scholarly journals An Author’s Guide to Mastering Research Communication Skills: Introduction of a Medical Manuscript

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamer El-Sobky
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Academic Experience ◽  
Research Communication ◽  
Academic Medical ◽  
Publication Quality

Skilled academic/medical writing is critical to research communication. The fundamental sections of a scholarly manuscript are introduction, methods, results and discussion. The introduction of a medical manuscript is aimed at briefing readers on the clinical extent and public health context of the research problem. It must justify the essentialness of the research to the scientific community and reveal any underlying research novelty. Skillfully conceived, designed and performed research protocols that are unskillfully presented can lose scientific credibility and impact. Without research communication skills authors would not be able to display the usefulness of their research for the scientific community. Generally, research communication or medical writing training/skills is underrepresented in curricular systems of medical schools globally. This can challenge publication quality and quantity of early-career authors/researchers. The author presents the academic experience he accumulated through peer review and supervision of vast manuscripts and theses. This article aimed at presenting a comprehensive roadmap for academic writing of the introduction and at identifying its common pitfalls.

scholarly journals Book Review: Keys to Running Successful Research Projects: All the Things They Never Teach You

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 258
Author(s):  
Patrick Baumann
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Academic Experience ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Academic Researchers

In any field, research is a process involving many steps and can feel overwhelming even to experienced researchers, with many researchers wondering where to start. As a means to combat this challenge, <em>Keys to Running Successful Research Projects: All the Things They Never Teach You</em> by Katherine Christian is a how-to manual for academic researchers. It accounts for those in every level of the academic experience, from doctoral students to early career professionals to research leaders. However, the focus is on early career professionals, especially in the sciences.

scholarly journals The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia (full text of book)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Wiseheart Sarnecka
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Workshop ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Early Career ◽  
New Faculty ◽  
Writing Group ◽  
Self Compassion ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Writing Practice

Research is all about writing, but most PhD programs don’t teach students how to produce the writing needed to get a PhD, publish research, or win fellowships and grants. Plus, the academic environment can feel as cold and harsh as the South Pole. But just as penguins form social huddles to survive the Antarctic winter, researchers can form writing groups to help them learn how to write more, write better and be happier in academia. The Writing Workshop tells you everything you need to know about forming and running a successful writing group, and provides invaluable tips on how to become better at and more comfortable with academic writing. Written by a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, this friendly guide is aimed at early-career researchers such as PhD students, postdoctoral scholars and new faculty members. Chapter topics include: How to form and run a writing workshop; how to plan research and writing projects over the long (one to five years) medium (ten to fifteen weeks) and short (one week) terms; how to establish and maintain a regular daily(ish) writing practice; how to write a literature review, research article, funding proposal or presentation; and how to revise for clarity at the document, paragraph, sentence and word levels. There are templates to help students set writing goals and log their writing practice, plus in-class exercises to help writers learn to hear the difference between effective and ineffective writing. Running through the book is the theme of well-being, and the idea that creativity comes from self-compassion rather than self-punishment. Writing is not only a way of producing scholarly output, but also a way of thinking, learning and generating new ideas. A regular writing practice grounded in a supportive community is something that every early-career scholar deserves and, with this book, it’s something every early-career scholar can have.

scholarly journals Improving together: better science writing through peer learning

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Stiller-Reeve ◽  
C. Heuzé ◽  
W. T. Ball ◽  
R. H. White ◽  
G. Messori ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Peer Learning ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Science Writing ◽  
Writing Groups ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Writing Group ◽  
Group Members

Abstract. Science, in our case climate- and geo-science, is increasingly interdisciplinary. Scientists must therefore communicate across disciplinary boundaries. For this communication to be successful, scientists must write clearly and concisely, yet, the historically poor standard of scientific writing does not seem to be improving. Scientific writing must improve and the key to long-term improvement of scientific writing lies with the Early Career Scientist (ECS). Many interventions exist for an ECS to improve their writing, like style guides and courses. However, momentum is often difficult to maintain after these interventions are completed. Continuity is key to improving writing. This paper introduces the ClimateSnack project, which aims to motivate ECS's to develop and continue to improve their writing and communication skills. The project adopts a peer-learning framework where ECS's voluntarily form writing groups at different institute s around the world. The group members learn, discuss and improve their writing skills together. Several ClimateSnack writing groups have been formed. This paper examines why some of the groups have flourished and others have dissolved. We identify the challenges involved in making a writing group successful and effective, notably the leadership of self organized groups, and both individual and institutional time management. Within some of the groups, peer learning clearly offered a powerful tool to improve writing as well as bringing other benefits, including improved general communication skills and increased confidence.

scholarly journals Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa T Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Early Career Researchers ◽  
Competitive Disadvantage ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Research Endeavour

In a contradictory fashion, researchers, their departments and universities simultaneously recognize the unpredictability of fieldwork experiences and outcomes and help establish a bureaucratic system of planning every component of their research. Ethnographic unpredictability and its consequences are a fact of fieldwork and it is essential that researchers and institutions are prepared to view these as part of interpretable data, to learn from them and not mask them. This article examines ethnographic unpredictability through the lens of sexual violence which I experienced during my doctoral fieldwork in Sierra Leone. I show how I redirected my research and renegotiated my position as an academic. I discuss the culture of risk and analyse the influence of neoliberalism on the university. I describe how ‘market logic’ conceptualizes unpredictability as competitive disadvantage. I show the impact that the imaginary ‘perfect academic’ has on early career researchers and the complicity of mainstream academic (re-)presentation in nourishing the image of the ‘in-control academic’ through muting personal field experiences and vulnerabilities and silencing unpredictable occurrences in academic writing. I conclude with recommendations on how personal situatedness, vulnerabilities, and transformations can be approached as factors in every research endeavour which must not pose threats to an institution’s competitive advantage.

Identity-trajectory: Reframing early career academic experience

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 952-969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn McAlpine ◽  
Cheryl Amundsen ◽  
Gill Turner
Keyword(s):  
Early Career ◽  
Academic Experience

The use of general and specialized corpora as reference sources for academic English writing: A case study

ReCALL ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Yeon Chang
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
English For Academic Purposes ◽  
Discourse Community ◽  
Academic Experience ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Training Corpus ◽  
English Writing ◽  
English Speaking

AbstractCorpora have been suggested as valuable sources for teaching English for academic purposes (EAP). Since previous studies have mainly focused on corpus use in classroom settings, more research is needed to reveal how students react to using corpora on their own and what should be provided to help them become autonomous corpus users, considering that their ultimate goal is to be independent scholars and writers. In the present study, conducted in an engineering lab at a Korean university over 22 weeks, data on students’ experiences and evaluations of consulting general and specialized corpora for academic writing were collected and analyzed. The findings show that, while both corpora served the participants well as reference sources, the specialized corpus was particularly valued for its direct help in academic writing because, as non-native English-speaking graduate engineering students, the participants wanted to follow the writing conventions of their discourse community. The participants also showed disparate attitudes toward the time taken for corpus consultation due to differences in factors such as academic experience, search purposes, and writing tasks. The article concludes with several suggestions for better corpus use with EAP students regarding the compilation of a corpus, corpus training, corpus competence, and academic writing.

Supplementing Basic Graduate Level Courses With Conference-Based Research Communication Experiences

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Reid Bush ◽  
Sam Leitkam ◽  
Craig Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Graduate Level ◽  
Research Communication ◽  
Life Problems

Two difficulties are commonly identified for early graduate-level students that hinder their growth in the academic community. First, students in graduate school engineering courses find the basic material difficult to relate to real-life problems. Second, early career graduate students have little practice at presenting research in a professional format (e.g. ASME conference).

Pitfalls and Misconducts in Medical Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miltos K. Lazarides ◽  
Evangelia Gougoudi ◽  
Nikolaos Papanas
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Medical Society ◽  
Scientific Integrity ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Peer Reviewers ◽  
Scientific Truth

The objective of medical research is the quest for scientific truth, as well as the communication of new knowledge to the medical society through publication of novel results. Journals publishing these results rely on the trust that all persons involved (authors, peer reviewers, editors, and publishers) remain honest, following the rules and ethics of scientific integrity. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and a wide spectrum of pitfalls and misconducts may occur, ranging from less serious violations of ethical rules to most serious ones. In ascending order of severity, these include borderline questionable practices (HARKing [Hypothesizing After the Results are Known] and hyping), redundant publications, authorship misconducts, plagiarism, and all types of fraud (data falsification or fabrication). Awareness of all these fraudulent practices is essential to mitigate misconduct in academic writing.

scholarly journals Communication Ambassadors—an Australian Social Media Initiative to Develop Communication Skills in Early Career Scientists

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack T. H. Wang ◽  
Cheryl J. Power ◽  
Charlene M. Kahler ◽  
Dena Lyras ◽  
Paul R. Young ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Early Career
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