Abstract
Despite calls for more research into the writing expertise of senior scientists, the literature reveals surprisingly little about the writing strategies of successful scientist writers. The present paper addresses the gap in the literature by reporting a study that investigated the note-taking strategies of an expert writer, a Chinese professor of biochemistry. Primarily based on interview data, the paper describes the expert’s recontextualization (Linell, Text 18:143–157, 1998) strategies at three levels: ‘accumulating writing materials’ by modifying source texts, composing from ‘collections’ of cut-and-pasted chunks in drafting a review article, and adopting reusable citations in sources as a ‘map’. It is emphasized that through repeatedly revising his paper in light of his rhetorical intentions in a new context of meaning, the expert writer would maximally recontextualize the source-based text segments and citations in the paper, averting transgressive intertextuality (Chandrasoma et al., J Lang Identity Educ 3:171–193, 2004) as a result. The paper ends by highlighting the pedagogical implications of the study for English for Professional Academic Purposes (EPAP).
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Notes
This seems quite unusual. But I could see from samples of his English texts (e.g., email exchanges with me) at that time that his English was at a high level of proficiency. In addition, during his doctoral years he also published a scholarly paper in a prestigious Chinese journal of philosophy, which, together with his independently writing three publishable research articles in English upon graduation from the PhD program, might serve as an indication of a strong talent in academic writing and a potential in further strengthening his expertise in the undertaking.
In terms of the impact factor (IF) (Garfield 2006), 8 of the 32 articles were published in journals with an IF above 5.0, 13 in journals with IFs of 3.0–5.0. The target journals of the 32 articles have an average IF of 4.658, with the highest IF being 30.181 (a journal of review articles). In terms of the citation rate, by the end of 2013 the 32 articles had received about 570 citations, including over 510 citations by others (as opposed to self-citations). The dominance of quantitative measures such as impact factors and citation rates in research evaluation has been widely criticized (e.g., Whitehouse 2001; Winchester 2013); yet the measures remain influential, especially in natural science disciplines while at the same time increasingly being adopted in social science disciplines.
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The support and cooperation of the anonymous participant has made the study reported in this paper possible. The insightful and constructive feedback from the readers of the previous versions of the paper has been invaluable.
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Li, Y. ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Recontextualization in Writing from Sources. Sci Eng Ethics 21, 1297–1314 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9590-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9590-4