Researchers in developing countries often struggle to get published in widely read international journals simply because they lack guidance and support in writing up their research.
This series of one-day workshops examines the structure of the journal research article and provides practical guidance on how to prepare an article for publication. The workshop uses current research articles in the participants’ fields of study to illustrate underlying structures for ordering and sequencing ideas and characteristic grammatical structures for each section of standard journal article formats. The workshop also looks at how journal editors work, the peer review process used by international journals and the ‘politics of publication’.
Workshops can be scheduled in a single block of five days or spread out over no more than five weeks.
Workshop synopsis
- Workshop One
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- Opening, introductions, orientation, course administration.
- Discussions on writing as a product, writing as a process and individual writing processes.
- Introductions and Abstracts.
- Illustrations and explanations of the “four-move pattern” of journal article introductions (illustrations are taken from the current published literature of the participants’ research fields). Participants practice analyzing journal article introductions using the four-move pattern and compare these to their own introductions.
- The four-move pattern in Abstracts.
- Current publishing practices and how they affect authors from developing countries.
- Workshop Two
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- Working with “the literature”.
- Accessing global literature databases.
- Methods and techniques for planning your literature review.
- Making decisions about what to cite.
- Quotations and plagiarism.
- Citation indexes.
- Accessing literature online.
- Workshop Three
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- Methods and Materials (Note: this workshop can be designed for qualitative or quantitative research. The outline below is for quantitative research)
- Appropriate levels of detail.
- Tense shift.
- Schemas for organizing methods and materials.
- Ethical Issues in Research: Editors responsibilities and publishers concerns.
- Workshop Four
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- Results and Discussion.
- Dealing with results: The good, the bad and the ugly.
- Linking results to the literature.
- Elements and schemas for structuring results.
- The visual communication of information.
- Workshop Five
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- Presenting your research.
- Preparing your paper for oral presentation.
- Effective presentation of scientific papers.
- Getting published.
- Selecting the ‘right’ journal and working with journal editors.
- The peer review process and its variations.
- Working with reviewer feedback.
Duration: 5 days
Audience: Researchers aiming for publication in local or internationally referred English language journals.
Note: Workshops can be run consecutively or spaced two to three weeks apart.
Recommended group size: 5 – 12
