Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. Alas, not all abstracts succeed.
To mark the 80th anniversary of the first transport to Theresienstadt on 24 November 1941, scholar Anna Hájková explores the social relations that formed within Nazi camps.
“The disc charts cannot stand many girls, no matter how gorgeous they look,” claimed Beatles manager Brian Epstein in A Cellarful of Noise, his memoir of the 1960s. He was explaining why he’d only ever represented one female performer—Cilla Black. His justification falls back on the then-conventional wisdom that girl singers were an anomaly, were each other’s competitors, and that there wasn’t an audience for their work.
From the beginning, Tommy Tune was pulled as if by centrifugal force toward dance and the Broadway musical. He was taking dancing lessons by the age of five, but his early ambition to be a ballet dancer was abandoned when he shot up in height during his teenage years. He later joked about his extreme height, saying, “Sometimes, instead of thinking of myself as six-foot-six, I tell myself I’m only five-foot-eighteen.”
[Reading list] Fake, false, inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive. This rhetoric is all too familiar to the news consuming public today. But what is fake news and how does it differ from misinformation and disinformation?
America’s World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that’s the story many Americans have long told themselves… But the reality is starkly different. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle […]
Once assumed to be a core research tool, many of today’s researchers have cast a skeptical eye on depth interviewing. These critiques reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about what depth interviews can accomplish.
Usually considered as the first French Symbolist painter, Moreau rejected the dominant artistic trends of his time in order to explore his own anxieties and longings by returning to the Greek myths.
In the fall of 1999, another action movie came and went, garnering disappointed reviews and a pittance in ticket sales. Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel “Eaters of the Dead”, The 13th Warrior offered a surprising premise.
Innovations in open research can help to address disinformation, making a wider range of information accessible and available, ensuring reproducibility, and facilitating reuse.
Open research may be the route to surfacing a definitional framework for the monograph in SHAPE disciplines. Director of Open Access, Academic, at OUP Andy Redman explores why in this blog post:
As a mission-driven university press, we strongly support the opening up of research and the benefits for access and inclusion that OA brings. We want to ensure that the transition towards open research is an inclusive process—to use the title of OA week, “it matters how we open knowledge.”
From its origins as an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest, over time Halloween has evolved into a day of trick-or-treating, scary films, costumes, and carving pumpkins.
Why do breakdowns in research teams occur? Often, it is due to a failure by all the team members to communicate clearly, honestly, and respectfully about the goals of the team and each individual, as well as expectations and understanding of responsible research conduct.
Symptoms of the looming climate crisis abound: 50-year extreme heat events happening every year, melting of polar ice sheets, forest fires that encircle the globe, tropical cyclones of greater size, intensity and, as was very evident in Ida’s recent visit to New York, unprecedented levels of precipitation.
So many fragments of manuscripts exist that a new term—Fragmentology—has recently been applied to the study of these parts and parcels. Librarians, archivists and academics are paying more attention to what can be learned about textual culture from a folio cut, say, from a twelfth-century manuscript and later used by a binder to line the oak boards of a fifteenth-century book.