For service researchers, contributing to academic advancement through academic publications is a raison d’être. Moreover, demand is increasing for service researchers to make a difference beyond academia. Thus, service researchers face the formidable challenge of writing in a manner that resonates with not just service academics but also practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders.

This session is targeted at Doctoral students and Early Career Researchers. These groups often receive limited training in academic writing and therefore learn competent writing from well-cited published articles. Ultimately, they mimic the writing style of articles they read. Adopting the academic style of extant articles may improve a manuscript’s alignment with what is assumed to be acceptable for academic readers. However, limited knowledge of writing research for broader audiences still hinders these researchers from producing articles that the public find engaging.

In this interactive special session, I will explain how service research articles’ lexical variations might influence their academic citations and public media coverage. Specifically, I will outline how variations in intensity, immediacy, and diversity relate to article impact. Interactive activities will be interspersed throughout the session which illustrate lexical variation in action, using a variety of excerpts from exemplar Journal of Service Research articles. In addition, I will summarize how the appropriate use of these lexical variants and other stylistic conventions depends on the audience (academic or the public), the subsection of this article in which they appear (e.g., introduction, implications), and article innovativeness.

In the second segment of this special session, participants will be offered an actionable “how-to” guide for ways to increase article impacts in relation to the academic and public audience. By way of directed discussion, they will explore how these recommendations apply to their own work.

The final segment of the workshop will open the floor for a question-and-answer session and will conclude with a discussion of further writing skills service researchers need to master to advance article impact.

This session translates the published study “Writing for Impact in Service Research” (Gonsalves et al. 2021) into a practical workshop to enhance research practice and future article impact in Service Research.


Reference
Gonsalves, C., Ludwig, S., de Ruyter, K. and Humphreys, A., 2021. Writing for Impact in Service Research. Journal of Service Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/10946705211024732