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Book review: Writing Your Psychology Research Paper

by Geoff Hart

Baldwin, S.A. 2018. Writing Your Psychology Research Paper. American Psychological Association. [ISBN 978-1-4338-2707-5. 134 pages, including index. US$29.95 (softcover).]

Previously published as: Previously published as: Hart, G. 2021. Book review: Writing Your Psychology Research Paper. Technical Communication 68(1):106-107.

Despite the title and the contents of other books in this series, Writing Your Psychology Research Paper focuses on writing classroom papers based on library research, not empirical research, and is most suitable for undergraduates. Though it can support empirical research writing, better books are available for that purpose.

Scott Baldwin begins (Chapter 1) by describing how brainstorming helps writers to choose a topic and narrow the focus until that topic has a manageable scope. Chapter 2 provides a good overview of literature searches, though it’s no substitute for the fuller treatment in Susanne Hempel’s book, which I reviewed in Technical Communication 67(2). Baldwin provides good advice on search keywords, but reminds us of the continuing importance of librarians and libraries in this age of Internet searches and of the need to assess information quality, based on both the quality hierarchy (peer-reviewed journals at the top) and critical judgment, such as scrutinizing research methods. Even good journals sometimes publish questionable papers. Chapter 6 complements this chapter by clarifying when citations are necessary, how to avoid unintended plagiarism, and how to use software like Zotero to manage references.

Chapter 3 carefully distinguishes a topic (the subject) from a thesis (opinions on that topic), and illustrates how a thesis emerges from synthesizing the literature review and how a paper emerges from organizing the results to support the thesis. One useful trick: to summarize each chosen paper based on what the authors did, how they did it, what they found, and the paper’s limitations, including both limitations the authors report and limitations you identify through critical reading.

Although Chapter 3 emphasizes the importance of an outline for organizing thoughts and facilitating writing, it doesn’t describe the highly iterative process of outline development, with rigorous evaluation followed by revision to improve the outline’s effectiveness. Most outlines must be revised repeatedly to support efficient writing. The example outline Baldwin provides is too general. Though it goes beyond a simple list of headings, it relies on questions rather than statements of what will actually be said. Thus, it illustrates an early step in outline development, not the final outline that should be created before beginning to write.

Chapter 4 ties the outline to a typical scientific paper’s structure and uses the effective analyze–evaluate–compare–synthesize approach to writing. Chapter 5 describes the revision process, based on well-known principles such as presenting one topic per paragraph, but doesn’t sufficiently emphasize the iterative nature of revision. Baldwin ends with an insightful and helpful discussion of how to fight procrastination.

Writing Your Psychology Research Paper provides a solid foundation for learning to write classroom papers, accompanied by many clear examples that illustrate the principles. It will also provide a solid foundation for learning to write more demanding peer-reviewed papers.