USER-FRIENDLY REPORTING OF RESEARCH FINDINGS FROM A QUESTIONNAIRE

Abstract

Hooray! You have succeeded in publishing an article based on your own, yet unpublished questionnaire. This can certainly be regarded as a personal success. However, many articles based on questionnaires are not particularly reader-friendly. I am sure that these authors are not being deliberately evil; however, in their path to fame, they forget that their writing is not a secret diary but something that should communicate readily with the reader. An enormous number of research articles in the field of education are published on a daily basis, many of them based on the application of questionnaires as research instruments. In early October 2017, a quick search of Thomson Reuters Web of Science database using the search term “education*” yielded 849,962 hits, mainly, but not exclusively listed in the following databases and categories: Science Citation Index Expanded - Education, Scientific Disciplines (40 hits) and Social Sciences Citation Index - Education & Educational Research (235 hits), Education, Special (40 hits) Psychology, Educational (53 hits). A similar search in Elsevier's Scopus database yielded 1,900,897 hits, from 1017 journals listed in the SNIP database. Google Scholar, a search engine not protected by subscription, as is the case with academic databases, produced 5,370,000 hits for education and 4,130,000 for questionnaire. These numbers (leaving aside sources not listed in established databases, books, conference proceedings, grey-papers, duplicate titles listed in different databases and so on--just to illustrate that the number of papers is indeed huge) far exceed the range that could possibly be read by any single living person. In addition, if someone is inspired to read your particular paper, then you should think of this person as a friend, and it is not polite to be rough with friends.