Company News, Training Services and Author Publication Tips

You have decided to write an academic paper and submit it for review. You feel excited to have completed your research study and are ready to share the results. You have selected a journal; read all the submission requirements and you are ready to write. But you hit a wall and you are not sure how to move forward – you have writer’s block.

What sorts of writing habits do successful researchers have?’ What does ‘being successful’ mean?

A thesis is a big undertaking, usually 60,000 to 80,000 words.  It’s likely to be the longest thing you’ve ever written, and when it’s complete, you’ll be examined on it.  It’s very common to be worried about whether you can write a successful thesis.  If you’re writing in English, and it isn’t your first language, that can be an even bigger worry.

The good news is that, if you get accepted for a PhD, it’s because your department believes in you.  However, they don’t expect you to already have all the experience you need.  You don’t have to already be familiar with the type of language expected in your thesis, or know how to structure it.

Module 14 will provide you with tips for increasing your chances of publication. It takes you through why papers are typically rejected and how to increase your chances of publication - in the Pre-writing, Writing and Post-submission stage.

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There are many ways to share the results of your research. Building a profile as a researcher can help you to become more well known in the field, enhance the visibility of your work, and increase the number of researchers who read your work when it is published in journals. You can share information about your research through a professional website, Twitter, social media platforms such as LinkedIn and by maintaining a research blog.

The methods section is very straightforward to write, but it does require a lot of technical detail, so writing this section can be time-intensive. In this section, you describe how you conducted your study, and making sure that this section is clear and complete is of utmost importance to readers and reviewers. Journal reviewers will weigh this section heavily during the peer-review process, as will journal editors.

In the results section of your academic paper, you present what you found when you conducted your analyses, whereas in your discussion section you explain what your results mean and connect them to prior research studies. In other words, the results section is where you describe what you did, and the discussion sections is where you describe what this means for the field.

Writing errors are common across academic papers submitted for publication review. These can lead to a decision to reject, especially if they are prevalent throughout the submission. Even if these errors do not result in a rejection, they will result in significant revisions, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

This module is designed to help you understand the peer review process. It talks about peer review, explains the peer review process, describes the types of peer review and shares tips on how to become a great peer reviewer.

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Module 13 will help you navigate the revision and resubmission process. It helps you understand the process, it gives tips for revising, resubmitting and going through the revision response.

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This module provides guidelines for increasing visibility, measuring and tracking impact.

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The goal of the theoretical framework, or literature review for your paper is to present and synthesize research that other researchers have conducted and provide an explanation of how your study connects to other research on this topic.

Module 6 provides tips for choosing a great title and writing a strong abstract and introduction. We discuss how to write a great Title, what to include and avoid while writing an Abstract and how to structure the Introduction section.

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This module will help you write a strong Theoretical Framework / Literature review. It takes you through why it is important to write a Literature Review, what form the components of a Literature Review, and what to avoid while writing it.

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This module will help you write a strong methods section. It explains the goals and components of a Methods section, and tells you what mistakes to avoid while writing this section. 

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This module is designed to help you to write a strong results and discussion section. Learn more about what to include and what to avoid while writing a results/ discussion section.

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This module will provide you with tips for enhancing your paper with visuals. It teaches you how to tell a story with data, how to present great graphs and tables and meet the requirements of the journal you are submitting your article to.

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Module 11 will help you decide when your article is ready to submit. It provides tips and checklists for writing a Cover Letter, and instructs you on common mistakes that you need to avoid.

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Module 2 talks about including descriptive statistics in academic papers. In order to decide which descriptive statistics to include in your paper, and how to include them, it is important to revisit what descriptive statistics tell a reader about the data. Even if you are not using quantitative data in your own papers, as a consumer of research it is important to understand what descriptive statistics are and know how to interpret them when you read scholarly papers that include them.

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This module is about telling a story with your data. It explains how to supplement the text with visuals that are informative, non-repeating and easy to understand:

●Are there any data that readers might rather see as a display item rather than text?

●Do your figures supplement the text and not just repeat what you have already stated?

●Have you put data into a table that could easily be explained in the text such as simple statistics or P-values?