Up To it! Home > White paper: Teaching and learning publishing skills > Requirements
This white paper was written for educators and organizers of continuing professional
development activities for biomedical and clinical researchers.
This document aims to promote informed decisions about
acquiring or developing training programs in written scientific communication for non-native
English speaking students and researchers.
Valerie Matarese, Ph.D., UpTo infotechnologies, Vidor (TV), Italy
Read the Introduction to this white paper.
The main requirement for the successful publication of a research paper is the quality of the research itself. The hypothesis that was investigated must be pertinent to the advancement of scientific knowledge: research questions that are banal or of little importance to the current day will not entice the interest of leading journals. Moreover, the experimentation must be sufficiently rigorous to substantiate the validity of the data being reported. Assuming, then, that a study's scientific hypothesis is relevant and its methodology is solid, the key to publishing success is an effective communication of the research activities and findings. Excellence in research reporting is achieved with a series of publishing skills, summarized in the following paragraphs.
Research journals, especially those indexed in Medline, choose manuscripts through a collaborative process called peer review that involves the evaluation by other researchers in the same field. Understanding how this process works is important, especially for researchers who aim to publish in selective journals. Also important is understanding how readers access the literature and how they choose between online and print and between free and subscription journals. The biomedical publishing industry is a dynamic sector that is undergoing rapid evolution as a result of innovations in digital technologies, demands for open access, increasingly stringent ethical requirements, and the economic repercussions of globalization. Authors who follow these developments are best able to position their texts in journals that guarantee visibility and scientific impact.
My experience as both researcher and editor has taught me that the foundation of proficient written scientific communication is a competent reading habit. Only by being a regular, savvy “consumer” of the scientific literature can one appreciate what is required to “produce” a research paper suitable for publication. A competent reading habit is much more than being able to read scientific English. It means being able to navigate with agility within a paper's contents to find needed information, evaluate papers rapidly for relevance and quality, interpret data in tabular and graphic form, determine the strength of the evidence, and spot red flags of poor quality. It also means feeling comfortable finding both strengths and weaknesses of published works, i.e. having a culture of critical appraisal. Being a demanding reader helps one appreciate the need for rigor, precision and information richness in scientific communication; this positively impacts upon one's writing.
Regular reading of research papers in one's own field is also important because it exposes the reader to the specific language and style of that field. This familiarity through reading is the basis for the genre approach to teaching scientific writing, in which novice authors study a corpus of high-quality articles and identify patterns on which they can model their own works.
The communication of research findings is invariably done in English. Writing in English requires knowledge of English grammar, a large vocabulary, and an understanding of how English academic texts are structured. Ideally, researchers are already fluent in English when they begin their careers, having studied the language in public schools and during study abroad programs. Given the importance of reading the scientific literature for a career in medicine or biology, English proficiency should be a prerequisite for entering these degree programs. Researchers with poor English language skills are disadvantaged, both in interpreting the research literature and in contributing to it.
The research paper is structured into four main sections (Introduction, Materials and methods, Results, and Discussion; IMRAD) plus several smaller, yet not less important text elements. Altogether, this articulated structure plays an important role in writer-reader communication, since it guides both authors (in organizing their information) and readers (in finding needed information). The correct distinction between a method and a result and between an introductory statement and a interpretive comment makes an article easy to be evaluated and increases its scientific impact.
Scientific writing, like scientific reading, is not tied to the linear order of the text. A research paper is not written, nor read, from abstract to conclusions. It is composed according to a systematic process that comprises a general approach to composing a research paper and particular strategies for the main sections and other text elements. Mastering these writing procedures minimizes the likelihood of inserting numerical errors and conceptual inconsistencies, and facilitates the production of a coherent text.
Since 1964, the Declaration of Helsinki has provided ethical guidance for conducting clinical studies that are useful, safe and respectful of the human subjects who are investigated. The Declaration of Helsinki is produced by the World Medical Association, a federation of national medical associations of almost all nations of the world. Over the years, the Declaration has undergone several revisions which extended its scope, so that today it sets standards not only for ethical research practice but also for transparent research reporting, such as the need to indicate sources of funding and to declare conflicts of interests.
Alongside the Declaration of Helsinki, numerous other guidelines promote quality reporting. The most known is the Uniform Requirements for Publishing Manuscripts in Biomedical Journals. Like the Declaration of Helsinki, the Uniform Requirements have expanded in scope over the years, so that today this document deals with authorship, conflicts of interest, privacy, overlapping publications and more. Other examples of such guidelines are the CONSORT statement for reporting randomized controlled trials and the PRISMA statement for writing systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Understanding and adhering to these standards, independently of national requirements, are essential parts of the research-publication process.
In a research paper, much of the content of the Introduction and Discussion sections is based on already published works. Proper attribution to the original sources is a fundamental aspect of written scientific communication, for both creating an accurate, solid evidence base for the new text and respecting the achievements of others. Authors need to know what are citable documents and how their selection impacts upon the quality of a manuscript, how to place citations within the text to substantiate statements and help readers retrieve the source materials, and what are the repercussions — both professional and scientific — of failing to attribute correctly. Moreover, they must know how to reproduce the ideas of other authors through paraphrasing, a type of rewriting in which selected content is summarized using an original word choice and linguistic structure.
The skills of citation and paraphrasing are receiving renewed interest because of the increasing awareness that manuscripts of inexpert writers often contain plagiarism. Plagiarism is a broad term that encompasses several poor writing practices that vary in severity. Author plagiarism, which means taking a published document, substituting the author's name with one's own, and republishing it as original, is intentionally deceitful yet rare. Surprisingly frequent, however, are other less serious forms of plagiarism, such as self-plagiarism (presenting parts of one's own published texts as original content) and microplagiarism (“copy and paste” writing). Although copy-paste writing may seem to help create a document with correct grammar, the microplagiarized parts of text are not original — a fundamental requirement for any article to be published as an “original report” — and do not always integrate into the flow of the arguments, creating a problem in logic that readers readily perceive. The availability of software that can identify pieces of text copied from already published works is an additional reason to avoid this poor writing “shortcut”.
Continue on to the following sections:
- Challenges for Italian authors
- Teaching scientific writing to NNES authors
- Learning opportunities for Italian authors
- Suggested reading
Valerie Matarese, Ph.D. © 2010. You may copy, distribute and display this document and derivative works based upon it provided that credit is attributed to "Valerie Matarese, Ph.D. — Up To infotechnologies, Vidor (TV), Italy".
Document created 22 March 2010.
Download the full document of this white paper in PDF format: Teaching and learning publishing skills.
For further information, please contact Dr. Valerie Matarese at +39 - 0423 - 985191 or info @ uptoit.org