What is a claim for significance or articulating a contribution?
A statement that identifies your thesis, dissertation, or article’s importance and value in relation to its object, methodology, argument, or conclusion to those in your field or discipline. Many of these documents include multiple claims for significance and multiple contributions.
Why do you need to make a claim for significance/contribution?
Fields and disciplines are focused on the production of knowledge, and establishing how you are offering new contributions to that knowledge is a critical part of that work. In every discipline, the importance of you doing direct work to build the field matters.
Including claims for significance/contribution in your article is therefore critical. A strong and explicit claim for significance/contribution helps dissertation readers, editors, reviewers, and members of the field why they need to read your article and how your article will benefit their work.
Where to put claims for significance/contribution?
Claims of significance/contribution can be placed in different places in your dissertation, thesis, or article. At least one of the claims should appear early in your work such as in the abstract or introduction, in order to motivate your readers to read your article.
- In the abstract. Use one sentence to state the importance of your work to people in your field.
- In the introduction. Often an introduction is a long claim of significance of your work, where you articulate your argument, relate your argument to previous scholarship, and point out how that argument matters to people in your field or discipline.
- In the goal statement or purpose statement discussion. Use one sentence to state the importance and value of your article, like in the abstract.
- In the implications and discussion. Return to the significance and contribution of your work in more depth via linking to previous research, offering evidence and examples, as well as articulating its implications for the theory and practice in your field.
How to make a claim for significance/contribution?
Wendy Belcher in Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks suggests ten types of claims for significance, which we offer here:
- Subject-based claim states the importance of studying your subject such as people, text, group, question, approach, or problem.
- Audience-based claim states that a specific audience has a long-standing interest in this topic.
- Literature-based claim states that your article fills a gap, extends previous research, or corrects previous research.
- Practice-based claim states that your article extends or corrects common practices, views, assumptions, or perceptions of practitioners in the field (who may be non-scholars).
- Method-based claim states that your model or methodology has explanatory value and is useful and illuminating in some way.
- Findings-based claim states that your findings, results, or interpretations have shed new light on a topic or may contribute to what people know about a topic.
- Disciplinary/field-based claim states that your article helps your field or discipline become stronger or better.
- Theory-based claim states that your article develops a better way of theorizing, improves ways of thinking about the world, challenges systems of ideas, or reshapes general principles.
- Implications-based claim states that your article demonstrates a phenomenon’s problematic and unjust effects or positive and helpful effects in the world.
- Recommendation-based claim states that your article offers powerful recommendations for action.
Some examples:
The article emphasizes the importance of developing critical approaches to digital media as a necessary prerequisite for using them as resources for learning (Sammendrag, 2015).
The ability to quantifiably characterize the nanoscale during high strain rate failure with ultrafast SAXS, complementing WAXS, represents a broadening in the range of science that can be performed with XFEL (Coakley et al. 2020).
This versatile route converts five- to six-membered rings and provides a detailed view of high-temperature mass growth processes that can eventually lead to graphene-type PAHs and two-dimensional nanostructures providing a radical new view about the transformations of carbon in our universe (Zhao et al. 2019).