From the Colombia Workshop

Greetings again from Colombia. The workshop given jointly by the International Foundation for Science (IFS) and AuthorAID ended yesterday. Today I return to the United States. I’ll miss the beauty of Colombia and the hospitality of our hosts.

Our joint workshop served 3 groups: (1) young researchers seeking grants from IFS, (2) researchers writing scientific papers, and (3) people who will teach others to write scientific papers.

For the first group, my good colleague Cecilia Öman from IFS presented sessions on developing and revising research proposals. For the other attendees, I gave sessions on writing and publishing scientific papers. We also had some sessions—for example, on literature searching—that everyone attended.

I enjoyed meeting the attendees, who came from Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. And I enjoyed learning about their work.

I’ve now added to the AuthorAID Resource Library my main presentations from this workshop. Unlike previous AuthorAID workshops, this one included a separate presentation on deciding which journal to submit a paper to. Also, whereas other recent AuthorAID workshops had separate presentations on different parts of the scientific paper, this workshop had a single presentation on the content and organization of a scientific paper.

My thanks to Cecilia for inviting me to join her in giving this workshop. Thanks also to the Colombian colleagues who made the workshop arrangements and to all others who contributed to this event.