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Intensive Course in Research Writing

This session of the intensive course focuses on presentations by class members, preparation of progress reports, writing review articles, and tips for writing or supervising a thesis or dissertation. A workshop on compiling a research paper will also be conducted if time permits.

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Intensive Course in Research Writing

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  1. Intensive Course in Research Writing Barbara Gastel, MD, MPH Texas A&M University Summer 2016

  2. Intensive Course in Research Writing:Session 11 (12 July 2016)

  3. Today • Presentations by some class members • Presentation/discussion (left from before): preparing progress reports • Presentation/discussion: writing review articles • Presentation/discussion: writing or supervising a thesis or dissertation • If time permits: workshop—plans for compiling your paper

  4. Presentations by Class Members

  5. Preparing Progress Reports (material from before)

  6. Announcements etc • Copies available: books ordered • Reading for tomorrow and Thursday • Writing for tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday • Panel discussion Thursday: advice from journal editors and peer reviewers • End-of course dinner

  7. Writing Review Articles

  8. Review Articles • Review article—an article summarizing the literature on a topic • Popularity of review articles with • Graduate students • Practitioners • People changing research areas • Others • High citation rates of some review articles and review journals

  9. Mini-Workshop • Do the instructions for authors for your target journal say anything about writing review articles? If so, what do they say? • Have you ever written a review article? If so, what was the experience like? • What did you notice about some of the review articles you looked at?

  10. Tips: Preparing to Writea Review Article • Check beforehand whether an editor might be interested. • Carefully define the scope of the article. • Search the literature thoroughly and methodically. Keep a record of your search strategy. • Perhaps obtain help from a librarian. • Perhaps have criteria for including articles. • Consider recording information on standardized forms or in a spreadsheet.

  11. Two Structures for Review Articles • Subtopic-by-Subtopic (with a subheading for each), much like a book chapter • Modified IMRAD—for example, for a systematic review article • Introduction • Methods used to search and analyze the literature • Results (findings of the search) • Discussion

  12. Browsing:Examples of Review Articles with the Two Structures

  13. Tips: Writing a Review Article • Organize the article carefully. • Stay focused. • Integrate what you found; do not merely catalogue it. • Because the audience may be broad, write especially clearly. • Double-check the text and references for accuracy.

  14. Discussion Questions • If you were to write a review article now, what would the topic be? • Where would you want to publish the article? Why?

  15. Some Resources • Tips for writing your first scientific literature review article • I want to do a systematic review • The PRISMA Statement (PRISMA: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) • Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide • NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing (a good way to identify authors of excellent review articles—and thus to find examples of excellent review articles)

  16. Writing or Supervisinga Thesis or Dissertation Some Pointers to Use or Share (with an emphasis on writing and publishing)

  17. Pointers: Doing a Thesis or Dissertation • Be alert for potential topics long before you need to choose one. • Choose a topic you’re very interested in. • Choose a topic that’s big enough to be meaningful but small enough to be doable. (Initial ideas tend to be too ambitious.) • Pay careful attention to study design. • Keep publication in mind from the beginning.

  18. Pointers (cont) • Try to include committee members who can guide you in various aspects of your thesis, including writing. • Make sure all members of your committee agree up front about the scope of your thesis. • Write a good proposal, and use it as a foundation for later writing. • Set a timetable. Realize, however, that items are likely to take longer than expected.

  19. Pointers (cont) • Realize that you’ll need to rewrite and rewrite. • Be aware that you don’t “publish a thesis.” Rather, you prepare publications based on your thesis research (or incorporate papers that you wrote into your thesis). • A thesis tends to include lots of detail, in part to help you master your field and show your committee that you’ve done so. • The publications based on your thesis research should focus on what readers would find new, interesting, and useful.

  20. If Time Permits: Workshop—Plans for Compiling Your Paper

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