On Academic Writing, Guiding Authors, And Building A Fulfilling Career With Julien Cayla
Written By Ceyda Sinağ, Post-Doc at Sabancı University, Türkiye
Julien Cayla is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Nanyang Business School, and he is one of the few ethnographers who teach and conduct consumer research in Singapore. Beyond his teaching and research, Cayla is an author, reviewer, and Associate Editor at IJRM. I had the opportunity to talk with him about his role as an AE and learned valuable insights on how to write and publish impactful research papers.
On the importance of good academic writing
Researchers often rely on jargon and complex language in academic writing, which makes research papers too difficult for people outside academia to understand, so the research audience is relatively narrow. With this concern in mind, one of the core values that guides Julien’s approach to writing and reviewing academic papers is accessibility. He prioritizes writing clearly and avoiding jargon in his own research. Also, as a reviewer and AE, he encourages authors to do the same.
“One of the core principles for me is that I see our role as social scientists as making the complexity of the world more accessible.”
- Julien Cayla
Julien recalls receiving no formal training in writing academic papers for journals while pursuing his PhD, even though the program offered courses like statistics and research design. This remains true in marketing academia today. To fill this gap, he developed an academic writing course for PhD students across different social science fields. In mentoring junior researchers, Julien observes that many struggle to write compelling problem focused literature reviews, do not know how to position their papers within a theoretical conversation, and face other academic writing challenges.
- Julien Cayla
Julien shared some writing tips for top academic journals. He advises authors to dedicate 30% of their time to polishing their title, abstract, and introduction. According to him, in these first pages, we should clearly articulate the problem, propose our solution, and discuss the academic field's context. We should be aware that finding a gap in the literature, something that has not been studied before, is not strong positioning. Julien shares that the idea of gap filling comes from the hard sciences, where knowledge accumulates by discovering new variables or relationships. He urges that new knowledge does not mean that it is valuable knowledge. So, if authors state in the introduction that nobody has studied X, Julien sees it as a red flag. Rather than filling the gap, he recommends that authors identify a problem in a scholarly conversation and join that conversation by showing how their research helps solve it.
“Every paper is a type of problem-solving enterprise. It can be a managerial problem, a societal problem, or a theoretical problem. It has to be a problem that is interesting enough and valuable enough that it requires solving.”
- Julien Cayla
When we discuss writing academic papers, it is hard not to think of AI. Julien says that for fixing grammar and spelling, AI is a useful tool; however, when it comes to writing a compelling story, AI does not help. So, AI does not solve the issue of problematization, which is the main challenge in writing scientific papers, as discussed above. If authors use AI to generate ideas and write for themselves, this could be easily identified by AI detection tools, as Julien puts it.
Julien urges authors not to use the review process to refine papers and get feedback. He recommends that authors obtain substantial feedback before sending their papers to a journal. A crucial point is that, as Julien puts it, “friendly reviews become too friendly.” So, consider sending papers to critical scholars before submitting them to a top journal to perfect your manuscript.
Reviewing the paper and guiding the authors
In addition to sharing useful insights about writing a manuscript, Julien also shared how he sees the role of an AE. As a reviewer and AE, Julien values being constructive rather than merely critical. He acknowledges the hard work authors put into their research and writing and sees reviewers' job as identifying an interesting idea in the paper and encouraging authors to pursue it. As he puts it, “try to create a review that you would want to receive as an author.”
According to Julien, the AE role is about curating and synthesizing multiple reviewers’ perspectives. The AE decides which points made by the reviewers are useful in guiding the authors.
“I find the AE role, in some ways, easier than being a reviewer because you read the paper and develop your own perspective, but you also have the reviewers… so that you can draw from their ideas. So, as an AE, it is more a matter of curating the reviewers’ feedback.”
- Julien Cayla
It becomes challenging when reviewers have discrepant different ideas; in that case, as an AE, he must decide which perspective aligns more with his own view of the paper. However, this scenario represents a minority of cases.
Learning and improving is a never-ending process
Julien highlights that academicians should not only keep an eye on improving their research skills, but they should also improve how they work, such as the way they handle rejections, how they can do better reviews, how to work better with co-authors, and how to create a community related to your work.
“I feel that academics tend to work in isolation from one another, so they do not necessarily learn much after their PhD about work processes and how to improve the way they work. I think that is a missed opportunity.”
- Julien Cayla
Meet the Associate Editor
Julien Cayla
Associate Professor of Marketing at Nanyang Business School
What is the number one question you want to answer in your career?
The questions that are guiding me are: What are the ways that we have of knowing the world in business schools, which are more Western ways of thinking about the world, and how do we generate knowledge that helps question these Western ways of thinking about the world? That is why I have done a fair amount of work in India. One of the things I am interested in is questioning some of what we take for granted in textbooks and business schools.
What is one piece of advice you often give to your students as they pursue their academic careers?
Your ability to surround yourself with people, experiences, and a community that help you generate energy is a big part of your ultimate success. For me, success is also your own well-being as a person who manages to be happy in their job. Having a hundred publications and not being happy with your work and your career is not success for me. It is important to form deep relationships so you can share ideas, but you can also share friendships.
If you would not be a marketing researcher, what would you be?
I play a lot of padel, a racket game. Maybe I would own a padel club in Bali and spend a lot of time playing it and interacting with the players. Otherwise, the part that I enjoy the most about my work is writing. I think that even when I stop writing academic articles, I will keep writing. I want to write things for a larger audience. Academic articles are just a specific format, language, or way of doing things. So, I still want to write, think, and communicate in different ways.
This article was written by
Post-Doc at the Sabancı University, Türkiye
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