The Author Skills modules engage you in a series of readings, hands-on activities and/or group discussions along with assignments designed to help you address many issues in the scholarly publishing process. How to read, write and publish research outcomes are some of the skills this training will help you develop. Join us to become more effective writers… and better researchers. The completion of the course will take 5-7 hours of instruction depending on the number of exercises finished. Topics include:
How to Read a Scientific Paper
An overview of the key activities needed to properly read and understand a paper. It discusses the types of scientific papers, organization of a paper, actions to take – to properly read a paper – and difficulties in reading scientific papers.
How to Write a Scientific Paper
Discusses key elements of publishing (ethical issues, style and language, structure and components of a paper including structured abstracts, the article submission process including peer review and author vs. reader priorities. It also includes an Appendix that summarizes the publishing process from a low-income country author’s perspective. The extensive exercises include assignments to write a structured abstract, designate keywords and, from abstracts of articles, decide which journal an article should be submitted to.
Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Plagiarism
Reviews the definition of intellectual property and how it links to copyright and plagiarism. Discusses copyright and plagiarism giving an overview of the concepts providing guidelines and resources. Finally the exercises review the material covered and provide questions to identify plagiarism in several documents.
Strategies for Effective Writing
Discusses the integrated topics of using concrete words and building forceful sentences and reviews the writing processes of editing & proofreading. It includes examples on how to write more effectively.
Web Bibliography
An annotated list of links to WWW based, full-text information on how to conduct ethical research, read and write a scientific paper, write a structured abstract, prepare manuscripts for submission and write footnotes and bibliographies. These links give the participants valuable resources that are available on the Internet.
Reference management tools
Reference management tools help scholars to create and manage their lists of references for research projects. Most tools are designed to organize citations into specific formats. Our trainng will teach you how to use two of the most used reference management tools: Mendeley and Zotero.
Research4Life is the collective name for five programmes – Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI – that provide developing countries with free or low-cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online. Find out more about Research4Life partners and programs at: https://www.research4life.org/about/ .
