I’m beginning to draft my first article for the semester and have almost finished researching primary articles. Continuing with my last blog, I am still surprised about the level of collaboration in scientific writing. Though I focused on peer reviews last time, I noticed while researching articles that some are written collaboratively. In the humanities, collaborative approaches to writing are usually ill-considered. There are many concerns of plagiarism or unoriginality that develop whenever collaboration in such a capacity is mentioned. Yet, in the sciences, collaboration often lends a greater degree of credibility to the research. Featuring many separate researchers with differing specializations can result in discoveries that might otherwise be unavailable without interdisciplinary methods. I’ve been wondering if such an approach might be beneficial in the humanities. For a field that considers itself a place of intersectionality, there is a surprising level of individualism in the higher degrees of scholarship. When analyzing similar articles in English, there is usually only one author and attempts to encourage more have been met with criticism.
I am also interested in the scientific field’s citation habits. Where the humanities are concerned with citing ideas and representing the original author, the sciences seem to have a lessened reliance on the author. Review articles frequently cite multiple studies per sentence without mentioning or quoting who conducted the experiment. One article I’ve been reading titled Challenges in achieving an economically sustainable aquaponic system: a review features some pages that contain up to twenty-five separate sources. As I continue writing and researching, I’ll be interested to find what other ways these genres of writing differ from one another.
Building Bridges 