How to write impactful research articles (Part 2)

On 25 October 2024, Rising Scholars Steward Dr. Haseeb Md. Irfanullah delivered an interactive session titled ‘Crafting Impactful Research Articles and Presentations’ to engineering students of Bangladesh. This Part 2 of a two-part blog post is based on that lecture.

In my last post, I discussed the different impacts a paper can have. Now, let us discuss, how can we make sure we publish impactful research.

But, let me play a bit of devil’s advocate here: Instead of worrying about “impactful” research, should we focus on conducting and communicating “good” research? Here I define good research as “a well-designed research that is conducted truthfully, and the whole experience is written clearly following a standard structure and maintaining publishing integrity.” To some of you, this may be a tough choice to make (i.e., impactful vs good). But, it is probably not about choosing one over the other. It is about communicating a good piece of research, which would also be impactful.

Here, I share five tips to remember while writing a good and impactful research article.

1. Think about integrity in every step.

• We have to consider ethical issues in every step of conducting research: From identifying a research topic to determining its rationale in research background; conducting literature review to finding a knowledge gap and validating initial assumptions; finalizing research objectives/questions; selecting data collection protocols; analysing, presenting and interpreting the data; to finally drawing a conclusion.
• Similarly, every step of writing a research paper should be ethically sound, including editing, reference checking, lack of plagiarism, and use of AI, for example. We have to be particularly cautious about using AI. Last year, an article by Zhang et al. (2024) was retracted for using Generative AI without disclosure. This piece suffered from several other major unethical practices, such as using duplicate images and substantial duplication of text and image data which were already published in another journal. Both articles were submitted and published in close succession and were authored by the same group of authors. So, we should always check the journal’s instructions to see whether the use of AI is allowed, and under what conditions.
• As authors, we have to be careful about integrity in authorship. This means that we should list as authors all the people who contributed substantially to the work. Similarly, we should avoid practices such as ‘ghost authorship’ (i.e., a person who worked in the research/writing article, but was not mentioned as an author) or ‘gift authorship’ (i.e., those who did not contribute, but were made authors). Another form of ‘gift authorship’ is group authorship where a group of people write different types of papers. They appear as co-authors, often without contributing. This trend is on the rise, especially as a way to pool money to cover the journal’s APC: In a way, this could also be considered ‘paid authorship’.
• If we want good, impactful research articles, we should also avoid a practice known as “salami slicing”. It means, we should not divide our research into several smaller articles to increase our number of publications.
• Finally, while responding to reviewers' comments, we also should show our integrity. For example, some limitations in our research may be discovered by the peer-reviewers. If this happens, we should explain our position, or challenges we faced while doing research in our own, unique context. This will help the reviewers to understand our side of the story, and also help readers to appreciate diversity of research contexts. 

  

   

2. Realise that articulation is crucial.

• Our article should be well structured with logical flow between the sections and between the paragraphs within a section.
• We should not repeat the same thing in different parts of the text. This includes not presenting same data in different forms (i.e., in text, tables and graphs). We should also avoid exaggeration.
• We must remember, every section of an article has a clear purpose. For example, the Results section should only describe what we have found by analysing the collected data. On the other hand, the Discussion section aims at finding a meaning of our results by comparing with past/existing research. So, we should not repeat all results in the Discussion section.

3. Add innovation to your research.

• Innovation is not about invention; it is about being creative. Innovation has different forms: a theoretical approach tried in a different context, a modified tool used to collect data, or a combination of different techniques used to see a situation from different angles, for example.
• In an article on the COVID-19 pandemic, my co-authors and I consulted an analytical tool used to measure how communities tackle flood risks. Based on that, we developed our own framework to analyse how fishermen tackled pandemic and other stresses in Bangladesh in 2020.
• For another article on climate change, we developed a novel conceptual framework. This article received wide recognition by being cited in the prestigious IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2022). A case study on this article is discussed in detail in another Rising Scholar blog post by me.

4. Be careful about where you publish a paper. 

• We must be aware of predatory journals (which prey on vulnerable/desperate authors for money, without maintaining publishing/editorial standards/ethics; also called fraudulent, deceptive, fake, bogus, or pseudo journals).
• We should know which are hijacked journals where third parties hijack the identity of established journals by creating clone websites.
• We must be careful about paper mills where third parties produce fake manuscripts for potential authors to quickly publish papers or ‘purchase’ authorship.
• We have to be cautious about the recent surge of Special Issues published by many open access journals. In many cases, Special Issues, managed by guest editors, publish more papers than the regular issues of a journal, thus raising concerns about poor quality and encouraging unethical practices (like paper mills).
• Thankfully, there are different tools available to select authentic journals to submit articles (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/).

5. Translate your research for wider audience.

• Research publication in good journal is not enough, as noted in Part 1 of this blog post. We need to translate it for potential users of our research for impact on the ground. It needs to be communicated to common people as well, for greater awareness. So, researchers need to be advocate of their own research to make it impactful.
• A research team led by a Bangladeshi researcher, currently based in Australia, conducted scientific research on lighting flashes. The lead researcher frequently wrote op-eds in Bangladeshi newspapers to create mass awareness of negative impacts of lightning.
• In 2021, researchers from four different universities from Bangladesh, UK and Canada, myself among them, published a long review article on Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in Bangladesh. But, we didn’t stop there. We also published policy briefs in Bangla and English for a wider reach.

Writing an impactful research paper is not only related to the writing itself. It starts from conceptualizing the research topic and ends with translating it for potential users. Let us keep the conversation on good, impactful research going in the comment section of this blog post.