Keep an "eye" on the text: The Use of Self-mention in the Academic Writing of Experts

One of the most controversial inquiries in academic writing is whether it is admissible to use first person pronouns in a scientific paper or not. Many professors discourage their students from using them, rather favoring a more passive tone, and thus causing novices to avoid inserting themselves into their texts in an expert-like manner. Abundant research, however, has recently attested that negotiation of identity is plausible in academic prose, and there is no need for a paper to be void of an authorial identity. Because in the course of the English Studies Degree we have received opposing prompts in the use of I, the aim of this dissertation is to throw some light upon this vexed issue. To this end, I compiled a corpus of 16 Research Articles (RAs) that comprises two sub-corpora, one featuring Linguistics RAs and the other one Literature RAs, and each, in turn, consists of articles written by American and British authors. I then searched for real occurrences of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our and ours, and studied their frequency, rhetorical functions and distribution along each paper. The results obtained certainly show that academic writing is no longer the faceless prose that it used to be, for I is highly used in both disciplines and varieties of English. Concerning functions, the most typically used roles were the use of I to take credit for the writer’s research process, and also those involving plural forms. With respect to the spatial disposition, all sections welcomed first person pronouns, but the Method and the Results/Discussion sections seem to stimulate their appearance. On the basis of these findings, I suggest that an L2 writing pedagogy that is mindful not only of the language proficiency, but also of the students’ own identity may have a beneficial effect on the composition of their texts.

Intensive Program ERASMUS: TOPCART. Geometric Documentation of the Heritage (administrative and academic documentation)

[EN] This academic activity has been the origin of other work that are also located in this repository. The first one is the dataset of information about the geometry of the Monastery recorded during the two years of fieldwork, then some bachelor thesis and papers are listed:

Reflexiones sobre la puesta en valor del Monasterio de San Prudencio de Monte Laturce

[ES] Los datos de este registro provienen de la una actividad académica que también aparece descrita en el repositorio y desde donde se puede acceder a otros trabajos relacionados con el Monasterio:

Academic spin-offs incubation strategies: the case of the Andalusian region

[EN] The objective of this paper is to analyze the incubation strategies developed in the universities of Andalusia, a relatively low-income region of Spain, to promote the creation of university spin-offs. These strategies are also compared to the incubation models noted in the literature. The performance of the university spin-offs created and its relation to the incubation strategies developed by the university are also analysed. The analysis is based on data from a survey of nine public universities that carry out strategies for the promotion of university spin-offs. The result of the analysis shows that university spin-off incubation strategies in Andalusia present specific characteristics not covered by certain models that are well-known in the literature on innovation. Then, a new stage in the process of the university spin-off incubation is proposed. We consider it to be a pre-strategic stage to the academic spin-off incubation strategies. The analysis also finds certain environmental factors associated to those spin-offs promoted by Andalusian universities that achieve the highest level of performance. This result suggests that previous to making any decision involving investment into developing incubation strategies, universities should gauge whether they have sufficient resources and the possibilities of connecting with a Technology Park.

Mass spectrometry coupled to imaging techniques: The better the view the greater the challenge

These are definitively exciting times for membrane lipid researchers. Once considered just as the cell membrane building blocks, the important role these lipids play is steadily being acknowledged. The improvement occurred in mass spectrometry techniques (MS) allows the establishment of the precise lipid composition of biological extracts. However, to fully understand the biological function of each individual lipid species, we need to know its spatial distribution and dynamics. In the past 10 years, the field has experienced a profound revolution thanks to the development of MS-based techniques allowing lipid imaging (MSI). Images reveal and verify what many lipid researchers had already shown by different means, but none as convincing as an image: each cell type presents a specific lipid composition, which is highly sensitive to its physiological and pathological state. While these techniques will help to place membrane lipids in the position they deserve, they also open the black box containing all the unknown regulatory mechanisms accounting for such tailored lipid composition. Thus, these results urges to different disciplines to redefine their paradigm of study by including the complexity revealed by the MSI techniques.