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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Monthly Archives: May 2017


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What works for you? The choice of titles for academic articles in higher education

By James Hartley

The range of possible forms of titles available to authors in higher education is considerable, but few styles are actually used. An analysis of over 250 titles shows that authors employ colons most, short sentences next, and questions least of all. In Academic Writing and Publishing (Hartley, 2008) I distinguished between thirteen types of titles used in academic articles and I provided examples for each one (see Appendix). But disciplines vary and some types of titles are more common than others in different subjects.

In this note I report on the types of titles used in 260 articles on research in higher education published in the SRHE’s Research into Higher Education Abstracts, Vol 50, No. 1, 2017. I categorised these titles into three groupings as follows:

1. The most popular format: the colon (60%)
a) Title with colon (short: long) N = 73
Example: Divergent pathways: the road to higher education for second-generation Turks in Austria.
b) Title with colon (long: short) N = 47
Example: The influence of curricula content on English sociology students’ transformations: the case of feminist knowledge.
c) Title with colon (equal: equal) N = 30
Example: Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria.

2. The next most popular format: the single sentence (30 %) Continue reading →

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Academic freedom and freedom of speech

By Rob Cuthbert

In universities worldwide the debate about academic freedom and free speech continues, which is just as it should be. Meanwhile journalists in the popular press seem to have decided that political correctness and the ‘snowflake generation’ have made it impossible for anyone to debate anything in universities any more. But for those journalists, ‘research’ usually consists of looking at other journalists’ opinion pieces and referring to an alleged ‘free speech’ ranking from Spiked. This greatly exercised Registrarism’s Paul Greatrix, whose vituperative blog on 16 February 2017 said that as usual the new ranking was “sure to grab the headlines as examples of shocking repression in the higher education sector are paraded in the quality press”. As if to prove his point, a report from the Adam Smith Institute on alleged left-wing bias in academia was attacked by Aidan Byrne (aka Plashing Vole), aiming to debunk what he called this sinister new addition to the debate. The report was called Lackademia, though the URL was blunter: it read “Left Wing Bias Paper”.

Beyond the mass media there is a more informed debate. A faculty committee at the University of Minnesota Continue reading →

Paul Temple


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Steering Column

By Paul Temple

The SRHE Blog hasn’t featured a motoring column before – and actually it’s a bit late to start: if you’ve recently bought a new-ish car, it may well be your last one. That’s because the car makers and the big tech companies are betting the farm on driverless (“autonomous”) cars being the future of road travel – not in some “weekend breaks on Mars”-type sci-fi scenario, but in the next couple of years. At the end of February, an autonomous Nissan Leaf drove six miles around East London, including negotiating a roundabout on the A13 that scares me. It’s generally assumed that these cars mostly won’t be owned by individuals, but will be driverless taxis, summoned to your door (at least, in towns). Most new cars are already at or near what the industry calls “Level 3”, with sensors for parking, automatic braking, lane guidance and so on; “Level 4” cars will add all this to artificial intelligence and so do away with the human driver. The computer won’t make the stupid mistakes that all human drivers do – so one effect that’s already been noted will be the “nice to have” problem of a reduction in the number of transplant organs available.

It’s the combination of the scale and the imminence of this revolution that makes it so interesting social scientifically: this won’t be a gradual evolution, but a big bang – one year, cars like we’ve always known them; a year or two later, a transformation. Like an avalanche, unnoticed high up on the mountain, it is about to sweep down. (Look at one of the many blogs on this, such as “Connected Cars”, to get a sense of how fast things are moving.)

Why should this be of interest to higher education researchers? Continue reading →