Publishing in academia
Why is it so hard to write a good paper in academia?
I have now been working at [Teaching hospital] for 7 months trying to understand how they would deal with a large-scale disaster incident or an MCI (mass casuality incident). We have conducted focus groups with health care providers within the emergency department (ED) as well as those that take care of patients before they reach the ED. Participants have ranged from attendings and residents to air and ground paramedics and communication center personnel.
That is:
-- 7 months of qualitative data collected in the form of focus groups and informal interviews
-- 21 participants
-- 6 hours of people talking about their work
At these focus groups we have walked participants through a scenario of a train derailing in a heavily populated area. The train is carrying hazardous gases (Potassium Chloride and Chlorine gas) and the victims of inhalation are brought to the ED. I created this scenario based on news reports of an actual incident in Pennsylvania in 2006.
So with all this rich data, why am I finding it so hard to write a paper?
Ethnographic research is interesting and it beats sitting at a computer and writing algorithms any day. But analyzing the data is challenging. And in this kind of research, writing is part of the data analysis instead of being just a means to report the findings. In computer science research (which is my background) I would have taken an algorithm, increased its efficiency by 0.01%, evaluated it on standard databases, and reported the results in terms of graphs. That would have been a paper.
But when I write results of ethnographic data collection I am looking at more complex things like people and organizations. And that is the hard part. There are paper submission deadlines in Jan, Feb and Mar 2007 and I am waiting for the inspiration, the "Eureka!" moment, to start writing. Maybe that is the problem, maybe I should just start writing and the insights will come.
I have now been working at [Teaching hospital] for 7 months trying to understand how they would deal with a large-scale disaster incident or an MCI (mass casuality incident). We have conducted focus groups with health care providers within the emergency department (ED) as well as those that take care of patients before they reach the ED. Participants have ranged from attendings and residents to air and ground paramedics and communication center personnel.
That is:
-- 7 months of qualitative data collected in the form of focus groups and informal interviews
-- 21 participants
-- 6 hours of people talking about their work
At these focus groups we have walked participants through a scenario of a train derailing in a heavily populated area. The train is carrying hazardous gases (Potassium Chloride and Chlorine gas) and the victims of inhalation are brought to the ED. I created this scenario based on news reports of an actual incident in Pennsylvania in 2006.
So with all this rich data, why am I finding it so hard to write a paper?
Ethnographic research is interesting and it beats sitting at a computer and writing algorithms any day. But analyzing the data is challenging. And in this kind of research, writing is part of the data analysis instead of being just a means to report the findings. In computer science research (which is my background) I would have taken an algorithm, increased its efficiency by 0.01%, evaluated it on standard databases, and reported the results in terms of graphs. That would have been a paper.
But when I write results of ethnographic data collection I am looking at more complex things like people and organizations. And that is the hard part. There are paper submission deadlines in Jan, Feb and Mar 2007 and I am waiting for the inspiration, the "Eureka!" moment, to start writing. Maybe that is the problem, maybe I should just start writing and the insights will come.
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