Trends in Editor Questions Blog:

Trends in Editor Questions Blog

April 2019

Question 1

Student Question: I have a question about whether to include hyperlinks to reference dois. My proposal references are currently listed beginning with http://dx.doi.org/ and are hyperlinked.

However, my chair had commented on my prospectus to take the hyperlinks out. Can you please advise?

Editor Response: Either including the http link to the doi or using the doi without http (as can be found in CrossRef) is acceptable. Just be standard throughout your document with the format. If you use the http style, as you have in your proposal, you must remove the live hyperlink. You can do this by right-clicking on the hyperlink itself to view the drop-down menu, then clicking “Remove hyperlink.”

Question 2

Student Question: I am currently wrapping up my dissertation proposal and have been reviewing my APA style. I am having difficulty finding out how to present my research questions, research subquestions, and hypotheses in APA style. I have gone through the manual, checked the APA style blog, and looked through the resources on the writing center website and doctoral capstone resources for the PhD. When I looked at recently published dissertations from Walden, there was no consistency that I could find in presenting the research questions and subquestions.

Editor Response: There’s a SMRT Guide on the Form & Style website that will guide you through this. You can find it here.

Question 3

Student Question: I stumbled upon a concern with my Turnitin report. Is anyone available to assist me with the below issue?

My Turnitin results say 45% similarity with the breakdown being 1% from 45 different website sites. I reviewed my paper results and many of the sentences are generic (I.e., This paper will focus on). In addition, I cited each article! Should I go back and re-paraphrase each sentence that displays 1%? What is the percentage acceptable for dissertations at Walden University?

45% similarity seems really high. I'm not sure the process on how to fix it and re-submit to task stream for proposal rubric analysis. However, I submitted my paper in the past via my classroom portal. I'm not sure if the report picks up on those submissions as well.

Editor Response: The editors do not provide Turnitin assistance (we do not have access to the program and have no part in the process of submitting work to Turnitin), so I cannot answer specific questions about why specific terms or phrases would be highlighted or not. With that being said, I would suggest discussing the results and what an acceptable Turnitin percentage range is with your chair.

The Writing Center cautions students and faculty against using the percentage of a Turnitin report to determine plagiarism because the percentage is not an accurate determination of plagiarism. Instead, the student and chair should read through the whole report, look at the text being highlighted as plagiarism, and determine if it is actually plagiarism or a false positive. Your quotations and reference entries being highlighted would be examples of false positives because they have been published before but are not considered plagiarism because you are required to provide them in APA for citation purposes. False positives should be ignored and should be removed from your percentage in Turnitin.

We recommend that you and your chair carefully review the report, using the Academic Skills Center’s resources on how to read a Turnitin report at https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/ASCtii/ASCtiioriginality

Question 4

Student Question: I have had my prospectus approved by my Ph.D. committee.  The next capstone step (after approval of the prospectus by the program director) is the proposal preliminary development. Can you provide me with examples of the information included in “proposal preliminary development”?

Editor Response: Your chair and your committee will introduce you to the next step of your process. However, in the meantime, you may find it helpful to look over the proposal kit available on the Form and Style website: https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/formandstyle/kits/proposal