Format of entries | About Search Terms

Thank you for volunteering @ CompPile. This brief guide is meant to introduce you to the basics of the indexing format we use for journals. As you have questions, please contact us so we can revise this guide.

Please use the table format we have in the journal_table.doc document (available for download). You add new rows to the table by placing the cursor in the last cell and pressing the TAB key. You do not need to separate volumes in separate tables. Put everything in one table, however long it takes.

When indexing journals, our goal is to be comprehensive, covering all issues and scholarship falling under the scope of CompPile, including editorials, comment and response pieces, review essays, and special features such as policy statements. We have not indexed "announcements" sections, calls for papers, or short reviews of single books. The rule of thumb for book reviews is that we do not index a review if it is mainly descriptive of content, without scholarly commentary.

What is the scope of CompPile? Basically, all scholarship (of every methodology) that might fall under the umbrella of “adult, English-language writing commentary.” That is, CompPile includes study of the ways that writing in English is taught, learned, and practiced after high-school in and out of college. That scope will embrace the disciplinary areas of Composition Studies, Discourse and Rhetorical Studies, History of Rhetoric, Argumentation Studies, Technology Studies, Technical and Professional Writing, Writing in Society and the Workplace, Legal Writing, English as a Second Language, and Adult-Education. It will exclude studies of writing exclusively of children and of students in the schools, second-language studies when the second language is not English, studies purely of public speaking or social conversation, translation studies when none of the languages is English, reading studies when writing is not involved, linguistics when there is no connection to composing, studies of fictional literature, commentary on the teaching of literature except when writing assignments are discussed, and instruction in “creative” writing when no connections to “non-fictional writing” are made.

If the piece falls within that scope, don’t exclude it for personal reasons (e.g., supposed brevity, dubiousness of scholarship, irrelevancy of topic, triteness). CompPile is not a selection of “the most important scholarship.” It aims at historical comprehensiveness.

When in doubt, index the piece. We’ll be vetting each entry you send in.

When you finish indexing, send the table to Glenn as an email attachment (gblalock@grandecom.net).

If you have questions, please contact Glenn or Rich (gblalock@grandecom.net or rhaswell@grandecom.net)

Return to top

What follows are some beginning notes about the format of the journal entries. In format, we are aiming at absolute consistency across records. One of the quickest ways to determine format is simply to check existing entries in CompPile. But here are some basic rules.

Author:

• Single author format is LastName, Firstname
• Multiple authors: First author is LastName, FirstName, subsequent authors are FirstName Lastname
• Multiple author names are separated with semi-colons.

Title:

• In the title capitalize only first word, first word after colon, and proper names
• Respect quotations marks in a title. But use single quotes, not double.
• If the first half of a title ends with a question mark, leave out the colon between the two halves.
• When a piece has no author name, we use "Anonymous"
• When the piece is not a typical article, but instead a regular feature such as a review essay, an interchange, forum, etc., we place the label of the piece in brackets at the end of the title. Common labels are [review essay] after the title of the review; [editorial] after the title of a comment by the editor(s) or [Editorial] if there is no title for the comment; and [response to X] after the title of a piece in the comment and response section or [Response to X] if there is no title.

Date:

• If the publication covers two years, as with some journal issues, separate the years with a slash and no spaces. Write both dates out in full. For example, 2001/2002.

Journal:

• Type journal title and volume number (which includes the issue number when available). For example: English Journal 57.3
• IMPORTANT: For volume numbers 1 through 9, use the zero (e.g., 01.3, 07.4). Do not use the initial zero with issue numbers.
• If issue number is not available use the month, spelled out in full and in parentheses. For example: English Journal 57 (April); American Scholar 52 (Spring).
• Always use issue number rather than month when the issue number is available.
• If the issue combines numbers, separate the numbers with a hyphen. For example, English Quarterly 28.3-4. If the issue combines months, separate them with a slash. For example, Electronic Learning 08 (November/December)
• Use one space between journal title and volume number, one space between volume number and month, no space between volume number and issue number.

Pages:

• Write out all page numbers in full (not 537-50, but 537-550)

Search Terms:

• CompPile’s system of search terms is unique in part because of its discipline-specific controlled vocabulary. Its aim is tight but exhaustive searches. Some of the most important search terms are specialized and used only in CompPile’s search-term lexicon, such as bizcom, wcenter, FYC, etc. The full system of search terms is available in the Glossary. In writing search terms, we keep the Glossary active on our screen and double check when we are in doubt. It helps to review search terms assigned to previous issues of the journal (and related journals).
• Hyphens and spaces are important in CompPile. For example, “term-paper” (the specialized search term for the documented paper assignment) receives around 800 hits; “term paper” receives none; “termpaper” receives none; “term- paper” receives none.
• In the Search field, the list of search terms are separated by one comma followed by one space.
• Normally write out proper names in full (e.g., Society for Technical Communication; John Quincy Adams; New York City. A list of accepted abbreviations (e.g., CUNY, CCCC) can be located in the Glossary by typing “abbreviation used” into the Definition field.
• Put book titles in single quotes and capitalize the initial letter of major words in the title (e.g., ‘Whose Goals, Whose Aspiractions’)
• Avoid plural forms (e.g., assignment, not assignments; interaction, not interactions)

Assigning search terms is an important part of the indexing process. If you identify gaps or confusion in the search term lexicon, please send your observations / comments / suggestions to Rich (rhaswell@grandecom.net)

Return to top

More on Search Terms:

Default Terms: In CompPile’s controlled vocabulary of search terms, certain words are NOT used singly except in proper names, either because to do so would require that a huge majority of the records contain the search term, making it useless for searching (e.g., natural, mental, teaching, writer, writing), or because of the high number of multiple meanings contained by the term (e.g., class, story, subject), or because another search term is used for the concept (e.g., the term ‘teaching,’ which is covered by the search term ‘practice,’ or the word ‘social,’ which is covered by the search term ‘social’); or because the word is short and would produce a huge number of false hits (e.g., act).

Many of the default terms do appear in phrases and compounds (e.g., ‘text’ alone does not appear, but ‘text-analysis’ does).

Here is a short list of the major default terms.

A full list can be located in the Glossary by typing in “not appear” in the Definition field.

A note on the search term ‘data’: One of CompPile’s objectives is to distinguish usable, factual, data-gathering studies. The search term for this is ‘data’. Here is the glossary definition of that term:

Any study that systematically collects and reports facts usable in further study, through whatever research method (interview, ethnography, experimentation, descriptive measurement, case study, etc.).

Return to top

Assigning Search Terms: Here is the procedure Rich and Glenn use in devising search terms for a piece. There are certain categories of search terms that we fill in. We do not try to fill in all of these for every piece, nor is this list meant to be followed in a linear way. But these seventeen categories produce the majority of the terms in an entry. The last (No. 16) is very important, though, since distinct topic and treatment is a sign of useful scholarship. The example terms are NOT exhaustive for a category.

Categories:

1. academic/learner level: school, elementary, middle-school, G1, G2, G2-G6 [etc.], high-school, workplace, adult-ed, elderly, first-year, sophomore, junior, senior, re-entry, distance, WAC, interdisciplinary
2. academic location: department [meaning English or Rhetoric], biology-course, chemistry-course [etc.], ESL, wcenter, administration, admissions
3. geographic location: New York, Philadephia [etc.], USA, Britain, England, Taiwan [etc.], suburban, urban, rural
4. other research or study location: classroom, conferencing, wcenter, workplace, organization, government
5. kind of course: basic, bizcom, techcom, FYC, literature, ESL, ESP, internship, graduate, seminar, faculty-seminar
6. aspect or activity of academic course under study [writing is default]: language-study, historical, grammar, MX [mechanics], punctution, arrangement, group, collaboration, assignment, syllabus, syllabus-design, curriculum
7. writing activity under study or discussion: process, grammar, editing, pre-writing, collaboration, co-authoring, authorship, revising, drafting, planning
8. language status: ESL, EFL, L1-L2, bilingual, Chinese-English, German-English [etc.)
9. type of study: practice, data, theory, pedagogy, needs-analysis, change, lit-crit, discourse-analysis, text-analysis, grammatical, linguistic, genre-analysis, case-study, think-aloud, history
10. research method or design: interview, questionnaire, ethnographic, experimental, survey, teacher-opinion, student-opinion, worker-opinion [etc.], teacher-research
11. theoretical or approach: expressivist, critique, critical-pedagogy, feminist [etc.]
12. activity under study or discussion: practice, testing, evaluation, assessment, research-method, correcting, response, classroom, discussion
13. discursive genre under study: teacher-story, narrative, essay, essay-exam, science-writing, precis
14. element of texts under study: arrangement, coherence, cohesion, introduction, conclusion, paragraph, sentence, grammatical, syntactic, graphic, illustration, flow-chart, citation, MX, error
15. kind of material offered by the record [academic paper is default]: bibliography, annotated, sample [of questionnaire, student paper, test items, etc.], memorial, award
16. special topics or treatment of paper [an endless list]: Advanced Placement, commodification, John Dewey, spell-checker, [etc.]

Return to top