UPEN Blogs: Editorial Guidelines

UPEN publishes blogs which reflect on academic-policy engagement practices from anyone who works within this space.

Read our blog guidelines before submitting a blog to us.

Purpose and audience

UPEN’s blogs are designed to communicate on-the-ground learning about engagement between academia and policy. They should share your or your team’s professional experiences of knowledge mobilisation, what kind of problems you faced, how you tackled these, and what happened as a result.

We welcome reflections from all roles within academic-policy engagement, from university professional services and academics to civil servants.

We do not republish blogs that have been published elsewhere first. If you have already published a blog, we may be able to promote this through other channels.

Since our blogs are reflective learning pieces, we do not publish blogs that are announcements of new programmes of work, although we can sometimes promote these on our other channels.

Who reads UPEN blogs?

Blogs typically attract around 250 views, with popular blogs hitting 300-400 views.

Our blog audience comprises academics, knowledge mobilisers (people who facilitate, and provide specialist skills on, engagement) and civil servants across all levels of government who want to improve their engagement practices and learn from others.

The strongest blogs tend to:

Have a clear audience in mind – who are they and what are goals and challenges you are helping with? For example, Scottish Parliament engagement and REF 2029: Strengthening Impact Case Studies, First Steps for PhD Students in Understanding Policy Engagement
Share experiences, for example, Through the looking glass: What does research impact look like from inside government?
Offer insights into what works and what doesn’t
Be honest about challenges and how these were approached
Be transferable or offer ways in which the learning can be applied across disciplines, for example, From Caravan to Campus: Storytelling as a Bridge Between Research and Policy

Length

UPEN blogs should be a maximum of 800 words.

Style guidelines and tone

Blogs should be written with a more informal tone than academic writing.

Please include subheadings to split up the writing – even with shorter pieces. Subheadings should be substantive. Avoid subheadings like ‘next steps’. Vary sentence and paragraph length as this making it more interesting for readers.

Try to keep paragraphs to no more than 3 or 4 sentences. Shorter, snappier paragraphs keep the audience engaged and helps with readability on the page.

Where you have a long list of outcomes or actions, consider a bullet point list. Long sentences can be less impactful and more difficult for the reader to navigate.

Consider what your audience is already likely to know. Common topics in academic-policy engagement, like Areas of Research Interest or place-based policymaking, may only need a light touch explanation. Save your words to spend more time on the core of what you want to talk about in the blog.

Writing an effective introduction

A good introduction for a blog is crucial. While academic articles leave the conclusion until the end, blogs should lead with the main argument or point.

It’s a good idea to cover the basic points within the first paragraph:

What
How
Why
When
Where

Editorial support

UPEN will provide light editorial support for blogs in order to provide clarity of structure, argument and language. If substantive rewrites are required to meet our guidelines we may suggest submitting a second draft instead of providing direct editorial changes.