prompted me to curate a list of resources and scholars whose research pipeline processes might be of help for anybody who follows me or reads my blog. Here is my Twitter thread.

While this thread was about project management, I had to discuss something equally important: if you are the principal investigator of a laboratory, or you use the lab model to engage your students and research assistants, you can’t develop your own research pipeline without consulting others. Each member of the team’s research pipeline needs to align with that of the principal investigator, and vice-versa.

A few respondents offered their own advice on research pipeline management and I link to their responses in my thread.

Overall, I do hope that this thread and blog post will be useful to scholars as they plan their research pipeline! Also grateful to every scholar I quoted here for sharing their processes.

Posted in academia, planning, productivity, research.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 19, 2019

Analysing and teaching theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format

One of the things I find most challenging to teach is the skill necessary to map out scholarly debates. I find that most professors offer a list of articles, book chapters and books that (in theory) map the field as they see it. However, I find that very few if any provide any guidance on to how to understand an entire field or sub-field of scholarship through scholarly exchanges and conversations. In this blog post I show how we can teach theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format (PCR).

Reading highlighting scribbling

I strongly believe we ought to teach our students how to map out scholarly debates. It’s on us, rather than on them, to show them the road map: who says what in the field, who says the opposite thing (or a counter point), and is the balance of evidence supporting Theory A or Theory B or neither?

To be perfectly frank, I DO think that within a course, faculty owe it to students to draw the map of the literature rather than asking of the student to make sense of all scholarly work and create the map themselves. HOWEVER, I strongly believe that for comprehensive/qualifying/preliminary exams, students SHOULD be able to map out the debates themselves.

Beyond the corruption theory Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder set of articles I show above, I found another set that discusses environmental justice.

Now, so far I have only provided two sets of articles in PCR format. I draw from one of these sets to showcase how to write the argumentation in a Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder kind of way.

I also believe it is important to teach our students how to write critiques that are firm but courteous. They should also be able to highlight their own contributions without destroying the scholarship of people who came before them.

Hopefully this blog post will be of use to those of you who want to teach strategies to map out the literature using scholarly exchanges as examples.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 10, 2019

Teaching proper citation practices: avoiding “Daisy chains” and grandparented cites when doing citation tracing

I have written a lot about how to do proper citation tracing (both forward and backward) to search who has cited whom and facilitate proper attribution of ideas.

I am a fan of always going back to the original source.

And I know grandparenting citations is often the result of not being able to go back to the original source.

Robust and ethical citation practices are an important part of what we do as scholarly writers. I am not a fan of what I used to call grandfathered citations

This is an example of a grandparented citation:”As Pacheco-Vega argues (2010, p. 874, in Gomez-Alvarez 2013, p. 30)…” I understand that historians will push back against my dislike of grandparented citations, but as noted by several scholars elsewhere (and in the paper I link below), there is a high risk that you’ll end up quoting someone saying something they did not intend to say.

Dr. Harrison, Dr. Academic Batgirl and I aren’t the only one concerned with Daisy chains and grandparented citations. See Patronek et al (2016) “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature”

I think grandparented citations should be only valid when it’s really next to impossible to find the original source. Thoughts?

Posted in academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 5, 2019

Prioritizing work and the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy

One of my biggest problems, as I have openly said everywhere, is that I often prioritize other people over myself. This is partly because I’m overly generous by nature, partly because I also know that helping others will come to me naturally, whereas sometimes tackling my own work is hard and difficult.

Writing while in Berlin

One of the tricks I use to force myself to prioritize my own work and well being before others is using the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy.

As I said on Twitter, for my #2ThingsADay I focus on TOMs, and when I get to campus, I work on the TOTOs – this may sound selfish, but seriously if I don’t carve time for my own writing, I simply work on stuff that I owe to other people and I never focus on my own writing.

You may want to consider start prioritizing your TOMs.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 1, 2019

Making your research “dialogue” with other scholars’ in your literature review

One of the biggest challenges I find when reviewing the work of my graduate students is that their work is often not situated within the broader landscape of scholarly literature. They have made an important contribution, but it does not show clearly in their writing.

Offices (campus, home and my Mom's)

I tell them “you need to put your research into dialogue with other scholars’ work”. In this blog post I explain what I mean by that.

An important step in the process of making your work “dialogue” with others’ is drawing connections. This is why I say that we need to read broadly and deeply: to be able to connect a particular idea with that of other scholars you need to know what they said and where. This is why the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) is important: you can search the Excel file for a particular idea or concept that may seem relevant and related to the one presented in the paper you are reading. You can obviously do the same if you store your articles and books in PDF format in Mendeley (or Zotero, or EndNote, or Citavi, or Refworks). The ability to search can’t be overstated.

In the particular case I analyzed in my thread, I linked to the work of 3 scholars whose work I admire and who have studied the case of the water crisis in Flint: Benjamin Pauli, Ashley Nickels and Malini Ranganathan. Because I do recall their work, I can connect ideas from the article I’m reading to their published research, as I show below. I drew a quick mind map to show how their work connects to that of Moors’ (2019).

This mind map only links 3 ideas and 3 authors, but of these, perhaps the most relevant is the reframing of Flint as a vibrant city. That’s the core idea Moors is putting forth: that social media enabled Flint residents to tell the world their story from their perspective.

CIDE office desk at work

I haven’t written a memo derived from these notes, but it’s clear to me that I could (and probably should), and that I could/should cite Ben, Malini and Ashley’s work when I revise my R&R.

At any rate, THIS is what I mean by “making your work dialogue with that of other authors” – being able to connect core ideas from an author to those of others. Hopefully this blog post will help those writing their Literature Reviews

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 30, 2019

Writing your literature review based on the “Cross-Reference” column of the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED)

Earlier this year, I was invited to Memorial University of Newfoundland (in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada) as the George M. Story Distinguished Lecturer (thanks to Drs. Amanda Bittner and Arn Keeling who successfully submitted an application for and won a grant to bring me to MUN).

Literature review

I gave a public lecture, a research talks and a couple of workshops for graduate students. As I was preparing the one on academic writing, I got an insight that I hadn’t realized when presenting earlier versions of this talk: you can, if you want, write your literature review based on the “Cross-Reference” column of my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED).

Note how the paragraph above the purple highlight and the next one actually discuss how different scholars have argued about the variability in degree of precarity across waste pickers’ case studies. THAT is the kind of stuff I would write in my “Cross-Reference” column.

Basically, once you’ve surveyed the field, your “Cross-Reference” column gives you the foundations to start writing the literature review, because it allows you to see how the work you’re reading is connected with your own and with others’ scholarship.

Hopefully this blog post will help those who use my CSED method to write their literature reviews.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 13, 2019

On skimming reading material and the importance of The Second Round of in-depth reading

One of my main concerns when I see students seek advice online, as I’ve made explicit in earlier blog posts of mine, is that many folks recommend that they should ALWAYS SKIM EVERYTHING and later (at some undetermined point in time) they should choose which readings they must come back to and read in more depth. As I’ve said repeatedly, students and scholars alike should develop a broad repertoire of reading strategies. There is no magic bullet, and there are risks to the ALWAYS SKIM strategy which I outlined in a Twitter thread earlier this week.

Reading writing working

I have read a ton of my fellow professors encourage students to “just skim and when you find the right article/book, THEN you can read in more depth”. I would be down with this strategy if students were used to reading in depth throughout their studies. I am not certain they are. There is a lot of heterogeneity in reading speeds/material density but also on the purpose of said reading materials. For example, in my class, I always tell my students: “this lecture will ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE that you read very much in depth article A, B and C. Skim D if need be”.

Example: if it’s a class on foundations of institutional theory, I can easily tell my students: “read Ostrom 1990 Ch 3 in depth, North 1990 Ch1 in depth, and Hall and Taylor 1996 – from H&T you should totally do a synthetic note that includes a table on 3 neoinstitutionalisms”. People who teach institutional theory may frown at the fact I didn’t include Williamson. Personally, I believe one can learn institutions with Ostrom, North, Hall and Taylor. THEN go in more depth with Williamson. Anyhow, this is just an example of guidance I offer my students.

I really do hope that folks in higher education will take to heart the message that if you teach your students to strategically choose and skim, you should also teach them to do The Second Round of in-depth reading.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 13, 2019

Getting unstuck with your #AcWri: responding to, or critiquing a statement/argument

I get stuck, all the time. Even though I write a lot, and I write about writing as well, I often feel stumped. There’s a particular paper that I am having a really hard time finishing, and I’ve been trying a few different techniques to get myself to complete it (I’ve written about all of them below, as my Twitter thread below indicates).

The one strategy that is almost always fail-safe and pretty much gets me out of a writing rut just about all the time is responding to a statement/argument. Nothing gets me writing faster than wanting to demonstrate how someone is wrong.

author is wrong

I found a really insightful paper on a topic I’m writing about, and then I found a couple of places where I disagreed with the author, so I used those points of disagreement to write a memorandum in response.

This strategy (to respond, critique or counter-argue a statement as a prompt to write) has served me well when feeling stuck. Hopefully it will be useful to others!

Posted in academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 21, 2019

A few pieces of advice for doctoral students in their first year

I clearly remember my first semester. I was absolutely dedicated to studying. Like, beyond whatever I ever had done before. I arrived on campus at 7:30 in the morning and left at 9:30 at night. I don’t want anybody to think that this was healthy. It was just that I was… really convinced that this was my calling and I spent just about every waking hour thinking about research.

MY research.

Reading, scribbling and highlighting

I worked excessively long hours because I wanted to, and thought I would be prepared to write my doctoral comprehensive exams right at the end of the first year.

Famous last words.

One proviso before I continue: If there’s something that I have always wanted my students to learn is that circumstances, populations (and therefore, policy options) are extraordinarily heterogeneous. So, giving blanket advice for undergraduates, or graduate students, does not work. We all have our circumstances. So, whatever suggestions I provide here are to be taken with a grain of salt and adapted to each person’s individual circumstances. Here are some pieces of advice that I provided when a number of people suggested my website as a source of wisdom for the PhD journey.

One thing that I strongly believe people doing PhDs need to do frequently is to remember that this is a training process. You’re not supposed to know everything. That’s what the doctorate is for: to prepare you to do independent research that can investigate phenomena to a deep extent so you can provide an original contribution to the literature.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 21, 2019

The Dissertation Analytical Table (DAT) – an overview device to formulate a 3-papers thesis/doctoral dissertation

I wrote a traditional, book-style PhD dissertation, mostly because I actually knew nothing about the three-papers model, and when my advisor saw how far ahead I already was, he decided to just keep my thesis as a book. In hindsight, I wish I could have reformatted it as a three-papers thesis and publish it in advance. But at the time, The University of British Columbia (UBC, where I did my PhD) wasn’t keen on this format for all doctoral students (this has changed in the past few years, as has the format for comprehensive examinations!).

Workflow at my CIDE campus office

At any rate, I now try to advise all my doctoral students to do a 3-papers dissertation, because it gives them publications by the time they’re done, it helps them think as researchers more than as students, and it allows them to test the submission-rejection-revision-resubmission process as they move forward.

As I have already written about, a PhD is an original contribution to the knowledge. It demonstrates you know stuff broadly and deeply. Writing a doctoral dissertation shows that you can undertake independent research. One way to demonstrate this is to write 3 separate papers that have a common thread, and where each of them makes an original contribution and it is an independently conducted piece of research.

To help my doctoral students, I created this Overview Device: the Dissertation Analytical Table (DAT).

Dissertation Analytical Table

The Dissertation Analytical Table (DAT) complements the Dissertation Two Pager (DTP), another Overview Device I use with my students to help them see their overall research from a vantage point. Every student of mine (undergraduate, Masters or PhD-level) wants to Do All The Things, so I frequently sit down with them and discuss what exactly doing an honors undergraduate thesis, a Masters’ thesis and a PhD dissertation entails, and then tell them to stick to what the requirements are.

The table is comprised of the following columns:
• Case study/field site
• Research question
• Theoretical framework
• Empirical strategy
• Research methods
• Expected results/explanations of phenomena
• Contribution (theoretical/empirical/both)

An example of one of these papers would be, if my students’ doctoral dissertation were something like “Essays on the Politics of Garbage Governance”.

The table is comprised of the following columns:
• Case study/field site – Aguascalientes, Mexico compared with Leon, Mexico
• Research question – What explains the variation in approaches towards privatization of waste collection in Mexican cities?
• Theoretical framework – Literature from privatization/remunicipalization (Bel/Warner, etc.) – perhaps historical institutionalism?
• Empirical strategy – fieldwork based, comparative- historical.
• Research methods – elite interviews, participant observation, archival research.
• Expected results/explanations of phenomena – I expect to identify sources of variation in decision-making, perhaps party politics, perhaps regulatory capture?
• Contribution (theoretical/empirical/both) – This paper is the first one of its kind studying privatization/remunicipalization of garbage in Mexican cities, specifically the ones I chose as case studies. Therefore, more of an empirical contribution.

In theory, my student could choose garbage governance in Mexico as the main general topic, or simply waste management across countries and choose two countries. The advantage of such a simple approach to the Dissertation Analytical Table is that you can do any and every kind of combination to create a theoretical, or an empirical contribution, or both.

Where I think the DAT is particularly powerful is in helping students develop solid research questions. This is a very important exercise, and one that is often poorly done, or only executed at the proposal writing/defense stage.

RESOURCES:

I found a few resources for those of you considering (a) supervising a 3 papers-thesis or (b) undertaking a 3 papers-thesis.

Hopefully my Dissertation Analytical Table (DAT) method will be able to help students and supervisors alike! You can, of course, adapt it any way you want to.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 13, 2019