Holcombe:Presenting

SUPA Sydney University Perception and Action Lab Primer editing help refcard

Poster making

• hp poster printer in psych IT area has roll paper width of 1065 mm
• VSS 2008: Posterboards are 4’ (121.92 cm) tall x 8’ (243.84 cm) wide

notes on making animated demos

Writing

see Phrases for grants and papers

Also see The University Of Manchester's phrasebook. It contains a number of phrases commonly used in scientific writing. "If you use these phrases in your writing, it will be boring, but generally more accepted by the scientific community" - Alex Holcombe PhD.

For paragraphs and for larger structures and maybe even sentences, these are great guidelines:

1. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.

2. Place in the stress position the "new information" you want the reader to emphasize.

3. Place the person or thing whose "story" a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.

4. Place appropriate "old information" (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.

5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.

6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.

7. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.

From "The Science of Scientific Writing". George Gopen, Judith Swan. November-December 1990 issue of American Scientist. The Science of Scientific Writing

Making Diagrams and Figures (not graphs)

Inkscape is a free open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

Example:

Alex uses Keynote for simple drawings, and even for posters with many drawings. Powerpoint is also a possibility. Both can be frustrating for precision drawing

The university has a site license for Adobe Illustrator. It comes with the Adobe CS5 suite which you can download from here. You'll need a staff unikey to proceed.

We shouldn't care about 2007 ISI impact factors

• Science 30
• Nature 26.7
• Nat Rev NEurosci 24.5
• BBS 17.462
• Nat Neurosci 15.7
• PLoS Biol 14.1
• Neuron 13.4
• Trends Neuro 12.5
• Current Biology 10.5
• PNAS 9.6
• TiCS 9.4
• Brain 8.6
• Psych Review 7.8
• J Neurosci 7.5
• JCN 5
• Proc Royal Society Biol 4.1
• Cogni Psych 4.0
• Cognition 3.8
• JoV 3.8
• J Neurophysiology 3.7
• JEP:HPP 2.6
• Vision Research 2.1
• Cogn Neuropsych 1.9
• Visual Cognition 1.7
• Perception 1.6
• Memory & Cognition 1.6
• Percept Psychophy 1.4
• QJEP 1.1
• Spatial Vision .94

See Eigenfactor for better rankings.