CW12 - Trolls just want to have fun

Master / Vertiefung Nailing your Thesis
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CW12 - Trolls just want to have fun
Hello guys,

I’ve just read the paper “trolls just want to have fun”, which we should do a written review of.
I have one small question - The form and structure that we have to fulfill in our project (e.g. related work + methodological approach) are not explicitly stated in that particular paper. Is that common for paper in the psychology field or is it just this paper?

Thank you!

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I don’t read many psychology papers to give you a definitive answer on what the conventions there are, but I can tell you for certain that they differ from software engineering research, for instance. This is the case for almost any field of research.

As we have talked about in class, there are arguments against pre-defined structures to be made. However when you are a member of a particular academic community and are used to the conventions of that field it can speed up the process of scanning a paper for relevance to your work significantly.

In any case, as with any convention they are not binding or even sensible in every single case, and it may make sense to deviate even if you know them and are used to papers being structured a certain way. In some cases it simply makes sense to discuss related work before your own research, sometimes it makes more sense to put it at the end, for example.

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As Andreas pointed out, customs vary.

Here, there may have been additional forces in play.

The paper is comparatively short (one reason why we chose it :wink: Publishers charge by page sometimes, in particular if journal issues will still be printed on paper. So they may have looked for ways to shorten things.

Also, you may have noticed that the introduction is heavy on references, so one could argue that related work has been merged into the introduction section.

The approach is part of the study sections and here I guess is assumed to be the same as always. If in a community there is clear consensus on how things are done, you may only point to it or a reference work and don’t explain it in detail.

Cheers, Dirk