Bringing the complexities of academic research to other audiences in a more accessible form maximizes the value and utility of faculty members’ work.
Knowledge trickling down to students doesn’t magically appear in textbooks and lectures. Someone must seek out answers to specific questions and pin them down. But while bloodhound academics sniff out the clues to solve their cases, readers can lose their findings among field-specific verbiage. Jargon hides the best ideas in plain sight.
That’s where I come in.
I help Professors Glenn Richey and Beth Davis-Sramek, the co-editors-in-chief, with the Journal of Business Logistics, a premier academic business publication focused on advancing knowledge within supply chain management and logistics. Each week, I choose JBL articles to read, linking them with current supply chain news to emphasize their contemporary relevance.
I focus on the manuscripts’ main points, picking out the ideas underpinning inquiries, the results of the studies, and why it matters and to whom, translating the scholarly into the colloquial.
This framework serves as a guide for the summaries I strategically craft for a specific audience: other academics, managers and policymakers.
I emphasize findings for managers and policymakers, so they discover more efficient strategies for implementing new technology or developing public policy. I aim to pique other researchers’ interests so they seek out the original articles and take up authors’ urgings for further investigation.
And after all this, I disseminate these pieces on our social media pages, employing digital marketing strategies for targeted posting that amplifies the findings for those who need them most.
My own academic milieu prepared me for this. As an English undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, I parsed through literary theory from Jacques Derrida and essays by Donna Haraway.
I wrestled with texts like Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit” and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” while earning my master’s degree at the University of Chicago.
Seemingly impenetrable writing permeates all scholarly fields. My humanities education trained me to read this highly complex material, analyze it, extract the main point and meaningfully engage with it.
JBL’s research has become even more crucial as the pandemic has thrust global supply chains onto the international center stage. I bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners, ensuring this research has its
full impact.
Katie Thompson-Taylor
Communications Editor
Department of Supply Chain Management
