Perspectives and Perceptions on Academic Writing and Citations

The current book Perspectives and Perceptions on Academic Writing and Citations is consisted of three parts. All the three parts are distinct in their nature and type of chapters included therein. The first part involves a brief introduction about academic writing and citations and various perspectives and perceptions regarding this. The author introduces about academic writing and tries to throw light upon the main features which makes it different from simple and layman’s writing. This includes not only what, why and how of academic writing but also what is the possible international code of conduct and ethics while creating an academic writing. The chapter is highly enriched to create a sense of academic writing and paves the way for creating it logically and rationally. The author then gives an eagle’s eye on perspectives and perceptions about academic writing by people associated with various different sorts of organizations. These academicians belong to Commonwealth, NCERT, Open University, Central University and Private University. The second part consists of the chapters by various academicians that witness their perspectives and perceptions about academic writing and citations. There are chapters which are written by academics with long teaching, learning and writing experience belonging to different sectors of academic field. When going through these chapters, readers will have a glance of what academics from the country think about academic writing and citations and will get further insight about what is and what should be there pertaining to this field. The third part of this book shares an empirical study especially meant for the current assignment. The chapter shares an opinionnaire, which was developed on academic writing and citations. It was sent to those who are or were involved in any sort of academic writing. The author analyses the data to discuss various issues pertaining to writing ethics, academic writing, citations and styles. This part does not evaluate the knowledge of those who attempted this opinionnaire but tries to throw light upon some critical issues pertaining to academic writing and citations drawn from the data. The chapter reveals that academics have different sort of opinions pertaining to even those issues which, one would think, can be generalized easily to be uniform in nature. The book became the need of the hour as most of the new authors who are writing papers, articles, etc. are lacking in proper knowledge of academic writing and citations. Even the basic concepts of academic writing and citations are absent in their writing and this has more enhanced by the flood of so-called international/national journals who claim to publish the paper within a day or a week without even looking at the write-up and just by charging a huge amount of money. Hence, people are blindly publishing anything in such journals and publications which are publishing blindly anything due to lack of basic knowledge even among their so-called editors and reviewers. I fact, some of such editors or reviewers form a group, contact some reputed academicians, make them the patron, etc., become self-declared editors and sub-editors, though may not knowing to write even a single page correctly. They call reputed people in some seminars, conferences, etc., pay them some good amount of money and become editor of so-called international/national journals. Due to easy publication in such flooded online international / national journals, new authors don’t want to even learn basics of academic writing and citations. And, this has been one of the basic reasons for carrying out this book. The book is a boon for all students, researchers, authors, teachers, teacher educators, publishers, proof readers and academic writers. It is a must read for all the people related, in one way or the other, to academic writing and citations.