challenges in academic publishing role of english...

Challenges in Academic Publishing Role of English Language

Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.


Disclaimer All content used on this presentation is owned or licensed by Crimson Interactive Inc. or its affiliates under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Some content may have been blocked for confidentiality reasons. Unauthorized use of any part of this presentation by any other party is prohibited. Breach of this condition is liable for legal action.

Agenda

Tips on journal selection

Tips on compiling research in a written format

How to write an academic paper – do’s and don’ts

Academic publishing landscape in Latin America

Checklist for manuscript submission

Important steps in the publication process

Correct usage of English language


From 2000 to 2010, Latin America witnessed a high growth rate of more than 9% per year in scholarly output

Latin America’s relative citation impact has been improving by 1.6% per year

Latin America contributes to ~10% all articles published in Dentistry, ~11% for Agricultural & Biological Sciences, and ~12% for Veterinary Medicine

From 2000 to 2010, increase in the number of publications led to Latin America contributing to 4.4% of the world’s annual output of scholarly papers

Between 1996 and 2016, the number of citable scholarly outputs by Peru has increased 10 times

Academic Publishing in Latin America (1/3)


Figure 1: Latin America’s annual share of total scholarly papers and 5-year relative citation impact



Figure 2: The prevalence of open access publishing in Latin America



Types of Papers

Research/Original articles: Most frequently published papers

in all disciplines

Case reports: Mostly published in medical journals; also in

economics, etc.

Review articles: Such articles are generally written by authors

on invitation from journals and are related to the latest

research in a particular field

Communications/Letters: Short articles to share a new

development or process


Beginning: Read Before You Publish

Six questions to ask yourself:

What approaches have other authors used?

What research methods or methodologies have they employed?

What conclusions have been drawn?

What is missing from these approaches, methods, or

conclusions?

What can I do differently from what has already been done?

What are the best journals to publish my article?


Brainstorming: Compiling Your Research

• Make connections

• Group your ideas/data under different headings

• Try to answer the two following questions:

– What is the aim of my research?

– What do I hope to discover/show from this data?

• Order your information from contextual information to specific

data

• Ensure that every claim you make has accurate data to support

it


The Research Funnel

Broad research area

Literature review

Gap in research

Your study

Research questions

Research aims Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.

Structuring Your Academic Paper

• Title

• Abstract

• Introduction (including Literature review)

• Methodology

• Results

• Discussion (including Conclusions)

• Works cited or reference list

IMRaD format


Title

Title is the reader’s first contact with your work

and must get them hooked!

Your title should

• Clearly state the key concepts

• Explicitly state the findings

• Use field-specific keywords

• Be finalised at the end


Abstract

Abstract must convince the reader to keep

reading!

Your abstract should:

• Be a miniature article (structured or unstructured)

• Be concise

• Sell the importance of your paper


Introduction

The introduction explains why your research matters

Your introduction should

• Introduce the topic

• Provide general/background information

• Introduce the aims or argument of your paper


Literature Review Literature Review Clearly state your own position and reasons for reviewing the literature Body • Clearly organize the literature by theme and provide brief summaries and

interpretations of each area • Start with a general overview of the literature and go on to address the

literature that relates to your specific research question Conclusion • Summarize the most important aspects of the existing literature and

evaluate the current state of the literature reviewed • Identify significant flaws or gaps in existing knowledge and outline areas

for future study • Link your research to existing knowledge • Use the literature as support for what you are proposing


Methods

Methods should include:

– Description of the study site

– Details of the time of data collection

– Protocol for collecting data

– Details of the experimental or sampling design

– Details of any computational research methods used

– Organism(s) or subjects studied

– Description of how the data were analyzed Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.

Results

Results should include

• Only the results that are relevant to your research question

as outlined in the Introduction

• Your data in graphs, figures, or tables

• A summary of the data in the figures or tables

• A conclusive statement on the entire study


Discussion

Discussion should include Clear introduction • Outline basic structure • Restate aims of research Body • Clear and logical • Should express a central idea

Tips: • Present results in an interesting

manner • Show unexpected results and

try to explain them • Indicate which results are

significant and why • State meaningful comparisons

and conclusions


Discussion should also

• Remind the reader of the research question being addressed or

the hypothesis being tested.

• Tell the reader what you want them to get from the data.

• State which differences are significant.

• Highlight the important trends and comparisons.

• Indicate whether the hypothesis is supported, rejected, or

partially supported.

Discussion


Conclusions

Conclusions should contain

• Brief summary of the scope of the paper

• Topic and research aims given in the Introduction

• Reiterate your most important findings

• A general statement about how this topic relates to its context

and to the wider field surrounding your research


Which of the following are types of research manuscripts accepted by journals?

– Review article

– Correspondence

– Scientific news highlight

– Original article

– Letters/Communications

Spot quiz

Answer

• All except scientific news highlight


English is the universal language of science

Most well-known journals are published in English

Publishing in English allows worldwide projection in one’s area of research

It provides more possibilities of visibility of your research

Importance of Publishing in English


Importance of Publishing in English

Figure 3: Ratio of the number of journal articles published by researchers in English to those in the official language of eight different countries (1996–2011). Source: Scopus Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.

• English words do not have a gender

Spanish vs English

• Adjectives are placed before the noun in English

• English has more usage of prepositions

Spanish: Este es un perro viejo. English: This is a brown dog.

English Spanish • The gift is in the box • The box is on the desk • The desk is in the room

• El regalo está en la caja • La caja está en la mesa • La mesa está en la habitación

English Spanish • a window (feminine) • a city (feminine) • a car (masculine)

• una ventana • una ciudad • un coche


• Negations are more complicated in English

• Possessive pronouns don’t exist in Spanish

Spanish: Usually just putting no before the verb will negate it. English: There are variety of prefixes—like “non-,” “un-,” “dis-,” “in-“ to imply negation

Spanish: El gato de Pedro English: Peter's cat

Spanish vs English


Active vs. Passive Voice

An author may write a sentence in one of “two” voices—active or passive.

The active voice emphasizes the performer (or agent) of the action:

Wind disperses plant seeds.

Smith et al. investigated the relationship. The passive voice, in contrast, emphasizes the receiver (or product) of the action:

Plant seeds are dispersed [by wind].

The relationship was investigated [by Smith et al]. Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.

The American Medical Association’s AMA Manual of Style

recommends that “In general, authors should use the active voice, except in

instances in which the author is unknown or the interest focuses on what is acted upon.”

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

(APA) has similar advice:

“Prefer the active voice…The passive voice is acceptable in expository writing and when you want to focus on the object or

recipient of the action rather than on the actor.”

Active vs. Passive Voice - Preference


Parallelism refers to using elements in sentences that are grammatically similar or identical in structure, sound, meaning, or

meter.

Parallelisms

Karakus et al. compared the energy performance of CS-based schemes to conventional schemes

Karakus et al. compared the energy performance of CS-based schemes to that of conventional schemes

✔


Parallelisms

To correct faulty parallelism, match nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, and phrases or clauses with similarly constructed phrases or

clauses.

Although this is an attractive approach for noise reduction, it requires setting up multiple microphones and to know the positions of the microphones in advance.

Although this is an attractive approach for noise reduction, it requires setting up multiple microphones and knowing the positions of the microphones in advance.

✔


Redundancy is the unnecessary use of two or more words to describe the same thing.

Examples of redundancies in English

• Actual fact – A fact is by definition something that has already been confirmed to have happened.

• Major breakthrough – A breakthrough is already major and significant. There is no reason to say that it is major.

• Unexpected surprise – By definition a surprise is going to be unexpected.

Redundancy


In your scientific paper, use verb tenses (past, present, and future) exactly as you would in ordinary writing.

Past tense

Work done: We collected blood samples from ... Work reported: Coyle et al. observed the opposite behavior in …

Observations: The conversion rate was close to 95% …

Present tense General truths: Microbes in the human gut have a profound influence on ...

Atemporal facts: This paper presents the results of . . .

Future tense Perspectives: In a follow-up experiment, we will study the role of . . .

Verb Tenses


Add emphasis using • Undoubtedly

• Indeed

• Obviously

• Admittedly

• Particularly

• Especially

• Especially “Metal fixed orthodontic appliances have a long history of use, along with attempts to improve upon their structure, material, and color, especially the aesthetic requirements, which have attracted more and more focus in recent years.”

• Obviously “The test result of the stress-strain curve is shown in Figure 1. Obviously, the elastic modulus and viscosity coefficient of the wires decreased with increasing temperature.”

• Indeed Indeed, the results from independent t-tests show that the accuracy scores were consistently higher in the massed learning group than in the distributed learning group (Table 4).

Pointers While Writing Content


Show cause using • For

• Because

• Since

• As

• Because “Because a central venous line was not inserted, we tentatively initiated dopamine infusion at 5 μg/kg/min, which was increased to 10 μg/kg/min; however, his hypotension worsened (Fig. 1).”

• Since “Since the outputs of linear models do not satisfy the constraints on probabilities, linear regression might not be suitable as the probability estimator.”

• As

Such hedge needs are too large to be fully met by U.S. and European banks’ capacity to provide dollars as they became keen to squeeze assets due to recent regulatory changes.



Compare data using • Similarly

• Likewise

• Similar to

• both…and

• Similarly “Similarly, by increasing the sonic conductance Cr, the pressurised gas can be exhausted to the atmosphere immediately to avoid negative work.”

• Both…and “These results show that fungi possessing ligninolytic activity at 0°C are abundant under snow cover, and they belong to both Basidiomycota and Ascomycota.”

• Similar to “After rehabilitation, the perception of life quality by the present study group was similar to that of the control group.”



Effective Academic English Language Use

Some tips on Forecasting!

• The whole paper (“The focus of this paper is...”)

• Another section (“The physical properties are presented and analyzed in Section 5”)

• The current section (“This section will examine...”)

• A previous section (“In the previous section, we demonstrated that...”)

• Passage immediately preceding or following (“The objectives are as follows:...”)


Acknowledging the Source: Citations

End of the sentence … as shown in a study conducted by the University of

Melbourne (Davis, 2015) … as reported by/according to Davis (2015)

Beginning of the sentence • Zizek (2015) argues that… OR According to Zizek (2015), … • In his most recent book, Zizek (2015) makes a case for…

Some reporting verbs suggest, define (as), claim, challenge, explore, reveal, analyze, confuse, allege,

speculate, recommend, hypothesize, advise, explore, assess, debate…


Tips for In-text Referencing

Insert an in-text citation wherever your work has been influenced by someone else's work like when you:

• directly quote someone else’s work

• paraphrase someone else’s work

An in-text citation consists of

• author’s surname and year of publication

• a footnote or endnote providing details of the publication

• a page number for direct quotations


Figure legends A figure legend is a miniature abstract for the

figure. There are four components that should be in

every figure legend: Title - Methods - Results - Figure definitions and

descriptions

Figure and Table Captions

Figures have legends and tables have titles

Figure 4: Effect of one crown spacing harvesting method on stem height of pine trees One crown spacing method was used to selectively harvest pine trees in the Range Pond State Park. Fiver years after this event, stem height (Mean ± SEM) of pine trees in harvested plots (n=22 trees) was significantly higher (df – 40 m, Unpaired t-test p <0.005) than non-harvested plots (n=22 trees).

Title

Discussion


Titles for Tables

Titles should be kept brief but informative. If needed, explanatory footnotes can be inserted under the

table.

Figure and Table Captions

Title

Footnotes


When referring to tables and figures in the main text of the article, you can use:

• Clauses beginning with ‘as’ As shown in Table I, lipids were found in hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, pizza and doughnuts. • Passive voice Mean weights for samples are shown in Table 1. • Parentheses Each sample tested positive for the three nutrients (see Table 2).

Referring to Tables and Figures


Tips for Reference Lists

• Your reference list should be constructed in complete adherence to

the style that you are using

• Style guides for referencing can be found on most university library

websites

• Your reference list should include the following information:

Author names; publication year; title(s) of

book/website/article/journal/newspaper (where applicable);

publisher and city of publication (for books); volume, (issue)

and page numbers (for journal articles); URL (for websites)


How to Prepare Your Article for Publication

Re-examine your article and emphasize what is unique.

• After your draft is ready, leave it for a few days before carefully examining for errors in grammar, spelling, and syntax

• Ensure that the argument is logical

• Have your article edited and proofread by someone more

experienced or comfortable in doing so

• Check the required word count and adhere to the required style guide


How to Choose the Right Journal

Choose a journal that

• Matches the scope of your manuscript

• Is read by your target audience

• Is database accessible

• Has good visibility (Open Access = High visibility!)

• Is highly ranked

• Is peer reviewed

• Has well-known researchers on its Editorial board

• Has an acceptable copyrights policy Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.

Checklist for Manuscript Submission Check the journal website

Email the Editor, introduce yourself, and explain your article sending an attachment of your:

• Abstract

• Keywords

• Bibliography

• Any recommendations for peer reviewers

Enquire as to how long the Editor expects the review process to take and when you can expect to hear a reply

Be polite and concise Copyright © 2017 Enago Academy | All Rights Reserved.


Disclaimer All content used on this presentation is owned or licensed by Crimson Interactive Inc. or its affiliates under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Some content may have been blocked for confidentiality reasons. Unauthorized use of any part of this presentation by any other party is prohibited. Breach of this condition is liable for legal action.

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