Writing book must be last choice after having accumulated all the experience while planning , executing and finalising a series of recommendations through various assignments. So begin with writing research articles over the years , gain some infield experience and then after putting up some good number of years , think of planning to write a book incorporating your all experiences ..
Writing book must be last choice after having accumulated all the experience while planning , executing and finalising a series of recommendations through various assignments. So begin with writing research articles over the years , gain some infield experience and then after putting up some good number of years , think of planning to write a book incorporating your all experiences ..
I totally with Professor A. K. Srivastava writing books better after you have a full accumulative knowledge, but, in some cases when your work in teaching besides you doing research, you can develop and improve your lecture note to put in a book format.
Dear Maryam
While I assume that writing a book is a long and difficult process, I am hoping that this will also help any one to write articles for publication in journals/conference proceedings as a side outlet.
My rationale is that some of the ideas in each of the book chapters can itself be published as article in the journals/conferences, while the book is getting shape, given that the topic of the book is hot.
Science is a giant and it progresses by the work of the many midgets, like us. Scientific progress is about making formulae, equations and calculations work; the opposite of science is not practice, but theory. The most important is an effective discourse community, with the exchange of structured ideas and written articles. The book has to be considered as a report of all these activities, marking a new crossroad of research.
Yes, if possible writing a book could be more productive. However, this is largely depending on the level of knowledge you have generated through research (primary and secondary data). If sufficient knowledge has been generated and tested, you could go for a book. Meantime, most important here is the level of generating and sharing knowledge with wider audience for the benefits of many. Therefore, writing scientific articles initially and once satisfied with the knowledge, going for a book is more useful.
The recent generation in research world is articles generation. Article takes shorter time to complete it as it focus on a certain idea (one contribution/survey), as well as most of the researchers nowadays are interested with reading articles and use them as references more than books which take long time to read it due to big size of the contents. However, as the book need many contributions to be achieved, this make it more valuable than articles.
I think the book is more useful for undergraduate students because they are not still ready to understand the very specialized topics.
Therefore, sometimes scholars must sacrifice and write books! :)
Although articles generate more reputation, I think that books are still needed. Complicated topics could be better described in a book. Articles need to cite other articles or books in order to be a complete piece of information (and one need to read at least some of the listed literature to understand the article). Citations in books are useful for further reading but not essential to understand the content of the book.
Therefore, I think scientists should write books as well as articles because they fulfil different tasks:
Books are needed to get a broad knowledge about a topic.
Articles are a good source for specialization within a topic.
Best Regards
Andreas
Both serves different purpose. Books are written in simple format to fit its readership while articles are meant to convey certain experimental information while consulting current literatures.
In a dynamic world, the relevance of an article or a book on certain topics in the social science area will last for a short period only. If you want to publish any thing ( a book or article) do it immediately before it loses its importance.
Unfortunately, writing a scientific book in Croatia on not appritiated a lot, but without sciientific books tjere are no good scientific articles.
Thanks Dr Mohammad. Book is surely far more authoritative than research articles .But these research articles are the very basis of writing books. Now days books are mushrooming like anything. A book should be written by an experienced person who carries good experience with excellent past credentials ..
Hello,
Generally speaking, the traditional saying on the need for publication by the professors in intellectual/ academic circles has made us all believe in " publish or perish" prophecy. However, writing a book is, comparatively speaking, more worthwhile than writing an article simply because it is more difficult for us to write a book than prepare an article.
Best regards,
R. biria
Bigger question is , who writes the book.Many times, you will see a book written by a person , who never worked on that topic...
Since this question generate very useful information, it is better if some expert could conduct a survey to find out actual senario. Finally, what is important is the views of information users than those who writes. In my RG account I have uploaded both books and articls, there is one book which has read more than 20 times of a article when compared with my own account. But again I understand this is depend on the subject, topic etc.
No, I prefer writing an article on science progress. Regards
Your question is really good. Well, as above many researchers' stand with book and especially younger stand with articles. Actually the requirements for both are high and time taken but for book required bulky and correct knowledge of specific field or subject and that includes hundreds of articles.
Interesting discussion in progress. In fact, articles and books have different class of clientele. Writing research articles will always keep you updated with latest research in that field. While , writing books will not be easy to keep that pace with research what assumes globally.
Writing article was more useful as i think because it keep us update with the developing science in our field . Writing book take a lot of time from us and its writing depend on what we published of researchs and articles.
Isn't it curious that we are writing and discussing about books and papers using a non-paper (i.e.: electronic / digital) platform like RG? Discussions about so-called paperless society are very old indeed, going back to the 70es of the previous century, i.e. at least 50 years ago.
OK, society is moving at a very modest, not to say slow speed (see a famous citation of Edsger W. Dijkstra on the upper bound on changes you may expect in real life).
But what about science and the scientific community? How comes that the scientific community is sometimes so slow to adopt - at least experimentally - new ways of communication and sharing, while at the same time literally embracing technologies with a very low impact on intellectual capital at all (you certainly know what I mean, don't you)?
I don't have an answer ...
Never attempt a book prematurely, it's like a someone's life time achievement.Many times , we see a book authored by a person who has hardly worked in that field. There is no meaning of such books...
I do agree with Dr. A.K. Srivastava. In addition to that I want to say that article will reach to broad readers but scientific books usually read by students n researchers of that targeted area only. So I think writing article is more effective. N writing a book is not a easy task ..... for writing an effective n truely original scientific book u hv to write on 100s of research items on that particular domain n hv to go through 1000s of research publications for ur references..... unless u hv a depth of knowledge on a subject mater u shd nt try to write a book. N the knowledge gradually grow depth by continuous reading research n experience on that particular domain.
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