Guest Post: From an Intensive-Course Participant

[This post is from Dr. Daniel Limonta, Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine, Havana, Cuba. Thank you, Daniel!— Barbara]  

Hello! I just took the 3-week intensive course in research writing at Texas A&M University from Dr. Barbara Gastel and associate instructors. The main goal of the course is to increase the ability to write scientific articles for English-language journals. That is why the essential reading is the well-known book How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 7th edition, by Robert A. Day and Barbara Gastel.

In a friendly manner, the course includes presentations on all aspects of the academic publication process: authorship, titles, abstracts, the IMRAD structure (introduction, methods, results, and discussion), references, acknowledgments, ethics, manuscript submission, and the peer-review system. Preparation of poster presentations and oral presentations, grant proposals, and curricula vitae is also discussed in the class. In addition, there is material on English as a foreign language. The course syllabus and main lecture slides can be downloaded from the AuthorAID website.

I like the fact that the attendees have to present their research in a 15-minute formal talk. It is wonderful that the main writing assignment is the preparation and revision of your own manuscript to get it ready to submit to a journal. This significant goal is achieved in part by productive meetings with associate instructors about our work and small-group discussions (“workshops”) among the attendees to peer-review our papers. I do recommend this annual course to international authors looking to improve their ability to write scientific papers.