Publishing in Scientific Journals: Tips to make you succeed : Prof M.Daramola
July 08, 2020
Publishing in Scientific Journals: Tips to make you succeed Journal publications are very important to a student’s academic journey. It helps them gain local and international recognition.
Publishing in Scientific Journals: Tips to make you succeed
Journal publications are very important to a student’s academic journey. It helps them gain local and international recognition and also be acknowledged as a professional in a certain field. The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World Zimbabwe National Chapter organized a webinar science talk on tips students can use for them to succeed in publishing their work. The topic was dubbed, “Publishing in Scientific Journals: Tips to make you succeed”. The topic was tackled by Professor Michael Daramola from the University of Pretoria.
The science talk was opened by Dr. Chipo Shonhiwa, OWSD Zimbabwe National Chapter Secretary. She gave a warm welcome to the special guest Professor Michael Daramola from the University of Pretoria. She gave a background of the OWSD Zimbabwe National Chapter to new members. She also highlighted that OWSD Zimbabwe National Chapter assisted other southern African countries to open national chapters. She also acknowledged ten women from Zimbabwe who have benefited and attained their PhD through the OWSD PhD fellowship which includes Dr. Jiri the OWSD Zimbabwe National Chapter Vice Chair.
The topic dubbed, “Publishing in Scientific Journals: Tips to make you succeed” is a very crucial subject in the academic field. Professor Daramola did justice in delivering the crucial topic. He opened his presentation with a quotation from Ryan Holiday,” Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and if done right end sin total victory”. He defined research as the systematic investigation into and study materials, situation, process, natural phenomena in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. He quoted Albert Szent-Gyorgyi,” Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and fourth, money”. Professor challenged the members to think of reasons why it’s important to write scientific articles. He highlighted that scientific articles are published in scientific journals. He also gave definitions for scientific article and scientific journal for members to better understand the difference. Scientific article is a paper/article which communicates scientific work to a wide audience. Without publishing results, the important data collected, analyzed and interpreted is inaccessible to the scientific community and hence of little or no value. In order to advance the science, researchers must share their results. A scientific journal is a periodical publications intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.
To add on, Professor Daramola also gave an insight on the difference between research articles and review articles. He mentioned that research articles sometimes referred to as empirical or primary sources, report on original research whereas review articles sometimes called literature reviews or secondary sources, synthesize or analyze research already conducted in primary sources, they generally summarize the current state of research on a given topic. The presentation also highlighted an important section to make an individual’s publication succeed that is the ethics in research and publication section. He advised scientists to be honest in their work. Sometimes scientists writing their thesis include ‘ghosts’ in their work meaning that they include names of people who did not make any contribution towards the contents of the paper. The author should also avoid submitting manuscripts without the permission of an author or contributor. Intentionally submitting or resubmitting work for duplicate publication is also considered a breach of publishing ethics. Another breach of ethics involves research fraud whereby researchers publish data or conclusions that were not generated by experiments or observations but by invention or data manipulation. Another ethical consideration is salami slicing whereby a researcher divides a meaningful paper (single manuscript) into different other publications. Acknowledging other peoples work is also very important. Obtain copyright permission for a portion of a published item you used in your manuscript.
Furthermore, Professor Daramola gave a clear picture of the proposed scientific content which contributes to a successful publication. These include: title, abstract, introduction, experimental materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusion, acknowledgements and references. These make up the whole journal and they are very important points. However, they are also challenges researchers face when conducting their research. The presenter highlighted that lack of funds to cutting edge research and innovation, lack of state of the art research facilities to conduct cutting edge research and innovation hinder researches from achieving their goal of being successful in research. To add more, insufficient expert with wealth of experience to mentor the upcoming scientists in cutting edge research activities and lack of government support and incentivization have also been a hindrance.
The insightful presentation was closed by Dr. Guyo a member of the OWSD Zimbabwe National Chapter. He acknowledged the presentation. He added that research and publication is focused on three aspects that is acquisition, dissemination and application. Research is a wide range of scholarly activities that includes acquisition, dissemination and application of skills and techniques. The session ended with a closing prayer by Hamunyari Ndwade the master of ceremonies.
