HOW TO PUBLISH IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS

You don’t have to be a beginner in the paper-writing business to benefit from this course. We’ve had senior scientists join, after they had published 20 or more papers and they still benefitted a lot from the course. You will learn how to make your established writing process more efficient and how to write better papers with less effort.

Absolutely, we will take you by the hand and give you an introduction to the whole process. If you’re planning to write a paper in the near future or are in the early phase of drafting one, you are at the right spot. The course will give your paper writing plan a tremendous push and you will surprise yourself with the progress you have made by the end.

The aim of the course is not to overwhelm you with a lot of details on writing papers but give you relevant and hands-on guidelines for how to write your paper. You will work on your own paper draft in 20+ exercises during the three days. All exercises can continue to be used after the course so that you know how to complete your paper.

This is the perfect situation- you’ve already started writing the paper and now you can use this paper and make a major leap in coming ahead with it. Of course, you can use the paper for all the exercises that we run during the course, so that you leave with a paper that has substantially progressed and improved.

There is no specific preparations to make before you take this course, apart from that you should be committed to writing a paper. We advise only that you have a paper idea, or topic you could write about, if you are not in the writing process yet. To facilitate this thinking, we will send you some information prior to the course to guide you.

Selecting the appropriate journal for your paper is part of the course content. Whether your paper gets published or not really depends on whether you submit it to journal A or B. It’s great if you already have some ideas where you could submit a paper, but we will look at this question in detail during the course.

The world of academia is huge, and many different disciplines have their own traditions and practices. There is of course not one size that fits all, but when we deal with paper writing, we deal with communication and the same rules of communication apply to many fields. We’ve had students from fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, environmental sciences, geosciences, psychology, history, archaeology, economics, sociology and many, many more … and they all were able to transfer the steps and guidelines they learned to their fields and get published.

Every course is different, what makes ours unique is that we guide you step-by-step using a real paper that you are going to write. Thus, instead of hearing what you might potentially encounter when you write papers, you will actually apply your knowledge directly to your own work and end the course with an advanced paper draft. If this was not covered in your previous course, you will definitely benefit from joining ours.

We have been supervisors ourselves and we know there are many great people who advise students, yet, it is often a single perspective that you’ll hear, even if the person is well-informed. What we do differently from your supervisor: We survey many publishers, editors, reviewers and authors across academic fields to hear about the problems and challenges authors have with their papers. Based on this information we develop our guidelines, which clearly go beyond the perspective of a single supervisor.

The more important question is how much time you can set aside for writing your next paper. Before the course days, it is useful to think about a paper idea you want to develop in the course. Otherwise, it is not a lot of extra work needed to prepare for this course. You will spend some time afterwards to finalise your paper, but this is why you joined the course. We give you great tips on how to make this process as time-efficient as possible.

Everybody on the course will get a digital course certificate. It states the number of hours you spent on the course and state the ECTS credit points that you have acquired. You can submit our certificate to your graduate programme.

Many elements of writing papers are very similar, independent of the paper type that you are focussing on. The course subject matter centres around writing scientific research papers, but if you are writing a review paper, a methods paper, a short communication or a discussion paper, you will equally benefit from it.

This is a live-online course where we all will connect using video conferencing tools. You would need to have a desktop or a laptop computer with webcam and speakers or headphones as well as a good Internet connection. This is all you need and for many of us at our home-offices, this is what we have.

We are very much aware that many PhD students or other researchers are running on a tight budget and the Corona pandemic has probably even sharpened this situation. For this reason, we decided to provide this one-time offer of an especially reduced course fee for ALL students. The real course value is much higher but we want to give everybody a chance during the Corona pandemic to participate.

You were probably registered for a conference that has now been called off, or you had planned to attend a summer school or another course that was cancelled. Investigate whether you can reallocate your budget and invest it in your career development by joining this one-time chance for getting a quick-start in paper writing.

No problem, for this reason we offer you a payment plan that you can pay the course fee over 3 months, see the options at the check-out.

If you want to pay the course fee by invoice and not via the online payment system that we offer through PayPal, OR if you need an invoice for your department please contact us at [email protected]. 

Our course instructor, Gunther, not only has a background in science himself, he studied natural sciences, social sciences and humanities with a PhD in natural sciences. He researched and taught at various universities and research institutes across Europe, served as an Associate Editor for an international peer-reviewed journal, and regularly reviews papers for journals. For 13+ years he has coached and advised academics from all fields to help them get their papers written and published in journals. Gunther has collected all the essential experiences as author, reviewer and editor during his academic and professional career to teach you how to be a successful author of a journal paper. Gunther is also the co-author of the SMART ACADEMICS Blog providing guides on boosting performance and careers in academia. 

Find out more about Gunther on LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or on his website.

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