Vicky & I are still on our PhD-courses-marathon, and this week we had the chance to attend a very interesting workshop on how to write and publish scientific papers (“How to write and publish scientific articles in Social Sciences and Humanities”).
We had the best possible teachers, maybe you’ve heard of them: Nicolás Robinson-García, Daniel Torres-Salinas and Evaristo Jiménez Contreras. As a small course, it was a very intimate and useful experience. All our individual questions were solved, and we could learn from each other’s doubts.
During the two-day course, we learnt what exactly is a scientific article, its structure (introduction, methodology, results, discussions and conclusions), how to include graphs and tables and how to properly create a bibliography. Moreover, we understood the importance of choosing a proper and adequate journal and of being aware of its specific rules.
We were also given a small intensive explanation on the Impact Factor, its history, and its internal mechanisms. They also gave us advice on how to handle authorship, how to navigate a peer review evaluation and on the current (and growing) importance of Open Access.
We can perfectly understand why this course is one of the most popular ones within the PhD program, and we really encourage anyone who has the chance to take it next year! If you want to check out the materials they used (and learn, for instance, what is the “Torres-Salinas writing technique”), you can access Nicolás’s materials here and Daniel’s presentation here.