Tips to excel in scientific writing

If English is not your native language, take a look at this 6-minute read with tips on how to write papers and grant applications

  • If you can’t find a suitable phrase in your first draft, leave a blank and move on
  • Start with the section you find easiest
  • Figures can help you to construct a narrative and add a ‘wow’ factor
  • When doing literature research, note down each paper’s core message
  • Create a crude introduction and polish it later
  • Study other people’s writing styles
  • Use tools such as ChatGPT to fine-tune sentences

Bealls list: the dominant source of data in questionable, scholarly open-access publishers

Beall’s lists are not without limitations, however it is widely used in empirical research on predatory publishing to identify potential, possible, or probable predatory journals and publishers – including articles in Science.

Predatory journals are “those that tend to publish low-quality science and deviate from best editorial practices. They might use false or misleading information, or aggressive solicitation practices, and collect fees for publishing work that undergoes little editorial scrutiny” (Singh Chawla, 2021, Nature News)

It is recommended to read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided there, and then decide for yourselves whether to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here.​ Hopefully, tenure and promotion committees will also be able to decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards. 

VIII International Symposium SRUK/CERU – interested talks relevant to the day-to-day life of any researcher

On 12th of March, the Organizing Committee, being its primary concern the health and wellbeing of everyone, has decided to postpone the International Symposium until the WHO declares that the risk related to COVID-19 has disappeared. As soon as we know the new date, we will publish it, in order for you to have greater certainty about your travel schedule and plans.

Date to be confirmed!!! The VIII International Symposium SRUK/CERU (new date different from 10-12 of July) to be hold in Oxford! With its theme Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (A. C. Clark), we will look into how science has evolved in a way that was very difficult to imagine in a not so distant past. More details to follow, here and on SRUK social media.

Speakers on Leadership, Science Policy, Science Divulgación (youtuber, )
Grant proposals, Resilience for researchers wellbeing, Time Management… Be ready to develop soft and hard skills and meet other colleagues to share goals and maximise opportunities and benefits.

International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation: 11, 12 and 13 Nov

One of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector is ICERI2019. This year, the 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation will be held in Seville (Spain) on the 11, 12 and 13 of November 2019.

After 12 years, ICERI has become a reference event where more than 700 experts from 80 countries will get together to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and educational innovations. The 2019 edition of ICERI is sure to be among the most successful education conferences in Europe.

If you wish to share your experiences and projects in the area of education, research and innovation, you can submit your abstract proposal for ICERI2019 here: https://iated.org/iceri/call_for_papers

KUDOS: A Researcher Tools

An online platform that helps any kind of reader find your work: whether colleagues, researchers inside and outside of your field, the scientific news media, or the general public.

After thousands of hours of hard work, you carefully wrote up the results, polished your manuscript through rounds of revisions, and received the good news that your article was accepted and published. You can turn the page and start the following task. Or you could act, instead of waiting for the world to discover your groundbreaking work.

Kudos aims to help authors increase readership. Rather than waiting for people to find your article or hoping that your journal will effectively promote it, you can use a tool like Kudos to increase your article’s reach. It is currently free for authors and paid for by participating publishers.

Kudos co-founder Melinda Kenneway at the 2014 Society for Scholarly Publishers (SSP) conference in Boston, said that she wants to give authors more “control” over the post-publication reach of their work:

In the past, authors were almost entirely dependent on their publishers to make sure their work gets found, read and cited. But with almost 2 million new articles being published every year, it’s becoming ever more critical for authors to use their own networks and expertise to ensure their publications get noticed.

Kenneway

In an extensive article published in AJE  by Amy Beisel, four Kudos’ features are highlighted:

  1. An editable plain-text field to summarize your work and its importance to the general audience.
  2. Space for adding links to data sets, photos, graphs, media coverage… or to point readers to coverage or blog mentions of your work
  3. Integrated social media (incl. Facebook, Twitter) to easily share a link either your enriched Kudos article profile or the version on the publisher’s website.
  4. Impact evaluation from publisher data and activity on your Kudos article page (similar than in researchgate, Kudos shows the n# times your publication is viewed and downloaded, and the article citations). It has also integrated with Altmetric, a service that quantifies interest in your article beyond citation metrics. For each publication you’ve claimed on your Kudos dashboard, you can view its Altmetric score and the various inputs into that score, including blog posts, tweets, and comments on publisher sites that mention your article.

From the home page, you can search for any of your publications that has a registered DOI  in CrossRef, using the built-in search feature. By creating an user account, you can then manage your publications: first click the “claim” button next to each of your articles, then the article appears in your dashboard.

Kudos account dashboard

Your account dashboard displays a summary view of your claimed publications; the actions you have taken to enrich and share each publication; and various measures of your publication’s reach, including article views, article downloads, and Altmetric score (see below). By clicking on an article from your dashboard, you will open your article’s profile page hosted by Kudos.

Your article profile page includes several components: title, authors, and journal; a link back to the article’s version of record on the publisher’s website; and editable fields where you can place additional context to help readers understand the importance of your article.

Winter School on Sustainable Waste Management

Deadline of Competition Submission: 30 September 2019 (Texas local time)

Participate in the Essay Competition for winning a full or a partial scholarship to attend the ISWA-SWIS Winter School Jan 2020. This is the only international, 2-week course about sustainable waste management, including modern landfills and landfill mining. It offers a good mix of theoretical lectures and practical site visits (have a look to the programme here!).

Spread the word around!

Pint of Science 2019

Monday 20 May to Wednesday 22 May 

Pint of Science is an annual festival that takes place over three evenings in multiple cities around the world.

The aim is to present fun, interesting and relevant talks and activities based on the latest science research in an accessible format to the public, in a pub setting. For that, researchers prepare fun and engaging talks and demonstrations aimed at a non-specialist, general public audience and based on their real research. 

In Sheffield, topics like Have we got time to waste?, Sound and vision and The future of healthcare, among others, will be represented.

Women & science: movie + discussion

‘El enigma Agustina’ is a 2018 documentary about Agustina Ruiz Dupont, a fictional Spanish scientist that fought to break her way into the male-dominated scientific community of her time (1900-1930). The film is followed by a round table discussion about the topic ‘Women in Science: past, present, and future’, with the leading actors in attendance.

When? Friday 12 Apr 2019, 18:30 until 22:00.
Where?: Muntpunt, De Wolken +5, Munt 6, 1000 Brussels.

Book your place: Here

Organizer: Científicos Españoles en Bélgica (CEBE) in collaboration with FECYT (Fundación Española para la Ciencia Y Tecnología), the Spanish Embassy in Belgium (Spain Arts and Culture) & Muntpunt 

Responsible Research and Innovation: what really is it? what to write?

The Marie Curie Alumni Association, in collaboration with EuroScientist, hosted a round table on “Responsible Research and Innovation: a check-up” on March  2018. The full event was recorded and is available here.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a buzzword in European science in the last few years. Scientists must fill in the RRI section in their European project, and sometimes they do not know what to write there. Others are anxious to have the RRI tag attached to their communication and PR activities. But what really is RRI? Why is it needed? How could science and society benefit from this approach? The strict definition of RRI implies a radical change in the way of conceiving scientific projects from the very beginning, bringing a wide range of stakeholders (from companies to activists, from designers to patients…) in defining the scientific agenda. Are researchers prepared for that? What is the actual level of implementation of RRI in European science? What policies are there in place to facilitate this process?

Making science count in policy making

Representatives of the most important stakeholders participated in the round table:

  • Rosina Malagrida, La Caixa Foundation, RRI Tools project
  • Gerrit Rauws, Director at King Baudouin Foundation
  • Anne Loeber, NewHoRRIzon consortium

The round table is moderated by Dr. Michele Catanzaro (physicist, freelance science journalist for Nature, El Periódico, and other outlets).

This is a free on-line (only) event organized by the Marie Curie Alumni Association, in collaboration with EuroScientist.

Retractionwatch: an indispensable tool in scholarly publishing

Since August 2010, there is a place for recording  studies no longer reliable. The blog retractionwatch.com created the first database of retractions, with nearly 18,000 retractions so far, stretching back decades. There are well over a thousand retractions each year and this database inform about scientific misconducts.

Retractionwatch is doing deeper dives, prompting to file public records requests for reports of misconduct investigations and other materials (and their co-founders to urge universities to do a better job with them). In the past year, retractionwatch has collaborated together with journalism organizations, to bring readers stories that go deep and reach larger audiences than retractionwatch can on the blog. There are their established partnerships with STAT and Science, where they continue to break news and help readers make sense of developments.

Some of the most impressive stories related to retractions and academic misconduct include:

Can you share yours in the comments below?

This non-profit organization have received some foundation support from MacArthur Foundation, the Helmsley Trust, and the Arnold Foundation. The founders, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, are not taking salaries from the organization. One can contribute with a tax-deductible donation to The Center For Scientific Integrity or contribution, follow them on Twitter, like them on Facebook, add them to your RSS reader, sign up for an email or subscribe to daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in their database, you can let them know here. For comments or feedback: team@retractionwatch.com.