Guest Post: A Workshop in El Salvador

[This post is from Noris Isabel López Guevara (vice chancellor for research, Universidad Tecnologica de El Salvador), who recently received an AuthorAID workshop grant. Thank you! —Barbara]

Great science writers like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, who also contributed greatly to generating new knowledge in their specialties, have held that it is important to share science with society and the scientific community. To do so, the producers of science must be proficient in techniques and tools that allow them to communicate their findings.

Under this premise, Universidad Tecnologica de El Salvador (UTEC), a Central American private higher education institution, held a workshop titled Management and Analysis of Scientific Information and Writing of Scientific Papers. The workshop was held in 2013 with INASP support.

The overall objective of the workshop was to develop the participants' skills in developing of scientific papers and posters. By mastering techniques of communicating research results, participants can more readily make visible the work conducted at universities and research centers.

This workshop lasted 32 hours. Researchers, research managers, editors, and teachers from various public and private institutions were invited to participate. Thus, the workshop was attended by 38 professionals from 18 institutions around the country.

The instruction combined practice and theory. It covered the following topics: scientific production and its importance for scientific academic development, bibliographic search strategies for critical reading and analysis of scientific information, development of scientific posters, techniques for writing scientific articles, citations and reference management styles, and Web 2.0 as a tool, among others.

Aspects contributing to the success of the workshop included having facilitators with excellent qualifications and experience, carefully selecting participants, using suitable facilities (classrooms and computer labs), combining theory and practice, and having participants and institutions committed to allocating training time. This approach can be replicated at other institutions to benefit research groups and other stakeholders.

We thank INASP for supporting this training to ensure that the academic community has the skills to disseminate the results of scientific studies.