Research Summary Guidelines

Research Summaries are intended to make the findings of research presented in the academic volumes available in digest form to a wide audience comprised of academic researchers and persons outside the academy who may be doing research or who may be interested in particular or general questions about globalization and autonomy.

Compendium users are able to browse Research Summaries by a Table of Contents of the academic volumes and by topic area.

The intended audience for the Research Summaries is not synonymous with the audience for the academic volumes. The audience for the summaries is much wider and will include senior high school and undergraduate students along with educators, policy-makers, and the media.

Research Summaries are intended to be "stand-alone documents." By this term, we mean that the reader of the summaries will be able to learn about the nature of the research you have undertaken and your main findings without consulting the chapter in the academic volumes (or other publication). They should be written with the assumption that the reader may never consult the academic document in question.

The Compendium's Editors will ensure that it is clear to readers that a full presentation of your research can be found in the UBC Press volumes (or elsewhere).

There is no need to mention in the text of your summary that the research being described is published as part of the UBC Press series (or published elsewhere).

With this background in mind, Research Summaries should be written according to the following guidelines.

You should write in a language and style accessible to a broad and largely non-academic audience. The language should be at a Grade 12 reading level and adopt a non-academic tone. Academic jargon is to be avoided.
Using this kind of language, the summary should tell the reader:
- What are your research questions?
- Why are these questions important for understanding globalization and autonomy?
- What answers did you find to your questions?
- What did you learn?
- How do these findings relate to key globalization and autonomy issues?
- (Where appropriate) what are the implications of your findings?
If you need to use a key concept or reference a particular organization, event, place, or person and you think that a general audience may not be familiar with this aspect, you should provide a glossary article for it, if it does not already exist.
Do not provide us with what amounts to a narrative table of contents for your chapter. Writing constructs such as "this chapter examines..", "this chapter describes…" are not appropriate.
Keep the length of your summary to a maximum of 3-4 pages or about 1,000 to 1,500 words.
Research Summaries should contain no citations or accompanying list of Works Cited. Readers will be encouraged to consult the UBC Press publication if they are interested in a list of works cited in your chapter. Readers will be able to locate resources related to the topic of the research being summarized by searching the Compendium's bibliographic database. Key terms within the summaries will be linked to the glossary; most glossary entries include Suggested Readings.
You may suggest up to five keywords that describe the content of your summary.
Endnotes or footnotes are not permissible in Research Summaries.

Your task is thus not to prepare an abstract in the academic sense of your chapter but something closer to an executive summary that tells any interested reader what you have learned about globalization and autonomy.

Please send all correspondence related to submission of Research Summaries to the Compendium's Editors at: [email protected].