The "emotion" norm in academic paper evaluation

In recent years, academic evaluation has become a common topic. Although academic papers are written by authors, whether they can be published is determined by the editors, and both ends involve "people", and people are advanced animals with "emotions", so this emotional factor often plays a role that cannot be underestimated in the publication of papers. That is to say, in most cases, if an author submits a paper that can be published in an academic journal and seen by readers, it should be after the author's emotions collide with the editor's emotions, which have a spiritual resonance, and will be appreciated and launched by the editor. To borrow a proper noun from psychology, it can be called "empathy" before the publication of the paper. In the past, the journal community and the editorial community have discussed the academic norms and technical specifications of papers more, and the author here tries to explore the psychological norms for establishing the judgment of papers from the perspective of "emotion". If there are any mistakes, please correct them.

The paper should have "emotions"

We know that the reason why authors want to write or hit the keyboard to write papers is nothing more than four motives: one is out of their own research interests, the other is to vent the academic impulses in their chests, the third is to be tempted by external fame and profit, and the fourth is the pressure of unit work assessment and title promotion. Of course, there are also people who are a combination of these four. However, no matter what kind of motivation, for the editor, after the paper is in hand, the criterion for judging should follow a scale, that is, only need to observe and understand whether the paper reflects the inner "true feeling", or whether it reflects the four elements of "truth", "goodness", "beauty" and "love", and cannot be influenced and swayed by the external emotions of the author or others, that is, "human feelings" and "relationships".

Of course, some people may question that "emotion" itself is a complex inner feeling, not only has a positive and negative distinction, even if it is "true", "good", "beautiful" and "love", different people will have different interpretations. In order to avoid ambiguity and disagreement in understanding, the author here limits "emotion" to emotion that complies with Chinese laws and regulations.

So, how should the editor grasp the four "emotions" of "truth", "goodness", "beauty" and "love" presented in a paper? This should be observed and evaluated from four aspects, namely: the evaluation of the emotions contained in the main and subtitles; the evaluation of the author's emotions; the evaluation of the theme and the subject's emotions; and the evaluation of the beginning and ending emotions. Among them, the evaluation of the theme and the emotion of the subject is the core content of the evaluation of the four aspects.

In the current increasingly standardized thesis writing, as an editor, although you can take a certain flattering way in the early review, from the "title", "abstract", "theme word" or "keywords" to roughly understand the core concept or central meaning of a paper, but in the final trade-off stage, I am afraid that I have to carefully observe whether the overall narrative of the paper echoes the title, whether there is a core theme implicitly or explicitly. Because it is the "soul" that pins on the author's thoughts and emotions, penetrates the author's aesthetic pursuits, and embodies the author's academic ideals and world outlook. Like the main theme in a symphony, it runs through the entire work and plays a role in different movements. In this way, if a comprehensive evaluation of a paper is good or bad, whether it can be included in the topic selection plan of the journal column also needs to have a general understanding and understanding of the theme and emotions contained in the subject of the paper.

Articles should have "temperature"

Regarding the criteria for judging a good paper, due to different disciplines, different topics, and different thesis writing methods, it can be said that everyone is different and inconsistent. Although a unified and formatted good paper standard has not yet been formed, there are still many commonalities in carefully comparing various standards, that is, everyone agrees on the importance of topics, processes, materials, and language in a good paper, but the expressions are different, and the perspectives are different.

However, the real problem is that some articles are read throughout and conform to academic and technical specifications in terms of topics, processes, materials, and language, but after the responsible editors have been introduced through hard work, the discerning readers do not agree. The reason for this, in addition to the different cognitions caused by academic experience, value orientation, and aesthetic taste, is probably also related to the coldness of the article and the lack of "temperature" that the humanities and social science papers should have. Without temperature, it is difficult to warm, activate, and mobilize the reader's inner enthusiasm for echoing the author's views, which is easy to cause an embarrassing scene in which the author talks to himself and the reader is indifferent. This kind of temperature, to put it bluntly, is a kind of "emotional" absence, which requires "emotion" to appear, warm up, and save the scene.

For thousands of years, "affection" has always been the source and driving force for the development and progress of Chinese culture and Chinese scholarship. Although Sima Qian's "Baoren AnShu" (報任安書) says, "King Wen performed Zhou Yi; Zhongni'er wrote "Spring and Autumn"; Qu Yuan exiled and endowed "Leaving Sorrow"; Zuo Qiu was blind and had "Chinese"; Sun Tzu was blind, the "Art of War" was revised; Bu Wei Qianshu, the hereditary "Lü Lan"; Han Fei imprisoned Qin, "Speaking Difficulty" and "Lonely Anger"; "Poems" three hundred, the works of the sages of The Great Bottom were also angry", people have heard it well, although Liu Xun's statement in "Wenxin Carved Dragon Zhiyin" is "the writer is moved and resigns, and the viewer wears the text to enter the feeling", People also remember it vividly, but time has passed, and "love" has gradually drifted away from readers in today's academic papers. Some scholars have written articles that must be "deconstructed", wen must be "post-colonial" and "postmodern", a large number of obscure and self-made concepts, a series of multiple definite sentences stacked with the word "of", or fixed clauses inserted by multiple dashes, and some long sentences even have no punctuation, mixing and matching Chinese and English. The author's original intention may be to show the depth or difference of learning. Don't you know that due to the lack of "true feelings" and "feelings", readers do not buy it. Because in the eyes of the reader, this kind of concise Chinese is complicated and cumbersome, if it is not the author who saves effort and effort in order to scare people, it is that there is a rupture in thinking and "it makes people faint and obvious".

Writing must be "true and sincere"

In academic papers, "truth", "goodness", "beauty", "love", etc. belong to the content of "love", and if you measure and test all papers one by one, it is inevitable that you will appear harsh and unkind. If we retreat to the second, simply and compressed into one, then the first thing is "true". Assuming that "truth" is missing, then the affixes after "truth" such as "truth", "sincerity", "truth", "truth", "truth", "truth", "true knowledge", "true essence" and "truth" will lose their meaning and cannot be talked about.

What is the "truth" of the emotion of the paper? It is the theme of the article and whether the subject sincerely dedicates new knowledge, new discoveries, new ideas, and new feelings to the reader. Specifically, the first is that the topics proposed and discussed are "real problems", not "pseudo-problems" or "false problems". The so-called "true problem" is to be able to ask questions about the causal links that exist between objective phenomena, the academic questions raised have social significance, and the conclusions drawn capture the essence of the problem, or transcend and innovate on the basis of predecessors. This requires academic feelings and concentration. The second is "literature to carry the Tao", which undertakes the function of inheriting civilization and disseminating ideas, so it should be true feelings and true feelings, not adulterated, not fake, and have things to say. The third is to write with the "heart", natural and sincere, and the heart and spirit are one. Editors can tolerate the lack of rhetoric, language, punctuation, and structure of the author, and cannot condone the author's use of flowery rhetoric to cover up the hollowness and three papers without donkeys in the subject matter.

It should be noted that some people may worry that if "emotion" is included in the normative system of academic papers, it may dilute the calmness and rationality advocated by academia, and thus move towards emotion. There is some truth to this concern, but it misunderstands the "emotional" element of the paper. To borrow Bai Juyi's words in the Nine Books of The Yuan: "Those who touch people's hearts, Mo Xianhu feelings, Mo Shihu words, Mo Qihu sound, Mo Deep Righteousness." This means that there is nothing that can move and move people beyond emotion, nothing that does not begin with language, nothing that is more relevant than sound, and nothing that goes deeper than reason. The humanities study human concepts, spirits, emotions, and values, and the social sciences enrich the spiritual world of people by studying various social phenomena and development laws, and they are inseparable from the "emotions" of researchers from beginning to end. As for "emotionalization", it is a moody and morbid psychology, which is two different things from the "pure feelings", "true feelings", "warmth", "tender feelings", "communication" and "deep feelings" advocated in academic research.

In short, the humanities and social sciences, in the final analysis, are all human-related learning; the topics studied are all flexible and living beings. It requires researchers to mobilize their knowledge reserves at the same time, put all their inner emotions into it, and truly feel and send rather than moan without illness, so that feelings such as "true", "good", "beautiful" and "love" are reflected implicitly or explicitly in the papers written, so that editors and readers can experience and be infected, so as to give people enjoyment or inspiration. Therefore, the inclusion of "emotion" in the evaluation criteria of academic papers will effectively curb the obscurity, boredom, eight strands, rigidity, and "false emptiness" of some papers, so that people like vivid Chinese academic journals more and love the vivid Chinese academic world more.

(This article was written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Tianjin Social Sciences)

(The author is the Editor-in-Chief of Southern Academic, University of Macau)

Edit: Zong Yue