Scholarly Communication No. 5

Listen to this interview of Sascha Fahl, Professor for Computer Science and Head of the Chair for Usable Security and Privacy at CISPA, the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, in Saarbrücken, Germany. We talk here about replicable methods, about critical reading, and about the necessity of a network to your research.

Sascha Fahl : "I myself practise — and encourage my PhDs to practise it too — the zero-draft writing approach. This is the approach of writing early, writing often. Because it's just absolutely important to accept that what you initially write down is not what's going to be submitted and definitely not what will be in the camera-ready version of the paper. So I encourage the researchers in my group to put text into a manuscript very early on and to write sections which can be written before all the results are in. And then it's just about revising the text multiple times, as it grows and as the project advances. Because we want to make sure that the argumentation is good, that the research questions are good, that the results actually address the research questions, that the discussion really fits well together with the results, and all that stuff. So the approach I promote is write early, write often, and also revise a lot."

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