Academic Writing and Publishing | Oku Okut Press

How to write a book review?

admin — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:50:41 +0000

This study aims to provide a guideline on how to write book reviews. For this purpose, the first chapter begins with a short terminological introduction and draws attention to the similarities and differences between book reviews and book criticism. It divides these writings into those written before and after the publication of the book. Then, it offers an answer to the question of why a book review needs to be written. It argues that the primary reason is a scholarly answer to the readers’ question of what should be read, to guide them through producing works worth reading or suggesting the work of other colleagues who produce such works by writing reviews of their work to contribute to them finding the place they deserve among the literature or criticising the poor-quality works. Finally, the work offers a guideline for how to write a book review. How to write an introductory paragraph, what needs to be included in the description and evaluation of the main sections, and how to write the conclusion. It is hoped that this guideline, together with the sample reviews given in the second chapter, will be useful for those who have just started their academic writing career.

ISNAD Citation Style (Arabic)

admin — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:46:42 +0000

There are more than 6,000 bibliographic styles around the world. The most common academic writing and citation styles have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century. Chicago style (The Chicago Manual of Style, CMOS, CMS) was introduced by the University of Chicago in 1906, and its 17th edition was released in 2017. The APA style (The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, APA) was published in 1952, and the 7th edition was released in 2019.

Styles such as Chicago and APA are guidelines for academic publication in English. Students or academics can access the full texts of these styles in English by purchasing the book format or subscribing to their university’s electronic versions. A fee is required for both access options. Therefore, access to the full texts of these styles is not common except in Western countries.

It is also an option to use styles such as Chicago and APA if they have translations such as Turkish and Arabic. However, even translations of earlier editions of these styles are on sale as a commercial products and are not freely available. The styles, such as Chicago and APA, are updated, and new editions are made available over time. The current version of the APA, the 7th edition, was published in English with 428 pages in 2019, and the 17th edition of Chicago was published in 2017 with 1144 pages in English. As of August 2022, they do not have translations into other languages. Even if translated, students can only access their full texts by purchasing them.

Researchers who submit their work to an institute or a journal requesting the use of Chicago and APA styles usually prepare their studies by looking at the examples of one of the different editions they find on the internet. In this case, researchers are often unaware of which editions of Chicago style, which has 17 editions, or APA, which has seven editions, they are looking at. Suppose universities mandate the use of styles such as Chicago and APA in dissertation writing. In this case, universities that require these styles should subscribe to them, like European and US universities, and offer them free of charge to their students. However, access to their English texts will not be a complete solution. These studies prepared to write academic texts in English will need to be translated into Arabic or Turkish and made available to students. Whenever these styles are available to students and researchers in full text, awareness will increase that Chicago and APA styles do not only contain 3-5 pages of information in the footnote and bibliography.

These styles contain all the basics from A to Z that students and researchers must know about academic research and writing. Therefore APA’s English has 428 pages, and Chicago style has 1144 pages. Styles such as Chicago and APA cannot be learned correctly by students due to the difficulty of accessing the full English texts of these styles and the translations of their current editions. The negative consequences of this are suffered by advisors, editors, and publishers who have to check and correct academic texts. Due to the lack of knowledge of academic writing and citation, academic ethical violations can be made by students and researchers without even being aware. To eliminate all these negativities, the ISNAD Citation System was developed with the project support of Sivas Cumhuriyet University in 2018.

ISNAD is a Turkey-based academic writing and citation system developed in Turkish for use in scholarly studies. Access to the full text and web version of ISNAD is entirely free. English, Arabic, and Persian translations of ISNAD are also available free of charge. It will also be translated into Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and other Turkish languages. ISNAD; It can also be used with citation management tools such as Zotero, EndNote, and Citavi.

Universities, publishers, and researchers can use ISNAD free of charge, which is offered with an open-access license. ISNAD is more accessible to students and easier to learn. Citation styles differ according to the discipline. In disciplines that use up-to-date data, such as questionnaires and interviews, it is preferred to cite (in-text system) by specifying the publication date immediately after the author’s surname. In branches of science that consider it necessary to reach the oldest written source, such as manuscripts, archive documents, and classical works, it is practiced to specify the source name after the author’s name (system with footnotes). ISNAD has both in-text and footnote versions. However, in the academic texts written in both versions, the works are written in the same order and format in the bibliography. Therefore, ISNAD is suitable for all branches of science. Preparing the bibliography in a single format allows the bibliography data to be presented as “clean data.” Accepting ISNAD as a reference system by universities and journals will also contribute to the standardization of academic writing. Thus, “clean metadata” will be provided to academic databases and indexes using bibliographic data. ISNAD will continue to be developed with the opinions and suggestions of academicians and researchers and will remain accessible free of charge.

ISNAD Citation Style (Persian)

admin — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:24:29 +0000

The ISNAD Citation Style is a Turkey-based academic writing and referencing style developed to be used in studies carried out in the fields of Humanities and Social Science such as Anthropology, Archeology and Art History, Geography, Language and Literature, Education, Philosophy, Folklore, Law, Economics and Administrative Sciences, Theology, Psychology, Arts, Social Work, Sociology and History. The word “isnād (pl. asānīd)” is derived from the root “sanad (pl. asnād)” in Arabic, meaning “to rely on, to lean, to put one’s trust in” in dictionary. Therefore, it means “to ground, to base upon, to take the word back to its owner, to indicate the way through which a word or a narration has been arrived, or to take it back to its origin”. It is used to question and indicate the source of the word as in the example of “what is the origin of your word?” Taking this sense of the word into account, “ISNAD” was chosen as a name for the citation style by the majority (70.4%) of editors who work for the journals publishing in the field of Theology in Turkey. The ISNAD contains all the rules necessary to know and apply in academic writings such as how to determine the title of an academic work, what information should be included in its abstract, how to select the keywords, how the outlining format should be, how to create the tables and figures, how to write the names of authors and the titles of studies carried out in Arabic, Persian or English, how to indicate dates and centuries, what should be considered in the context of publication ethics, how to quote directly or indirectly from the source work, how to cite the references in text or footnotes and how to create bibliography. “Citation” is one of the essentiality of the scientific nature of knowledge as well as a requirement of respect for intellectual property and copyrights. It is a crime of publication ethics when the original source of the text is not cited (plagiarism). Therefore, the sources of a scientific study must be cited correctly and completely with its all bibliographic components so that other researchers can easily access to them. The ISNAD was developed first as “Citation Style for Theological Studies” in 2017, and its first version was published on 12 March 2018 in printed form and online for free of charge. Having gainded interest in the journals belong to the field of Theology and also demanded in other academic fields in Turkey and Turkic Republics, its updated version has been put into service to be used in all of social sciences in September 2018 as the second version of the ISNAD. From now on, the ISNAD can be used in all the fields Humanities and Social Sciences. The ISNAD has been, within a short period of time, adopted by peer-reviewed academic journals and book publications as well as by the faculty deans (in writing graduation thesis) and the Administration of the Institutes of Social Sciences (in writing Master and Ph.D. theses). It also has been integrated into indexes and journal platforms such as TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) TR Index and TUBITAK DergiPark (Journal Park Platform) as one of the citation styles. In ISNAD citation style, the templates are created in a similar fashion to those of library and world-wide citation management programs like Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote. It is the only citation style launched free of charge for the first time and also the only national citation style. For Turkish to be recognized as a scientific language around the world, it was indispensable to develop a scientific citation style. Having developed in Turkish language and launched free of charge, The ISNAD is more convenient and easier to be learnt and used by Turkish middle school and university students, as compared to the other citation styles that are in English and unaffordable. The scientists in Turkish speaking countries will help strengthen Turkish as a scientific language by preparing their scientific researches such as symposium papers, articles and books according to the ISNAD Citation Style. By the ISNAD, it is targeted to use a common citation style in Turkey and Turkic Republics in the publications prepared in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. The use of the ISNAD will help detect the citation and the degree of influence by standardizing the citation style in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences in Turkish speaking countries and will make the scientific communication easier in Turkish speaking World. The ISNAD has been initiated for students, academicians, writers who research and write in the Humanities and Social Sciences and for those institutions and organizations publishing in the same field. Many journals who publish in the field of Social Sciences have started using the ISNAD. The number of universities who prefer using the ISNAD in BA senior thesis, MA and Ph.D. thesis is increasing. Furthermore, institutions and organizations organizing national and international symposiums and conferences have started asking their participants to prepare their papers according to the ISNAD. This style, that has been initiated free of cost, having user-friendly interface and citation software add-ons, is gaining acceptance and is being adopted rapidly. Students, writers, researchers and academicians can carry out their “reference and citation” processes easily, fast and free of mistake with the help of the ISNAD’s citation management software add-ons like EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley. The use of the ISNAD continues to increase in Turkey and Turkic Republics.

Data Search in Theological Researches: Databases – Libraries – Citation Indexes

admin — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:25:38 +0000

This study is aimed to introduce national and international databases which stand out specifically in the Islamic sciences, libraries and digital media that identifies citation. Moreover, databases on citation are also included in the research. The literature review is one of the pillars of academic work. Nowadays, the literature review is made mostly with databases in virtual environments that can be accessed via internet. There is not a single database which contains the literature of all disciplines of Islamic sciences in detail. It will be possible to reach a more comprehensive literature with multiple database searches. However, the upcoming developments show that databases will expand their scope day by day. In this context, classical sources, manuscripts, historical records, archives and registers, current studies (books, theses, articles), academic and popular magazines, visual materials (posters, postcards, stamps, etc.), audio and video records, newspapers, will be completely transferred to the digital media and made available to the users within the scope of these databases. Islamic sciences academia is rapidly digitalizing. Much electronic scientific software continues to develop. Our study is limited by the introduction of the databases which has been used frequently in Turkey Theology and Islamic Studies faculties. Especially it is aimed to introduce literature review and the websites that fresh postgraduates should see and know. In this study, relevant databases are introduced by obtaining introductory information from the official websites of databases and libraries widely known in the Islamic sciences field. Moreover, the answers of the following questions were tried to be given and demonstrated in practice: “How to search for a thesis, article, and journal in a digital environment or database in the field of Theology? How is it found? Where is it located?” While demonstrating the application, the database, and the part of the library that needs attention has been confirmed with the screenshots of each directory.

User’s Manual for Citavi Template for ISNAD Citation Style (2nd Edition)

admin — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:16:16 +0000

Citavi is a software that helps academicians in all processes, especially in the field of theology, in scientific research, and writing, from literature review to writing drafts of the research report (article, thesis, book) before the final revision. It differs from its peers with its features and tools that facilitate and accelerate research activities and processes and complete it with a solid weave. It fully supports many languages, including Arabic and Turkish, and offers error-free writing in these languages. It allows all kinds of date and page number entries to be written as written by the user. Citavi has brought together resource-reference management and information organization under the same roof. In this way, it has many features and useful tools such as creating bibliography and information slips, editing and changing the slips, dividing them into various categories, linking them to the chapters and headings shown in the table of contents of the research, and easily exporting them to a Word file. In this way, it transforms the time-consuming and tiring classical bibliography and information filing stage into an enjoyable and easily sustainable research process, thanks to its useful interface and advanced tools. In particular, the bibliography and information slips creation system will be welcomed by researchers with great pleasure and will be used with pleasure. Thanks to its features and tools, thesis, article, and book pre-edit drafts can be written directly in Citavi without the need for Word. Thus, the researcher can easily continue and complete his/her work directly through a single program without going back and forth between Citavi and Word applications. We wanted to ensure that researchers in our country benefit from this software, as it facilitates and accelerates the work of the researcher in almost all of the scientific research and writing processes in all fields, especially in the field of theology, and allows it to be built with a solid weave. For this purpose, a year ago, we presented the appropriate add-on for the ISNAD Citation System and the user guide to the use of researchers. Now, we are happy to present the same user manual to researchers as revised, supplemented, and visually improved.