What? You mean the non-peer-reviewed pre-prints? But this is a fast-moving situation. There hasn't been enough time for peer review on some of these things.
Well, to be quite honest, either way, I am happy to provide some entertainment in these trying times.
Many of us are locked indoors and basically going stir-crazy, so a little fun and diversion never hurt.
Your fundamental mistake is that you assume I lack self-awareness and do not realize both that I am a clown, and that clowns provide a valuable service.
Picture a version of Chris-chan who is just dimly self-aware enough to stew in perpetual torment, as in Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. You would only begin to scratch the surface of what it's like to actually be me.
This.... is like teaching Chinese postgrads, and whoever handles induction for freshmen at your college should be assblasted for failing to insist on a mandatory course on citations and academic writing. That’s their fault, not yours. I will lead you through the basics and then you can Google-fu yourself a few basic guides from other colleges to keep as a reference.
It is setting students up to fail to assume that they all know how to write an academic paper, and it annoys me when institutions take your money and don’t give you the skills you need to succeed.
The first thing every academic paper has is a thesis. Yes, even your first year essays. If you approach your work from the beginning of your academic career correctly, the skills will quickly become second nature. All a thesis is, really, is a sentence or two outlining the proposition that your paper intends to prove (or disprove, but the negative thesis is best avoided in humanities if you can).
You then arrange about three to five main strands of argument that will support your thesis. You will discuss each of these in a seperate sub heading, or chapter. It isnt that important how you divide them, but as your reader I should be able to easily distinguish one argument from another. As you discuss each one, you should also pick up the major arguments against it, the major known issues with the analysis, and any areas of doubt/lack of info, and deal with each one. You aim to rebut any material that says “your argument is wrong”, and you aim to illustrate what information is missing and how it may be gathered in response to material that says “you just don’t have enough evidence to support this argument”.
If there seems to be a shitload of material that says you are wrong or that there’s no information to support your argument and you are just pulling it out of your ass, this is a strong signal to sit down, go back carefully through all the material you have, and reconsider your assumptions and the conclusions you’ve drawn from those. It’s absolutely fine to be wrong. But if you submit wrong stuff to me, I have to mark you accordingly. It’s fine to take a couple of hours to recheck your thinking.
Now, in order to support each of your arguments, you need academic work. (In medical sciences, you will need data unless you’re doing a Cochrane review. I haven’t written a science paper since high school, so I will leave it to the better educated than me in this thread to talk you through data handling skills.) You need what a much missed professor of mine used to call in fruity tones “ssscholarly aaaaarticles”. Some sources, as we all remember from our first ever history lesson at school, are better than others. This is because they are written by people who are more authoritative in the field; they were published in a leading journal that has stricter peer review standards; the authors don’t have obvious or declared notable conflicts of interest; the paper emits from academics appointed to a prestigious institution. These on their own are not infallible and none on their own will be enough. It is however true to say that the better ‘score’ an article gets by these metrics, the less complete bullshit it is likely to be compared to the work of I.M. Clown self published on his Wordpress site.
More and more journals are going open source or digitising. This is marvellous because it’s a real pain in the ass to go to the library, and your friends will distract you if they show up there too. But I will check your sources when I mark your work. I will without fail check any source I am not already academically familiar with, and if it smells like shit, I will feed back that the source was not compelling enough to support your argument. This is not “academik boolying“, this is my actual job. Not all sources are equally good. Quite a lot of shit gets vanity published, and a thing you need to know is which journals are the vanity journals in your field, and avoid ever relying on them. (Also don‘t submit your work to them for publication, it makes you look like a spastic who couldn‘t get published anywhere else).
You should refer to specific parts of the sources that support your argument. Don’t just throw a footnote in or say “As Chandler argues, blah blah blah”. Because then I will go and read Chandler like a Pharisee to see if they supoort your argument, and if they don’t I will be pissed at your laziness and your attempt to smokescreen me with a source that doesn’t support your argument, and I will take my feelings out on your grade. In fact I am required to ding you for that shit.
Once you have written all this shit up, you have to write a conclusion about whether or not the stuff you just wrote supports your thesis. If it doesn’t you better have a damn good reason why and be able to analyse why not.
The last thing you write is your introduction, because that tells me what you are you going to tell me in the rest of the paper, so it’s easiest to write this last because by then, you know what’s actually in the paper.
So, in recap, the first thing you need in your corona epic is a thesis. I think from all I have read of your train of thought, the thesis you are trying to prove is that coof is a neurotrophic virus. So focus on that and sources that prove that, and the individual strands of argument that will support that. Don’t fire hose links and tweets (you have to be ultra careful using fucking tweets as a source, okay?) without explaining how they supoort your thesis. Don’t get sidetracked.
You are familiar with popular science books. Try and aim for that informational but readily digestible tone in your writing.
Good luck with reworking your document. I’m interested to see the finished product.
www.medievality.com
