5.6- Introduction practice

In this next module we’re going to do an active practice exercise about what you just learned about introduction sections. This is the introduction section from an article in the BMJ Christmas Issue, which is a humor issue. But it makes a good example. I want you to read the introduction and identify which sentences give the what’s known or background, which sentences give the what’s unknown, and which sentences refers to this specific study. So go through and figure that out, and when you are done, restart the video and I will walk you through it. Okay, so hopefully this one was fairly straightforward. In the very first two paragraphs and just the beginning of the third paragraph we get a lot of background information, we get the what’s known. So we’re told a lot about popular medical talk shows, the background there. Hopefully you identified all of those as what’s known. There are two places, two sentences where we get the what’s unknown. We get, the quality of information outside of the news media has not been examined, so this has not been well studied. And in the third paragraph, However, no research has systematically examined the content of the medical information provided on these talk shows. Nobody has done a study like this before, systematically evaluating those talk shows. All right, finally the last sentence gives us the aims of this study. They say, Our object was to review the most popular medical talk shows on television, to (1) determine the type of recommendations and claims given and the details provided, and (2) search for and evaluate the evidence behind these recommendations. It’s clear that this study is filling in a gap, because nobody has ever looked at this research question before. So hopefully that one was fairly straightforward. Now we’re going to do our second exercise. This was a study on self-citation. The authors wanted to know if men cite their own papers, self-cite more than women. And I want you to do the same thing as we did in the last exercise, I want you to identify the sentences that give the known, the unknown and then those that are pertinent to this study. So now pause the video and complete the exercise and then restart the video. All right, hopefully you’ve got that most of the, the first three paragraphs are giving a lot of back ground. We learned that self-citation is an important question. They tell us why this matters, we need some background on that to explain that citations counts are an important part of promotion in an academic career. And so if men are self-promoting more effectively than women, perhaps that contributes to the gender disparity we see in faculty hiring and promotion. Then in that third paragraph we get the previous literature. So we’re told that there was a 2013 paper that looked just at citations in general, not at self-citations, and that one did find a gender difference. Men’s papers in general are cited more than women’s. And then there was one previous paper from 2013 that looked specifically at self-citation, and they did find a gender difference. They found that men self-cited 1.5 times more than women. But here let’s move to what’s unknown. There’s just a one sentence statement of what’s unknown here. The problem is there have been few studies on this, right? We only have one that specifically looked at self-citation and gender. And that one study that looked at self-citation and gender looked at only a few disciplines in a relatively small number of papers. So this hasn’t been look at broadly. And then finally, hopefully you were able to identify the last two sentences as those pertinent to what this specific study is going to do. Here we examine gender differences in self-citations across 24 broad academic fields with hundreds of subfields and several million scholarly papers with over a million self-citations. So they’re going to fill in the gap of the previous literature by doing a much larger, much broader study. And they’re also going to look at one other thing, which is how the gender gap has changed over time.