Webinar summary | Writing for Publication in English

John Skelton, Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham and President of EALTHY, gives a very insightful talk on how to successfully submit a paper to internationally renowned scientific journals. The webinar is based on his online course Writing for Publication, designed to assist healthcare academics and doctoral students who are both native and non-native users of English.

When writing a paper, academics come across a lot of papers. Taking into consideration time limitations, along with the Abstract, the Introduction and Discussion sections are the decisive parts for reading a whole paper. Referring to how the information should flow smoothly in these sections, John addresses two major issues: the importance of a clear structure, and the choice of appropriate language in order to facilitate predicting   content while reading a paper. John´s advice is to adopt a minimalistic approach: think small (“say in 20 words what your research is going to be about”) and write in plain language. To demonstrate this, he presents excerpts from papers published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

From his point of view, the Introduction section can be structured as follows: describing the importance of your research topic, reporting previous research, defining a gap in the researched area, and stating the aim of your research. The Discussion section can start with a summary of main findings, moving to comparisons with previous research and finishing with a description of strengths, limitations and implications.

At the end, John suggests a few fun activities, which can be used to think about the structure and help to improve writing skills.

Watch the webinar and find out more about:

• Minimalism in the writing process
• Supporting reading comprehension
• The structure analysis
• The structure of the Introduction section
• The structure of the Discussion section

If you are interested in finding out in more detail about the topics mentioned in the webinar and would like to learn about the approaches known as IMRAD and CONSORT as well as the structure of other sections of a paper, the 30-hour interactive online course is the ideal source for you. As in the webinar, you can expect theory combined with examples from papers, creative tasks and fun activities.

DOWNLOAD THE COURSE CONTENT