Getting published and cited

How scientific journals work. Role of Editor and referees. Choosing the right journal. Impact and immediacy factors. Circulation and readership. Frequency, time taken from submission to publication. Special considerations with review papers. Current views on duplicate and prior publication. Choosing your format. Authorship. Increasing your citation rate.

Summarizing skills

Guidelines on writing abstracts of papers that are concise, meaningful, and stand alone as a representative of the study. Structured abstracts. Differences between paper abstracts and  conference abstracts. How to write a conference abstract to minimize the character count. Strategies for dealing with missing data. Increasing ‘findability’ of paper and conference abstracts.

Writing research papers

Introduction: Presentation of the problem, definition of the ‘question’.Methods: Preferred sequences for different kinds of research. Signalling the organization visually and verbally. Tense and point of view. What reviewers are looking for in the Methods. Results: organisation. Relating results to methods. Figures and tables: Selection of graphs, tables and illustrations. Table titles and figure captions. Discussion: Establishing general principles and relationships with reference to the literature.  Dealing with inconsistencies and surprising findings. Applications, implications, and speculations.

Theses and dissertations

Following the rules on length and format. Suggested thesis structures. Manking a detailed plan. What examiners expect. The literature review. Managing your references. Managing your time for writing and revising. Proofreading, production and binding.

Reviews  and book chapters

How to read a paper. Note-taking and managing your references. Note-taking and managing your references. Different types of review e.g. peer-reviewed and magazine-type articles. Classical principles of argumentation. Techniques for planning and organizing, including mind-mapping.

Posters

Principles of data selection for posters. How to write the text for a poster Principles of poster design. Exercise – the poster beauty parade. Some standard formats for different types of research. How to make more space on a poster. Producing and proofreading your poster.