Academics are sometimes afforded the opportunity to take part in outreach programmes. Usually, the target audience are schoolchildren and young adults. It can be challenging to create engaging content for an outreach programme, so here are a few tips to get you on your way.

This is a recording of our Ask the Experts webinar for Peer Review Week 2021: Identity in Peer Review.

Literature review is a necessary process when performing research. But how can you start to plan the literature review? In this article, we will discuss four key factors to consider as you plan your literature review so you can engage with and benefit most effectively from prior and current work in the field.

Once you have completed your literature search, you can then start thinking about creating a structure to best explain the literature and to link existing studies to your paper. Before that, though, you may still need to make some key decisions regarding what literature or texts should be included and excluded in your paper.

After you have reviewed prior and current studies in your field, the next step is to document these studies so that you can easily refer back to them and summarise them in your paper. This article provides some ideas to help you better structure and write your literature review. 

In addition to the literature review, there are many other opportunities to discuss or engage with prior studies in your research. This article offers guidance on how to include other studies or literature in different sections in a research paper.

As you read research papers, you may notice that there are two very different kinds of review of prior studies. Sometimes, this section of a paper is called a literature review, and at other times, it is referred to as a critical review or a critical context. This article aims to clarify the differences between the two.

Communicating the significance of your results to the wider scientific community can be a challenge. This is more difficult if you’re not writing in your first language. This article presents some simple ways for you to make your writing clearer and more accessible by breaking up your ideas.

Several specific errors seem to appear frequently in the papers we edit, particularly those written by researchers whose first language is an East Asian language such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean. This article examines a few of the most common mistakes regarding tenses and provides some tips on how to avoid them.

One common way to improve the flow of a paper is by linking, contrasting or just introducing your sentences with some common words or phrases. However, many of these words or phrases are often misunderstood and misused, particularly by those whose first language isn’t English. This article takes a look at some of the most common such words and phrases and gives a few pointers for avoiding their pitfalls.

When writing in English, it is usually preferable to avoid the repetition of words and phrases within a sentence. However, it is sometimes difficult for academics writing in English as an additional language (EAL) to find ways to avoid saying exactly the same thing several times. This article offers you some tips on how you can trim repeated phrases from your writing and make it easier to read.

Previous articles in this series have covered particular aspects of academic writing that can be difficult for those whose first language is not English. This article focuses on a mixture of other common confusions that we tend to see, especially in academic papers written by people whose first language is an East Asian language.

Written through the lens of Open Access Week, this articles compares and contrasts the open access publishing model with the traditional subscription-based model, illustrating the many opportunities open access publishing offers the scientific/academic community.

In the light of Open Access Week, this article discusses the current trends in open access (OA) publishing. It discusses aspects such as the growing awareness and acceptance of OA journals, the increase in funding sources and the emergence of open aggregators and consortia. Towards the end, it also cautions against the imminent threats to the OA publishing model, such as through predatory journals, and therefore calls for a vigilance on various related fronts.

This article explores and clarifies article publication charges (APCs) in OA publishing and offers ideas on how to make APCs even more financially and structurally equitable to researchers worldwide – all in the form of frequently asked questions (FAQs).

This article explains the differences between the two most popular open access (OA) publishing models - gold OA and green OA - in order to help research authors decide between them when submitting their article for publication.

Open access (OA) journals exist in three primary forms: hybrid, transformative and pure OA. Each form represents a proposed solution for OA publishing for a constituent audience and owner group. While touching briefly on the pure OA journal, this article focuses on the hybrid and transformative journals.

One of the great hopes and promises of academic open access (OA) publishing is that it will connect academia with industry and governmental policy makers. Such connections form structural equity, which in turn promotes diversity and inclusion. OA plays a significant role in ensuring equality among researchers from developing and developed countries. Many bridges do exist, as explored in this article.

Whatever your reasons to publish your research, as an academic scholar you want to amplify your research impact, reach and citations. This article explains ways to leverage open access (OA) journals and outlets to do just that.

The study background explains the importance of the study, provides a brief overview of the pertinent research thus far and posits how your research will address existing gaps.