2: What does a research journal look like?
What a research journal looks like depends on what, when and how you want to record your entries. This chapter should therefore stand alongside or after Chapters 3, 4 and 5. However, this chapter stands early in the book because most often our first thought relating to maintaining a research journal is to choose the right tools, and thus, to buy the right journal.
This assumption about the right research journal points to an important myth, namely that there is the research journal. In reality, we rarely get to see each other’s research journals, but when we do, our misconceptions may be skewed further. I myself have attended conferences or workshops where I ended up sitting next to the person with the research journal: a perfect, pristine, beautiful, well-organised, hand-paginated book with cross-references and annotations, containing key words and search terms along with an index, and all in perfect cursive handwriting. My own scribbles across several loose, unnumbered pages not only pale in comparison, but become a source of deep embarrassment, guilt and envy in those moments. What I have learned over the years is that for many academics the research journal they bring to conferences or workshops is not their only one, and that their other research journals look quite different.
Reading through research reports, journal articles and other publications relating to research processes, we are consistently confronted with outputs that claim excellence, originality, perfection and success. As researchers we all know that research is messy, chaotic, untidy, disorderly. Yet publications hardly ever account for this nature of research.
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