How to publish a paper in International SCOPUS journal during your PhD?
It is believed that, to publish a paper in a good…for you and your university. How to publish a paper in International SCOPUS journal during your PhD? Even when you mention the quantities, they must be expressed only as precisely as is consistent with the method of measurement: if you measured length with a tape, you can give the length to the nearest half centimetre; you can give the length to the nearest millimetre if you used a digital device that was accurate to the nearest millimetre; and you can give it to the nearest micrometre (µm) if you used a suitable microscope.
Precision is not limited to numbers and quantities but extends to all writing. The exact word is what you are expected to use. An embryo and a foetus, for instance, are not the same: whereas an embryo typically refers to the yet-to-be-born from the 5th to the 8th week of pregnancy, a foetus refers to the same entity from 8th week onwards up to birth. In botany, not all the underground parts of a plant are its roots: rhizomes, stolons, corms, bulbs, and tubers are all different.
Using the correct term also shows your familiarity with the territory. Jargon in journal writing, after all, is what experts use and what you are expected to use in writing research papers because they are meant mainly for your peers. However, see if you can avoid jargon in the title of your paper. A recent study shows that jargon in titles leads to fewer citations for such papers (Martínez and Mammola 2021). The trade-off is particularly important if you are writing for a multidisciplinary journal. A term that comes to my mind is albedo: the more frequent meaning is the amount of the light hitting a surface that it reflects back, especially the surface of a planet or other body in space, but the word also refers to the spongy whitish tissue on the inside of the skin of a citrus fruit.
Academic writing is mostly impersonal. Because science is objective, academic writing usually sounds impersonal, and the use of personal pronouns is discouraged: the actions and their results are what count, not the agents responsible for the actions. For this reason, academic writing uses the passive voice more often, although it means using more words. Yet, this is for a reason. For example, take a construction such as “air temperature was recorded every 24 hours beginning 0600 hours on the first day of the experiment”, which is not only precise but is in the passive voice because it does not matter who actually recorded the temperature. However, the active voice and the use of the first-person pronouns (I or we) is advisable in expressions such as “I initially ascribed the effect to high temperature but realized later that the change in colour was due to intense sunlight.” Another example is this quotation from the landmark paper by Watson and Crick (1953): “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for genetic material.”
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