Jativa 1

Freddy Jativa

Dr. Bookman Bita

ESL 10

6 November 2022

Comparative Analysis

In this paper, I am going to make a comparative analysis within the Genre of Academic

Research papers. As a student looking for achieving a Doctorate degree, it is important to

understand every single character in this area. This comparative analysis has the intention to

show some differences between a document written by a normal college student and a very

professional research paper that has an impact on the scientific world. For the purpose of this

document, I am going to use a paper written by Galen Weld et al in 202 named “Political Bias

and Factualness in News Sharing across more than 100,000 Online Communities” published by

the University of Washington. And the student work “Miles Apart: An Investigation into

Dedicated Online Communities’ Impact on Cultural Bias” was written by Kaile Chu in

November 2021.

Research papers are, historically, one of the most renowned written works in the

academic scene. This is nothing to be a surprised by since this genre has been written for many

centuries. This kind of research is also known as academic publishing since they are published in

academic journals, books, or theses. The first known publishing was “The Journal des sçavans”

later named Journal des savants. According to the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institution,

This Journal was written in 1665, in Europe. It contains legal reports and church history.

According to Jen Laloup, scientific journals, in their earliest days, used to show some dynamics.

One kind was the journals run by one person who was the one that had editorial control over the
 Jativa 2

contents. This was often simply the publishing of extracts from letters of another professional.

On the other hand, some journals employed a group decision-making process, this was the

closest process to modern peer review. Peer review practice became the standard in the 20th

century. This process is nothing else but the review of the written document by other scholars in

the field, this person must look for a high-quality job in order to merit publication. There are

some other academic research papers, not as formal as academic publishing. Those are written by

college students within different levels of scholarship (undergraduate, graduate, doctorate).

Both types of papers are written within the academic scene, but the situations are quite

different. Student papers are written in situations where the writer needs to show some of the

work done to their instructors and maybe some classmates. Whereas Academic publishing is

written to try to persuade the scientific community about a certain conclusion after very deep

research shown in the document. The participants may vary but, normally, readers are scientific

people and researchers looking for some information about the topic.

Since academic publishing is new scientific knowledge, it has the most complex content.

This type of written document has different sorts of information, usually, the statistic is present

from empirical experiments or surveys made by the authors. On the other hand, student papers

generally had information given by recognized institutions. For example, Kaile Chu in his text

uses information from a “Reddit” website, the author mention in the methodology that “The

online platform chosen for analysis for the purpose of this study is Reddit, one of the most

prominent social platforms among non-Chinese users but inaccessible to Chinese users. Reddit

was chosen for its exemplification of dedicated online communities through the segregation of

users into common-topic forums, or subreddits. Each subreddit lists a series of posts on its home

page in a top-down fashion, with sorting order determined by a filter of the viewer’s choosing:
 Jativa 3

“Hot,” “New,” or “Top” with a variety of time intervals”. On the other hand, Weld et al text uses

the same website information but make mathematical models to go beyond just show the data

that already exists. In its method description, they mention “This intuition can be formalized

using the Law of Total Variance, which states that total community variance is exactly the sum

of User Diversity (within-user variance) and Group Diversity (between-user variance): Var(Bc)

= E[Var(Bc|U)] + Var(E[Bc|U]) where Bc is a random variable representing the bias of a link

submitted to community c, and U is a random variable representing the user who submitted the

link. We compute user diversity and group diversity for each community. User diversity is given

by taking the mean of each user’s variance of bias, weighted by the number of labeled bias links

that the user submitted. Group diversity is given by taking the variance of each community

member’s mean user bias, again weighted by the number of labeled links. We then sum the user

and group diversity values to compute the overall community variance of political bias” where

you can see they explain more deeply how they use the information to get their conclusion.

In terms of structure, student papers usually are sort of extended essays where they have

at the top of the work the name of the author, instructor name, course number, and date. The

following part starts with the Title, an introductory paragraph, some explanatory paragraphs

within which authors explain their work, and a conclusion paragraph. On the other hand,

Academic Publishing Starts with the Title and the name of the author or authors. It also has an

abstract that summarizes the main idea of the work, and an introduction that could be more than

one paragraph. It also has a methodology section, where the authors show how they are going to

use the information that they recollected. Finally, they present some results, and implications and

lead to a conclusion given the results. Both types include a work cited section.
 Jativa 4

The format is different in both types of writing. Academic Publishing could adapt its

format to the journal in which the paper is going to be published. On the other hand, Student

papers are usually driven by MLA or APA format. For example, in the case of the study, Chu

uses MLA where it must use double-spacing throughout the entire paper and leave one-inch

margins on each side including the top and bottom. Indent the first line of each paragraph half an

inch from the left margin. It uses Times New Roman font size 12-point.

To conclude, even though the papers are written in the same scene and are technically the

same genre, they have significant differences given the participants of the situation. The main

difference lies in the purpose of the work, academic publishing has a scientific goal, whereas

student papers have the necessity to accomplish a summary of given information.

 Jativa 5

Works Cited

Chu 1 Kaile Chu Perspectives on the Humanities. 21 Nov. 2021,

https://d1oemxqau9vshd.cloudfront.net/app/uploads/sites/6/2022/05/Chu_Digital-

Cultural-Bias.pdf.

Galen Weld, et al. “Political Bias and Factualness in News Sharing Across More Than 100,000

Online Communities.” International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, vol. 15,

May 2021, pp. 796–807. dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/icwsm/icwsm2021.html#WeldGA21.

Podcast, Jen Laloup in, and Jen Laloup. “The History of Scientific Publishing: An Interview

with Aileen Fyfe.” PLOScast, 21 Apr. 2016,

https://web.archive.org/web/20171108035849/http://blogs.plos.org/plospodcasts/

2016/04/18/the-history-of-scientific-publishing-an-interview-with-aileen-fyfe/.