A rare post in French on a conference I gave last year on the status of author taken by students, mainly in the context of sciences and engineering (my field) but pointers given are quite general.
Le titre de cet article est celui d’une présentation que j’ai donnée l’an dernier dans le cadre de la Semaine sur la conduite responsable en recherche 2019 organisée par l’Université Laval.
Cette présentation vient d’être mis en ligne et est disponible ici: https://youtu.be/7MEplFlwW30!
You’ve been working hard, around the clock to get all the data out. You might even have submitted an abstract about your current to the great scientific meeting of your field (and maybe got to travel and present it). Now is time to plant the flag, leave your mark i.e. publish!
Have a look at this post over at Organizing Creativity: PhD Comics’ What is Open Access?
I always wondered what would be the single, most important advice I could give a new graduate student who is looking forward to have his or her work published at some point.
Sure the usual work hard, pick cutting edge topics, chose your advisor carefully and so on are the obvious suspects. But what about a single advice that would put in motions the necessary behavior to essentially “groom” the graduate student in being ready to publish?
After many years of mentoring, mine is read! Read published scientific papers in your field as much as you can and from day 1 on the “job”. Read for journals you are expected to publish in, from journals at the periphery, from more difficult journals to publish in (higher impact factor). Read also outside your field.
Make an habit to scan the usually suspects (for your field at least) once a month and read.
Not only will you know what is state-of-the-art but this will provide you the structure of a scientific manuscript, the language, what is accepted or expected. Note the good to excellent manuscripts, those that are easy to read i.e. that flows and tell you a story. What make them better than others you’ve read?
By the time, you are ready to talk to your advisor about publishing your results, you should have read hundreds of previously published articles.
As theory is not practice, you will also need to write as often as possible. The more you write, the easier it gets. But that’s my second advice 😉
Ruminating... 