Tuesday, March 27, 2012

First Quarter 2012 Issue of the Transactions on Professional Communication Now Available

The first quarter 2012 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication is now available for reading online.

Below are the abstracts of the articles.  
Note:  As was mentioned earlier to the membership of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, although we will publish new issues of the Transactions, each quarter as we always have, starting in 2012, we only print those issues semi-annually.   
So the March issue will be printed with the June issue.  The shipment in June is a double issue.  Similarly, the September issue will be printed with the December issue and that issue, too, is a double issue.  
So the March issue is available online now through the IEEExplore.  The March and June issues will be printed and shipped in June.   
To see the complete article, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=47.  (Note: Only free to members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (get your login from IEEE) and to those entering through university libraries with a subscription to IEEExplore.)
Volume 55, Issue 1

Research Article:  Exploring Think-Alouds in Usability Testing: An International Survey
by Sharon McDonald, Helen M. Edwards and Zingting Zhao.

Research ArticleAn Examination of Deception in Virtual Teams: Effects of Deception on Task Performance, Mutuality, and Trust
by Christie M. Fuller, Kent Marrett and Douglas P. Twitchell

Research ArticleA Tale of Four Functions in a Multifunctional Device: Extending Implementation Intention Theory
by Julian Lin, Hock Chuan Chan, Lingling Xu

Research ArticleToo Early, Too Bad: Uncovering and Understanding the Initial Participation Paradox in Technology-Mediated Learning Teams
by Elizabeth Koh and John Lim

Research Article: Assessing the Impact of Student Peer Review in Writing Instruction by Using the Normalized Compression Distance
by Sayuri Yoshizawa, Takao Terano, and Atsushi Yoshikawa 

Book Reviews
  • Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication), (3rd edition) by Ann M. Penrose and Steven B. Katz. Reviewed by JoLynne Berrett 
  • Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators, Second Edition Book Review by Charles Kostelnick and David D. 
    Roberts.  Reviewed by Garth Clayton.
  • User-Centered Design for Personalization by Lex van Velsen.  Reviewed by Charity C. Tran. 

Monday, March 26, 2012

What does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions’ Readers want to read?

Check out What does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions’ Readers Want to Read?,, which I co-wrote with Nancy Coppola, George Hayhoe, and Helen Grady and was recently published in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

In the process of exploring what readers want, this article also characterizes the state of the material published in the peer-reviewed literature on technical communication.

As the abstract of the article notes:  
Research Problem: The change in editorship of the Transactions on Professional Communication provides an opportunity for investigate the match between the content published by the journal and the content sought by its readers and to assess the uniqueness of the niche that it fills among peer-reviewed journals on professional and technical communication.
Research Questions: What content does the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication publish? How does that compare to the content published by other journals in the field? And what content do readers of the Transactions want to read?
Literature Review: Researchers in most fields occasionally analyze the entire body of literature within their disciplines as a result of a particular request or a research initiative.  The general purpose of these analyses is to assess the current state of the literature, although each analysis usually has a more specific focus that affects the entire field it covers.  Such reviews have had goals like identifying the leading works in a field, assessing the state of the literature of the field, providing a basis for changing the direction of a journal or body of literature, and assessing the alignment among different parts of  a body of literature. This study is rooted in a particular study intended to prepare for a transition among editors of a journal. 
Methodology: To identify what the Transactions publishes and its unique niche among peer-reviewed journals in the field, researchers identified all peer-reviewed articles published by four major journals in professional and technical communication between January 2006 and December 2010: the Transactions, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Using the STC Body of Knowledge schema, two researchers coded the subjects of articles and adapting a schema by Klein (1999), they categorized the type of research underlying the articles.  To identify reader preferences, the other two researchers surveyed members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (publisher of the Transactions) about their preferences for content and types of research (using the same schema).
Results and Discussion: The studies provide insights into the extent of alignment between  the material published by the Transactions on Professional Communication and the preferences of its readers on the types of topics covered and the methods used to generate them.  
To see the complete article, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=47.  (Note: Only free to members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society and to those entering through university libraries with a subscription to IEEExplore.)