Academic Writing - Science topic

Yes, I think we can discuss what academic writing is so that we all have the same understanding. Then we can later review each other's work and give construcive feedback.

Hi Tze,

Please, check this PLOS article on "ten simple rules for getting published"

Bourne PE (2005) Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published. PLoS Comput Biol 1(5): e57. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010057

Guidelines for Writing a Scientific Paper: http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/~smaloy/MicrobialGenetics/topics/scientific-writing.pdf

This is an excellent book on scientific writing:

"Scientific Writing and Communication" Papers, Proposals, and Presentations

Angelika H. Hofmann

Bests,

Rolando

Is it sexism to write He/she, with "He" first?!

I personally tried using Google books. Type in the title of the article and search. I wonder if there is any other method.

This is a complex issue - a brief but good summary can be found here: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/CP177.pdf

Good luck

Valid question. I think it depends on how well you synthesize your literature.

Most people here seem to be authors who say they are looking for reviewers for the manuscript they want to submit.  I am very surprised if they mean by this that they are looking for reviewers who will send their opinion about the ms to the journal editor.  This is incorrect, it is not the authors' responsibility to find reviewers.

Let me summarize my 30 years of experience in science publishing, as an author, and as a reviewer.  Reviewers work for the editor, not for the authors.  Some journal editors ask for authors to *suggest* reviewers.  But this is only a suggestion.  Most international journals don't even ask for this suggestion. They don't need to, they have the databases and the software to do this automatically.  In any case, it is the editor's responsibility to choose the reviewers and you should never even suggest any unless *specifically* asked to by the journal.  (And, I would advise, if you are asked to find, or even suggest, reviewers, check very carefully to make sure that the journal is really a top journal).

If you are asked to suggest reviewers by a top international journal, then use JANE http://jane.biosemantics.org/ to find authors who have published similar work.  JANE lists the authors in order of relevance to the index terms you have put in.

You're right, Dr. Ahmad. Online forums and social media do not distinguish between experts and laypersons in terms of the content posted. The idea of an online forum is to allow maximum participation for the very reason you have mentioned---that a layperson may have valuable insights that will probably not be tapped through any other medium.

Ideally, all content in such forums should be used with discretion. All replies to a thread need to be considered together, rather than in isolation. When you consider all points made, you can get a feel of the general opinion of the public about the concerned topic. Of course, it helps to check individual profiles to determine each contributor's credentials, but a contributor's profile should not color your opinion of the contribution made.

Further, I don't think it fair to assume that a layperson can contribute a valuable response only because he/she has more time at hand. In the present context, "layperson" would imply anyone not directly working on/familiar with the topic of discussion, but this does not mean that this person is not otherwise occupied with his/her own work. In many cases, it is best to consider the contribution independent of the contributor.

Finally, I would suggest that online discussion forums be used only to form an initial view on a subject. Thereafter, it's important to develop your opinion further by reading the relevant literature or directing questions to known experts. This way you can have reliable sources to cite if the said subject should come up on a public forum again.

A "national publication" is by definition one whose main printed output is distributed within e.g. India. An "international publication" is one whose printed output is not limited mainly to one country. As you hint, national/international is a poor proxy for research quality. To answer your question, only 1. is a national publication.

Thanks for the reply and I understand you're contesting criticality. So did Brookfield as cited by Wikipedia that I quoted in my initial question. His original paper can easily be viewed in (http://www.adulterc.org/Proceedings/2000/brookfields1-final.PDF ) and it is cited at least 13 times according to Google Scholar.

In a former thread where we discussed the question of Wikipedia citing, all contributions insisted (explicitly or implicitly) in the necessity of such critical thinking while using that source of information. In the present thread, the question is about extending critical thinking to the whole academic writing process.

Link to former thread: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/Academic_Writing/post/Citing_Wikipedia

Dear Sindiswe, fortunately there are software programmes available that assist lecturers in assessing submissions for plagiarism. Even search engines such as Google assist us in picking up plagiarized sections. These tools are most valuable especially when teaching our students how to use information without committing plagiarism.

Try to avoid footnotes entirely. They are a pain to typeset and a pain to read. If something is important enough to say, say it properly in the text.

Even though Wikipedia is my personal favourite source of information, the articles available on it are not always written by experts. Even when they are, anyone can still modify them. I know a few people who modified the articles for pranking their friends. (They did get caught in a while and were blocked by Wikipedia.) Assuming that all articles are written by experts and have not been tampered with, the articles still have not gone through a rigorous peer review. Therefore even though it can be used as a quick source of information, it can never stand out as an authentic and credible scientific information website.

I do not think that an editorial rejection can be based solely on minor grammatical mistakes, but it is obvious that manuscripts with substandard language and writing style can not be published either. If i would have to choose between the conditional (i.e. after language revision) acceptance of a top quality manuscript or accepting a mediocre research written in clear English, i would definitely choose the first option.

I think selecting a journal must be based on a combination of factors. Ideally, the journal's target audience should be the primary factor. You want to make your research available to the largest group of people who will find it most relevant and useful. Next, to further the cause of high-quality science, you should want to select journals that enforce a rigorous unbiased peer-review system, regardless of the review time.

Unfortunately, with the increasing pressure to publish and the fact that a researcher's publication record can directly affect his/her career advancement prospects, researchers tend to lose sight of these noble aims and instead consider things like the journal impact factor and review time/speed of publication.

Given the constraints in the publication scenario today, the best way to select a journal would be to (1) shortlist a few journals whose scope matches the topic of your study, (2) weigh how much each of these factors---speed of publication, wide readership, high impact factor, peer review process---matter to you, and (3) select a journal that offers you the best option for the factors you value most.

Dear Darío,

Scopus is a product of Elsevier. As you already knew, Elsevier has different products:

Scirus: a search engine

ScienceDirect: Electronic journals full text database

EMBase: Bibliographic database for biomedical papers

Scopus: Bibliographic database for all of sciences

It is more likely you encounter Publisher Bias in searching only Scopus. Elsevier may cover all or major part of EMBase and ScienceDirect in Scopus because it may lead in more accessibility, more purchase, more money, more citations and more Impact Factors. So, who knows, you may miss great papers from other publishers or you may find less journals from other publishers in Scopus.

There is one case you can only utilize only one database such as Scopus: in scientometrics studies.

Retrieval of all of related papers is impossible in many literature reviews because there are unpublished materials within a library in a far country, but you should consider not to miss many papers because it may lead in duplicate research with no or less novelty.

I always advise one resource is not enough.

If your work is not a systematic review, Google Scholar is most comprehensive (not perfect) available resource.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such internationally acceptable classification for journals.

Based on different purposes, people may use different categorizations:

1. Librarians utilize Bradford's Scattering Law to classify journals in three groups for core journals selection.

2. Researchers utilize Impact Factor or SCImago indicators such as h-index as usage criteria.

3. People may categorize journals based on indexed databases: ISI journals, PubMed journals.

None of aforementioned methods show quality but they justified for certain purposes.

We never could identify high-quality journals based on a ranking. Journals contains papers. Some papers may have low or high quality. Quality in journals is based on papers not journals so we could say paper titled "....." published in Journal of A have high-quality but we could not say journal A have high quality. As rarely someone study all papers published in all issues of a journal, it is hard to rank journals.

I think the answer to your question depends on how you use the term 'grounded'. It can be argued that any theory which is derived or tested empirically is 'grounded' in the data in one way or another. However, 'grounded theory', in the sense used by Glaser and Strauss, would be defined more strictly: in this case, all your constructs should -in principle- be derived from the data alone (rather than the literature or your intuitions). The extent to which it is possible to shut off pre-existing knowledge is, of course, a contested point. To return to your question, it seems hard to argue that a study which builds on a pre-existing hypothesis is 'data grounded' in the latter (stricter) sense, unless you can show that this hypothesis somehow suggested itself from the data.

Descriptive studies should become a source for further hypotheses related to causality. Like descriptive epidemiology considers the questions who, when and where and gives food to analytic epidemiology, good description of the study sample in a good article usually shows where to go with bivariate and multivariate analysis.

I largely agree with the comments made in the question as well as Daniel's answer. We can use IFs to compare which journals in our own field have the highest impact, which is also a fairly good indicator of how selective the journals are. I think most of us do this routinely when deciding where to send our next manuscript. If it is describing a major breakthrough of wide scientific interest, you want to go with an high impact journal. Long before IFs were calculated, scientists knew quite well the relative prestige in publishing in different journals - it's a part of the competitive research world we live in.

IFs should not be used, however, to evaluate individual researchers, as they may well have published great science in low impact journals. Here, citation frequency (and H-index) is a much more appropriate bibliometric parameter.

Also, a lot of strange things happen with the IFs of individual journals, as indicated both by Roland and Daniel, so one should be aware of this. An interesting read is http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012/05/07/understanding-the-journal-impact-factor-part-one/ outlining e.g. how Acta Crystallographica suddenly jumped from IF 3 to 54 due to a single paper which has been cited over 26 thousand times. I think that tells us that we should be fairly familiar with the journals we publish in and their reputation, and not go blindly by IF. The IF of Acta Crystallographica is back to 2-3.

The definitive guideline for what abstracts for clinical trials should contain can be found at http://www.consort-statement.org/extensions/data/abstracts/.

The STROBE Guideline is useful for observational studies: http://www.strobe-statement.org/fileadmin/Strobe/uploads/checklists/STROBE_checklist_conference_abstract_DRAFT.pdf

For other types of guidelines, check out the "Equator" network (http://www.equator-network.org/home/).

Janos, that's a somewhat different issue, but I'm with your mentor on that. Academics trade in ideas, so you'll seen citations in the literature to "personal communication" and to other people's "unpublished data", etc.

Yes - Academic Writing can be taught, and like any other educational aspect, we need to see it from teachers as well as students perspective.

Teaching Writing - should be in a more applied manner, which is through workshops and iterative feedbacks. Revisiting ones worknotes and changing it according to different academic requirements is also key.

Studying Wriring - should be more application oriented. Requires more reading, reflecting, and reacting (writing). Every student has their own style of writing and these academic forms are more linguistic in nature when it comes to novice writers. Therefore, students studying writing require to revisit their work and practice, take opinions of multiple evaluators, and should be encouraged to do more publications to gain academic credibility.

In Malaysia, we recommend Journals which are indexed in PubMed or ISI , the impact factor is important for academics.

Yes, that *is* a disturbing thought. But don't you agree that if a meta-analysis is properly documented (as it should be in order to get published), it will be relatively easy to verify the calculations? I wonder if the risks involved justify whatever gain there is from falsifying the data.

I think that the greatest danger is that, when conducting the meta-analysis, you assume that the primary data are accurate, i.e. you assume good faith on behalf of the other researchers. But if their data was fabricated / falsified then the meta-analysis would produce false results.

Another danger with meta-analyses is related to 'salami publications'. Sometimes, researchers publish data from the same study in different articles. If this is not clearly stated, then there is a danger that the researcher doing a meta-analysis will count the same study more than once. Again, here's a serious threat to the validity of the meta-analysis, despite the reseracher's good intentions.

You can find the exact definition of the impact factor on Thomson Reuters site :

But you have also a very good explanation on wikipedia :

Wikipedia say :

"In a given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years.[1] For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2008, then its papers published in 2006 and 2007 received 3 citations each on average in 2008. The 2008 impact factor of a journal would be calculated as follows:

A = the number of times articles published in 2006 and 2007 were cited by indexed journals during 2008.

B = the total number of "citable items" published by that journal in 2006 and 2007. ("Citable items" are usually articles, reviews, proceedings, or notes; not editorials or Letters-to-the-Editor.)

2008 impact factor = A/B. "

On Wikipedia you have also the criticisms about the use of impact factor, and it is something very important because the impact factor is not always the best criteria.

A lot of articles and discussions exist about impact factor. You can see it.

You have also an important statement on inapropriate use of impact factors here :

I agree with Tatiana Andreeva that good reviews have to be written by real experts, not by students. There is a new trend to publish the literature overview of a PhD thesis as a review. I am against this trend, because many of these reviews are of a poor quality (and thus receive only a small number of citations). A good review must be more than just a summary of the work done by other authors; a good review needs to be critical and the author has to give a very good outlook for further research.

A difficult part of writing comprehensive reviews is to find and collect all the literature and to distill the most important information out of it. You also have to judge whether a published result makes sense or not (you have to be very critical). I can tell you that reading the literature for reviews with more than 1000 references takes a lot of time. The author of a review has also to make sure to keep the same writing style throughout the whole review.

This may be another thought - "charity" by the scientific community. Basically say, if you are able to, pay USD 50 or even 70; if you are not able to, tell us how much you can pay and waiver in exceptional cases.

In this case, for every full payment of USD 50, you have buffer to help 4 other groups.

"Although the number of citations does not increase by raising the number of authors, but co-author citations increase by raising the number of co-authors. For example, in clinical medicine the percentage of co-author citation is more than self-citation because of the high number of co-authors and team working in this field. Of course, co-author behavior has no relation with author himself/herself, but continue to have relations with his/her co-authors. So, we propose that co-author citations should not be considered for calculating h-index of highly-cited researchers"

From: Leila Dehghani, Reza Basirian Jahromi, Mazyar Ganjoo. 2011 Citations to highly-cited researchers by their co-authors and their self-citations: How these factors affect highly-cited researchers' h-index in Scopus. Webology, Volume 8, Number 2

Dear friend, very interesting question.

However, the easiest way is searching the related document by typing the keywords into google scholar. You will find some related articles.

If yet to find the articles, do not hesitate to let me know. InsyaALLAH I will help you in detail.

Good luck. Dr Zol Bahri - Universiti Malaysia Perlis

it seems that the impact factor (IF) of the journal is what matters. Few papers in higher IF (HIF) journal may be better than a lot of papers in low IF journal.

Pros: you will get these nice sounding names: Nature, Science, Cell and etc. You will, positively, draw the attention of selection committees when applying for a grant.

Cons: you may never get past one or two of of these. Publishing in a HIF-journal typically requires longer times and bigger investments in research expense.

Also, there is the increasing believe that journal impact factors, when applied to individual scientists, are purely artificial and outdated means of judging one's worthiness in science.

My recommendation would be to just publish your work in a peer-reviewed journal and let people judge it.

You see High Impact Factor for my paper is not going to help anyone noe even me in any way... But if available widely it can be useful for others...... As Sunil Varughese said Wide circulation of high IF papers, I dont think it to be correct. If calculated properly Views per paper will be much high for papers published in Open Access journal. And For Acceptance we should start a new debate on Selection Bias policy of these high IF journals. Name a renowned scientist in your paper and every crap will be published. So this is useless talking.

It is better to publish our results in journals specific to the topic and aim of our research. Beacuse this will enhance the knowledge of researchers in that particular field.

Not everyone can get access or subscribe to all journals. If the research works are published in field specifc journals, those interested or working in that particular area can subscribe that partcular journal rather than subscribing or purchasing a multidisciplinary journals for only a few related articles.

My guess is that this is a very discipline-specific question, so it's difficult to make a recommendation in the form of, say, the number of pages that make up the Minimum Publishable Unit.

I think that each paper should make a new and substantive contribution to the body of knowledge, i.e. something that cannot be easily extrapolated from previous papers drawing on the same study. So for example, if I had conducted a study describing the dialect of people in a region, it would likely be inappropriate to publish separate papers for each individual village, or age group which contained similar findings. Such 'salami publishing' would be frowned upon by many journal editors, and is borderline malpractice. You may want to browse the COPE case repository for examples of publications that were deemed redundant. ( http://publicationethics.org/cases )

On the other hand, there are cases when cramming too much data in a single paper would cause you to lose focus. For example, you may have some insights that are interesting, and theoretically significant, but adding them to an article would force you to remove important corroborative evidence for your main claims. Sometimes you can get that from the reviewer's comments. In these cases, it is probably acceptable to cut these insights out and develop them into a new article.

In summary, the criteria seem to be that each article should be internally coherent (i.e. tell one story), and novel (i.e. tell a new story). I realise that this is probably too general to be of practical help. :/

Like other mobile technology has a downside and the upside is. We highlight the negative aspects of new technologies and modernization of fear and escape, but we should welcome it and we're looking to escape their problems

To add a point to our discussion...

Recently we submitted a paper on aspirin to Nature Chemistry... The editorial board rejected the paper without even sending it for refereeing. We submitted it to RSC Chemical Science (IF: 7.5), got accepted without any corrections. The paper appeared as research highlight in RSC Chemistry World. Then Nature Chemistry editorial board approached us to seek permission to publish it as a research highlight. So from this one can assume how negligent was the editor in rejecting our paper even without sending it for peer reviewing...

Dear All, I don't think it is that easy to just dismiss the IF as a tool for reference. I agree that it is not an accurate measure of research performance, especially when you compare it over different research fields, which should not be done and a wise department head, scientific leader or advisory board will not do it. The problem generally begins when during evaluation not enough effort is spend on looking and understanding the scientific contribution of the single researcher or a department but rather the (too) easy short-cut of just counting biased scientific values. This will not significantly change if in a distant future the RG score may "replace" the IF. Who will judge the scientific quality of contributions to ResearchGate. Again it will be a peer group, which in and by itself is biased due to recent trends, importance of a field, number of researchers in a field. In addition, I do not believe that many of the senior scientist with busy schedules for reports, reviews, meetings etc. will have time to get involved in discussions on RG. However, the senior scientists are after all generally evaluating. Please, don't misunderstand me. I do believe that RG can be extremely helpful for the scientific exchange of ideas, methods and findings in the future but the RG score should and will, I believe, only be an additional reference point that is mainly important for RG itself. After all, if people take time to evaluate science, the quality becomes evident beyond the IF or any other rating system. If systems are highly unfair it is either due to the lack of time or hidden agendas for non-scientific reasons. While the latter is extremely difficult to control (even with an RG score), after all we are human, we should all concentrate on spending time to understand when we are asked to evaluate the work of fellow researchers.

1) MS Word is the worst program I have ever used for anything.

2) Despite what anyone tells you LaTeX is not actually very difficult to learn.

3) Since 95% of academic writing needs to be formatted as a manuscript and since different journals' preferred formats differ, LaTeX's separation of content and format makes complete sense. Need to resubmit, change the format package from Journal of A to Journal of B.

4) Very few journals actually provide LaTeX style files for their preferred formats and that is a crime.

5) Many journals explicitly require a MS Word .docx and not a .pdf (let alone a .dvi!)

6) 95% of academics use the most conveniently available software which is what:

a) they are used to

b) is pre-installed on their computer

c) they don't have to personally pay for

d) most other people use

7) Currently, that convenient standard is MS Word

8) It is very difficult for LaTeX users and MS Word users to collaborate.

a) For some odd reason, MS Word users have the logistical high-ground in the argument about which to use

So in the end, I use LaTeX for everything I can but I have to keep Word around.

There is some truth in it and yes, if we focus on a specific journal (for example, one with a high impact factor in this case) we may sometimes do certain characterizations which otherwise not needed or important. I think the key point here is..we have to make a balance between focusing on getting high impact journal articles and writing good articles which sometimes may not go into the so called high impact journals..

I have not tried that yet. I only read the instruction and saw that my journal will be ready for this procedure somewhat later.

I do not see your sphere of interest. But welcome to our journal anyway: http://andreevin.narod.ru/journal

You are completely right. Currently the citations are considered the most important tools for evaluating the scientific value. However, the impact factor is highly discipline-dependent, perhaps due to the speed with which papers get cited in a field. A journal can adopt editorial policies that increase its impact factor. For example, journals may publish a larger percentage of review articles which generally are cited more than research reports. Therefore review articles can raise the impact factor of the journal and review journals will therefore often have the highest impact factors in their respective fields.

Beyond editorial policies that may skew the impact factor, journals can take overt steps to game the system. For example, in 2007, the specialist journal Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, with an impact factor of 0.66, published an editorial that cited all its articles from 2005 to 2006 in a protest against the "absurd scientific situation in some countries" related to use of the impact factor. The large number of citations meant that the impact factor for that journal increased to 1.44. As a result of the increase, the journal was not included in the 2008 and 2009 Journal Citation Reports.

Taking all together you see that there a great controversy regarding using citations but have you got a better suggestion?!

I wouldn't disparage the help you can get from peers. Consider forming a writing group with a few other students. Meet once a week or once every other week. and make it FUN. You can critique a paragraph or a section at a meeting, but probably not whole papers (people won't have read in advance). Don't play teacher...

@Nalam, I think the same way. Open review might potentially generate some unpleasant inter-personal interactions (especially between authors of rejected manuscript and the reviewer who voted for rejection). I think the best option is double-blind review systems. Ideally, the names of reviewers, together with their revisions (and authors' response) should be additionally published (possible as on-line only appendix to the manusctript) after acceptance of the mauscript. This would make the whole revision process clear for all readers and would increase reviewers' responsibility. The question is what to do with manuscripts (and their revisions) that were rejected.

I think there is no need for italicizing et al., e.g. and i.e. However this is worth mentioing that there should not be put full stop after et because this is complete word. The full stop be put at "al." because this is an abbreviation. So always write et al. instead of et.al.

Hi

I think www.plagtracker.com

Dear friend, very interesting question.

However, the easiest way is searching the related document by typing the keywords into google scholar. You will find some related articles.

If yet to find the articles, do not hesitate to let me know. InsyaALLAH I will help you in detail.

Good luck. Dr Zol Bahri - Universiti Malaysia Perlis

Dear Silky

I think this webpage could answer you Q:

However for easier explannation:

Medline is a database of medical articles published in verified medical journals by Medline content advisory committee. You can search Medline via PubMed (see PubMed limits), Ovid SP, EBSCOhost and many other interfaces.

PubMed could be a search engine, a mini-database and a medical resource. Why?

- It is a search engine or search interface because when you are searching PubMed, actually you are searching:

- It is a mini-database because it includes in press and epublished papers from some of publishers. This records may be enter in Medline or PMC after publication [having a volume and page numbers].

- It is a medical resource because it presents some kinds of facilities such as Clinical Queries which is unique in terms of application.

How you could find out a record in PubMed results belongs to medline or not?

1. Open the record

2. If a record includes MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) at the end, It belongs to Medline because Only Medline records use MeSH. Or some records mention [PubMed - in process]

Hope it would be useful

Dear Hassan,

You might to learn about the Journal of Public Health in Africa, which I have been supporting through the Research Cooperative (see http://cooperative.ning.com/group/publichealthinafrica).

They have had only one issue so far, and would selcome any contributions on your research topic I am sure.

Best regards, Peter

When I teach, I often quote (aloud) various statements that I have picked up over the years. But when I started writing my book on getting published in international journals, I had to not only find the actual sources for all those statements but also formally request permission to use them. I'll get to plagiarism in a moment.

The rules of the game are fairly straightforward: when one is quoting another scholar, scientist, or philosopher in a professional paper for journal publication, a citation in parentheses (along with a full bibliographical citation) is sufficient. "'Social capital is.....' (Bourdieu, 19__).'" The author does not have to get formal permissions because the author is not making any money from using the quote. In contrast, if the quote is in a book for which a publisher plans to sell, then the publisher or the author has to get permission from either the publisher of the statement or, in some cases, the author's estate. (And permissions often cost money, e.g., I deleted a wonderful 13-word quotation, along with mention of the book it was in, because the publisher wanted about US $200 for its use.)

As for plagiarism, again, I think the "rules" are fairly simple: If one quotes directly from another party, using his or her exact words, one must give attribution or one is plagiarizing. This is where paraphrasing comes in. If one takes several sentences or paragraphs from another party but rewrites or synthesizes the material in one's own words, then all one has to do is give general attribution (e.g., "In relation to social capital, Bourdieu says that..."). The "that" is the signal that one is explaining what Bourdieu says, in one's own words, rather than quoting Bourdieu.

I also agree with an earlier comment that professional or student papers should not be composed primarily of quotations. While I will accept, say, up to 25% of quotations as a real stretch (fewer are better), more than that shows the student's or beginning researcher's lack of original thinking.

Moreover, as far as quoting from the internet goes, I have learned to take anything I read there with a grain of salt. For example, the well-known American saying "There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting" is variously attributed to Louis Brandeis, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway.... My advice is to make sure that you--and your students--do real research, not "Wikipedia" research, when looking for attribution.

It depends on the the research work; In life sciences and biology its very difficult to get authorship and publication in international Journal.As per my knowledge all publishing and press jpurnals requires little amount to purchase copyright for your work (Non reproducable).

The classical journals like Nature,lancet,science ,cell, blood..aceepts your manuscript with quality of work.The work peice will be Highly novel and Ideal than before reserch excersise on topic.

Its important to have a copyright for your work,With little charges it could be possible.The review articles were always reviewed by specialist of field.Most of the reviewers expects the reproducibility of your research.

The quality of reseach defined,

The Reproducibility, Novality, Ideal, and some times the reviewer and legal team will requires the follow up of experiments done ,like follow up in note book also.

It is not the question of splitting up the data. The fact is that when a researcher want s to disseminate the results of the study with various perspectives, keeping in mind the wide spread of the research implications for the benefit of the academic community, he can do it without distorting its originality. But at the same time he should also keep in mind that just for the sake of increasing the number of publication he should not merely repeat the papers. If different papers are prepared from same research work with different objectives included, for the wide spread of knowledge it should be welcomed.

@Ruby - The answer to your question is YES. I guess, this would be the first question in every researcher's mind. Excellent examples (of open access websites) given by Ms. Gabriela and Ms. Hristina in particular, are note worthy. But if you aspire to become a good researcher I would suggest your good-self to go behind the impact factor of a journal rather than its cost for publication. It is always a good way to start targeting the journal you intend to publish in, the number of articles (especially in your field of interest) published in that journal and its impact factor. I would suggest you to kindly have a look at the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) list of journals which throws light on the current impact factor of a journal, and is also a trusted citation index for almost every researcher (I believe).

P-value has frequent misunderstandigs. They are more extensively explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value. Here I present an extract of it :

"...To understand both the original purpose of the p-value p and the reasons p is so often misinterpreted, it helps to know that p constitutes the main result of statistical significance testing (not to be confused with hypothesis testing), popularized by Ronald A. Fisher. Fisher promoted this testing as a method of statistical inference. To call this testing inferential is misleading, however, since inference makes statements about general hypotheses based on observed data, such as the post-experimental probability a hypothesis is true. As explained above, p is instead a statement about data assuming the null hypothesis; consequently, indiscriminately considering p as an inferential result can lead to confusion, including many of the misinterpretations noted in the next section.

On the other hand, Bayesian inference, the main alternative to significance testing, generates probabilistic statements about hypotheses based on data (and a priori estimates), and therefore truly constitutes inference. Bayesian methods can, for instance, calculate the probability that the null hypothesis H0 above is true assuming an a priori estimate of the probability that a coin is unfair. Since a priori we would be quite surprised that a coin could consistently give 75% heads, a Bayesian analysis would find the null hypothesis (that the coin is fair) quite probable even if a test gave 15 heads out of 20 tries (which as we saw above is considered a "significant" result at the 5% level according to its p-value).

Strictly speaking, then, p is a statement about data rather than about any hypothesis, and hence it is not inferential. This raises the question, though, of how science has been able to advance using significance testing. The reason is that, in many situations, p approximates some useful post-experimental probabilities about hypotheses, such as the post-experimental probability of the null hypothesis. When this approximation holds, it could help a researcher to judge the post-experimental plausibility of a hypothesis.[4][5][6][7] Even so, this approximation does not eliminate the need for caution in interpreting p inferentially, as shown in the Jeffreys–Lindley paradox mentioned below.

[edit]Misunderstandings

The data obtained by comparing the p-value to a significance level will yield one of two results: either the null hypothesis is rejected, or the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at that significance level (which however does not imply that the null hypothesis is true). A small p-value that indicates statistical significance does not indicate that an alternative hypothesis is ipso facto correct.

Despite the ubiquity of p-value tests, this particular test for statistical significance has come under heavy criticism due both to its inherent shortcomings and the potential for misinterpretation.

There are several common misunderstandings about p-values.[8][9]

The p-value is not the probability that the null hypothesis is true.

In fact, frequentist statistics does not, and cannot, attach probabilities to hypotheses. Comparison of Bayesian and classical approaches shows that a p-value can be very close to zero while the posterior probability of the null is very close to unity (if there is no alternative hypothesis with a large enough a priori probability and which would explain the results more easily). This is the Jeffreys–Lindley paradox.

The p-value is not the probability that a finding is "merely a fluke."

As the calculation of a p-value is based on the assumption that a finding is the product of chance alone, it patently cannot also be used to gauge the probability of that assumption being true. This is different from the real meaning which is that the p-value is the chance of obtaining such results if the null hypothesis is true.

The p-value is not the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis. This error is a version of the so-called prosecutor's fallacy.

The p-value is not the probability that a replicating experiment would not yield the same conclusion.

1 − (p-value) is not the probability of the alternative hypothesis being true (see (1)).

The significance level of the test is not determined by the p-value.

The significance level of a test is a value that should be decided upon by the agent interpreting the data before the data are viewed, and is compared against the p-value or any other statistic calculated after the test has been performed. (However, reporting a p-value is more useful than simply saying that the results were or were not significant at a given level, and allows the reader to decide for himself whether to consider the results significant.)

The p-value does not indicate the size or importance of the observed effect (compare with effect size). The two do vary together however – the larger the effect, the smaller sample size will be required to get a significant p-value."

It is a an international conference concerning plagiarism, learning strategies etc.

Publishers ensure that certain important standards of legality and presentation have been met, and maximize scientific credibility through independent peer review of submitted manuscripts. They edit for clarity, consistency, and accuracy (a step which can take many hours of work for a typical manuscript). They publish articles in citable formats that are indexed by the major citation indexes. They print and distribute the resulting articles to libraries and subscribers, and make them available in online formats to subscribers and others, often with cross-linking of references, supplementary materials including video and sound files, etc. They ensure the long-term stability of their archive with distributed electronic back-ups. They publicize the journal and specific articles to maintain interest and the subscriptions that pay for the enterprise.

So they are a screen for quality and they maximize discoverability. If someone doesn't care about these things, they are of course free to place a manuscript on their own Web site and let others know about it, but since publishing a manuscript represents a significant investment by a publisher, the publisher generally wants to ensure that it is one that is going to be valued by researchers before agreeing to publish it. Researchers in turn value the sanction that this agreement represents.

Peer review or refereed journal is an academic term for quality control. Each article published in a peer-reviewed journal was closely examined by a panel of reviewers who are experts on the article's topic. The reviewers look for proper use of research methods, significance of the paper’s contribution to the existing literature, and integration of previous authors’ work on the topic in any discussion (including citations). Papers published in these journals are expert-approved…and the most authoritative sources of information for college-level research papers.

The Refereed journal has very specific guidelines for papers to be published (often this information can be found on the journal’s website), and a rigorous peer-review process (each paper will list when it was submitted to the reviewers, and when it was

accepted for publication…often several months apart!).

Finally all SCI (Science Citation Index) Journals are called as Peer Reviewed or Refereed Journals which are indexed by Thomson Routers.

Yes, Actually the Practicum in the educational colleges needs improvements. The elements for improvements are the following:

1. Standadized Program for the training has high effectiveness.

2. Assessment tools for pre, and post stages.

3. Effective supervisors.

4. Effective schools for traning.

5. Micro teaching sessions befor and suring the training.

6. Self evaluation bu the stident teachers themselfs.

For thesis purposes, if I may gently suggest ;-).... you will want to create a very specific question that you can design a study for. You can't prove languages are equal, but you can look at the impact of different languages on world views or accents on how others are perceived, etc. One of the things you might do if you are just starting is to find other people who have studied in this area and see what they have published and what they cite in their references. Connect with them if they are doing something that is of great interest to you. For example, a quick search led me to Dr. Shiri Lev-Ari who has done research looking at the effect of accent on people's credibility as well having an interest in how using different languages can impact our cognition.

You may have already started this kind of process, but just in case... http://home.uchicago.edu/~shiri/

Hi!

Maybe this could do some good: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623943.2011.591599

The editor of Reflective Practice journal published complete communication between authors of this article and reviewers. I found it very useful :)

Good luck with the work!

It has been update at 2012-1-4

You deserve the compliments for your programming plan of the research with creative contribution you wish to help the members as we all know that psy is a day to day creative area bringing new forces & the visualisation connected there with .

I am sure you are to receive some sort of inspiration to complete of your task.

The Best of Luck

Rohit Parikh

India

Someone here may be able to help: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88018776768

Dear Mr Abdul ,

Deserve compliments for selecting a life career of creative topics which have no end & itself .It is a containuing process percorating all the time new ideas & thoughts

The Best of Luck.

Thanks

Rohit Parikh

India

It would be very beneficial for research if universal standards for publishing could be agreed on, because like this, a lot of literature is going unnoticed, and is often disregarded. And obviously it’s a lot more work to the ones who do this work, because they have to check the specific norms again and again. At least Universities should agree on a standard. But, being realistic, I've seen so many different rules on Portuguese Universities alone, I think that standardize all would be a Hercules job...

Dear Virginia,

In the light with involvement of your subject coupled with an interest in academic writing we offer you all the time new challenges with motivation & new ideas .I am certain you may contribute for the members of your group & also helping your viewers in right line.

The Best of Luck

Thanks

Rohit Parikh

India

What you can't find here or in your university library, you probably will be able to find on Questia.

Thanks for these, books that I had never heard of. One that I like is "How to Write a Lot". It's a light read (and I found it hilarious), but with lots of very specific and easy to follow tips.

Silvia, Paul J. (2007). How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing. American Psychological Association. ISBN: 978-1-59147-743-3

To these very useful responses, I add the following from the US: just as too many cooks spoil the broth, too many writers can spoil the style. So a common form of collaboration is for the authors to send one agreed-on party their contributions. That specific party then writes the entire article in his or her style, sending a polished draft back to the others for comments, and so on. But this person--the one who did the actual writing--is always listed first.

In addition, when two people consistently collaborate, they often take turns, so that person A is first for this paper and person B is first for the next.

The Impact Points in Research Gate and the impact factor of journals are different from each other. The impact factor of journal is a product of ISI, as I stated earlier. But, the impact points in Research Gate are auto-generated by the system itself as someone hits any publication. It may not necessarily need to be cited somewhere else by any author. So important point to be noted here is that the impact point increases as the publication gets hitted again and again.

Note: The views shared here are solely based on the perceptions as the writer is not an expert of the system. Only Research Gate experts can give the details of it.

Wasiu Lawal, I highly recommend using the services of my company Academic Language Experts. We specialize in professional academic translation services from Japanese to English. You can learn more by visiting the website: www.aclang.com

If you want readers to trust you, you will have to make sure they understand:

why you used the type of data you did,

how you collected it,

what you did to analyse it, and

why you did it that way (including why competing methods weren't suitable in your case).

Much of this fits into what people traditional refer to as Materials & Methods (though it will have probably different names in social sciences and humanities) and will be one or more chapters in a thesis. Do each of these to the standard demanded by your field. The purpose is both to show that you understand what you are doing, and to establish confidence in your work. If your committee doesn't have enough from you to clearly understand these things, they cannot trust your results or conclusions.

His name should be moved to the acknowledgements section if there is any residue of his contribution. E.g., "Parts of the data were collected by ...". Otherwise do not feel guilty about removing his name.

I would say:

1) How to find a good advisor /mentor- It must be one who reads emails, gives you appropriate feedback and cares about your work. It is also good to find a mentor than to learn on your own (asking for help is not a sin, especially when starting out). In this regard be patient and not write to him on a Sunday and expect feedback on his time off.

2) Know the readership you are addressing- it is expected that your advisor/mentor/readership knows about the field, but this does not necessarily know about x paper in y obscure journal with z obscure formula, so be explicit and concise in your literature review.

3) Be careful with your FOG index. There are plenty of theories on these that can go either way, but just be mindful that it is a point worth considering.

4) Be mindful of the politics of research, especially if your research is part of a project being funded by an external entity

5) Pick a research area that you like but not that you are extremely passionate about.This will push you to finish and not get so emotional about it that you will keep on it forever or assume postures that will harm your work or progress

6) Welcome constructive criticism- self explanatory

7) Learn how a search engine works- whichever one you use learn how to do effective queries to get the search results of papers that are relevant to your problem.

8) double and triple check your experimental setup and results. it is difficult to establish a reputation and really easy to loose it.

My two cents

Supervisor should not compare between students, Because supervisor may have some students whose works are not time consuming or you can say they are lucky to get perfection in everywhere.Do not underestimate the other poor fellow who are not perfect now . Supervisor should be sticking with these type of students to get the best output rather comparing with his best one. Because it was the supervisor who selected that student and it is his duty to supervise him.

You can not expect a good positive result all the time. Some supervisor accuse student when they do not find positive result of an investigative study, lets say, anti inflammatory effect of ''A''. Its not necessarily that ''A'' got the desired effect, but many supervisors used to blame the student.

Though the relationship with the supervisor is professional, but if any family matters harm the student and thus affect the student, supervisor may come up as a friend and can provide mental strength.

A supervisor must know the psychology of the student.

Here is the link for MEDLINE criteria for inclusion of journals. If your journal meets the criteria, you may apply for MEDLINE.

Thanks for the tip. You also have http://lanyrd.com which is great.

My mentor taught me to never give up on a manuscript. In fact, it took us 15 years to publish one study, due to its controversial topic. When we finally saw it in print, after far too many rejections to even recount, it gave us a sense of accomplishment. Truthfully, the paper that ultimately saw the light of day was the very best version we had written. Together, my mentor and I published many studies together, in part, because we never gave up on any good ideas. Based on that experience and many others like it, I've taught my students to do the same.

But I understand the thrust of the question. No doubt, there are countless publishable projects that lie fallow simply because authors have become discouraged. Conversely, there are those who never fully appreciate the process in another sense. I refer to writers who keep submitting fatally flawed papers time and again until some editor takes pity on them (or has unfilled journal pages). What a shame. All that effort with so little to show for it, except frustration.

One answer to your question is that highly productive scholars continue to revise and resubmit their work until it becomes good enough for publication. Many less productive writers simply give up on manuscripts after comparatively mild critique. Last, there are those who can't seem to give up on their fatally flawed studies or ideas.

Neither I nor We is appropriate. The better way is to use passive voice e.g. "it is shown" or "it is implied," or to use phrases referring to your study, e.g. "the present study," "this study," etc.

Dear Najm,

You can search and download available styles from:

After download, copy them in styles folders available in endnote folder in program files or any destination folder you installed the endnote software.

Also, some journals provide their own styles on their own websites.

I'd like to comment here from the viewpoint of someone who is an academic (Humanities rather than Science), and also a professional academic editor and translator.

I agree with the insights given by Murat Duran and Pankaj Roy. The long-term study of translation protocols and the contribution of translation professionals greatly enhances the quality of translated texts for academic publishing.

High level professional translators only translate into their Mother Tongue and also carry out many other tasks. These include editing the text to match the academic protocols of the target culture (for example the use of headings, subheadings, thetic progression). They also 'transcreate', which is exactly what Pankaj focuses on in the entry above - that is they move beyond a literal translation of the text to make not only the words but also any images used communicate fluently to a reader in the target culture without compromising the meaning of the source text.

Not everyone is able to do all of these tasks, even if they are highly skilled linguists or even bilingual. The editing alone is a highly skilled and codified task.

However translation is one of those fields that encompasses people from many walks of life. Some translators have studied languages, translation or linguistics: some have another professional specialism (such as medicine or law), in addition to language skills: others gain their training through professional bodies (such as the UK Institute of Linguists). However all fluent translators work all of the time to improve their skills and enhance their knowledge of the appropriate protocols.

Having said all this, if anyone wishing to learn translation skills has in depth knowledge of a specialist area (such as law or medicine), that can be an enormous help when entering the field and dealing with texts with very specific key terms.

I agree that new knowledge only can come about by questioning previous ideals and knowledge. Although many researchers would like to have something brandnew and ground breaking atributed to them, the vast majority of good solid research and creation of new knowledge, comes from questioning what we already know, asking new questions and hopefully testing the hypothesis and in doing so provide another small piece of the puzzle as to what is.

Please also view 'How to Write a PhD Thesis' at: http://consultant-law-education-india-nepal.in/wordpress/

I suggest you PCA (Principal Component Analysis). You should find which variables or parameters are associated.

Dear all,

I want to suggest you to check this blog with many tips and tricks to consider while preparing your graphical abstracts

Best wishes

Hello -

What you're asking for are the MIQE guidelines. They describe the minimum information necesary for evaluating qPCR experiements. I attached a link for an article which can be found in PubMed although this one is full-text - that talks about these and includes a checklist. http://miqe.gene-quantification.info/

This link from Bio-Rad has a lot of tools for researchers and may prove useful as well.

Word choice is situation-specific, so I can't give an example out of context. But there are subtle differences in English between verbs like "imply" and "suggest." An editor can help you choose the strongest word that is also true about your findings. That way, you are being specific and suspenseful in one word (or as few as needed). I have come up with myriad phrases to report findings so that authors are on firm scientific ground but also leading the audience to see the most interesting implications.

I do agree with Agnes and Mahboob. In addition, there are a number of instances where published data may be used in one's work without a threat to originality. In these circumstances all sources MUST be acknowledged and referenced appropriately.

I undertake systematic reviews and other types of literature reviews. This type of secondary research involves the use of data (that is published data or sometimes unpublished data) mainly from primary studies/sources to collate and synthesize evidence to answer a specific research question. Other types of original work may require the use of published data in statistical or decision analytic models and other types of computations to assess, validate and investigate specific outcomes.

However, I need to say that treating data (published or unpublished) which has been generated by another person as your own is a breach of good practice in the research community.

If you are new to writing journal articles, I would recommend you study the book "Writing your journal article in 12 weeks" by Wendy Laura Belcher. The book is very insightful, and the author is well aware of problems encountered by people writing outside the USA or writing in English as their second language. However, according to the book, the "twelve weeks" is possible only if you already have your data analyzed and base your article on something you have already done, such as a thesis chapter. Starting from scratch would probably take longer in most cases.

My pleasure

I would also add; originality, evidence of critical and fresh thinking, building on previous knowledge in that field, and being precise and clear in your writing. Plenty of signposting using sub-headings helps the reader. Another important point is being reflective and showing evidence of that. For example, being self-critical and understanding what was good about your research - what worked, what didn't work, what might you change and explore in the future. Being able to defend your reasoning/arguments with evidence as to why you did the study the way you did is crucial too.

I think that's a complicated topic, how do you determine

the true? after the evidences? what happend if those

evidences are fake? there are so many examples about

fakes evidences in all order of things... well i believe

that your theme must be focused over specifics areas or,

better said, over relevants issues, politics is one of

them... in my country (Chile) the mass media are

property of the economics powerments groups in fact

are property of the conservadurism and reflect that

vision, in summary, they lie and change the core of

information and the government turns a blind eye.

I hope this opinion means something to you, good luck

Hi Manglien,

I am a science student and i am also awestruck over the fact that we actually do not have a normalizing criterion!!. I find H index also very irrational. But I think, if we are in position of judging some one's work, we should be little deliberate and should have in our mind the thought of going beyond the brand of publication to quality of publication. One solution to your question may be, we can have a look on some top journals of that particular field at random and see, how many citations do authors from best journals of that field get generally, so we may have a relative idea of the quality of work of author in that field, which we have already normalized according to other fields by comparing it with the citations in the said field.

but, this is just a speculation, somehow I find it working.

Hope it helps.

do let me know.