Guest Post: Two-Day Scientific Communication Workshop in Cuba

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

Hello all! For the first time, Cuban scientists attended a scientific communication workshop with Dr. Barbara Gastel as instructor. The attendees’ excitement and interest kept increasing as the workshop progressed.

The workshop, which took place October 13 and 14, covered step by step how to publish an article. Aspects included approaching a writing project, ethics, authorship, the IMRAD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), references, paper submission, and the peer-review process. The workshop also included a talk on preparing poster and oral presentations.

For use in the small-group exercises, attendees brought instructions to authors from journals where they hoped to publish papers, examples of papers from those journals, and drafts of papers they were working on.

At some attendees’ request, the workshop included a lecture on writing fellowship-application essays. Also, as workshop co-instructor and local facilitator, I was pleased to give a lecture on scientific English for Hispanic researchers. I had given this lecture previously to colleagues at my institute.

As far as I know, no scientific communication workshops covering these topics have been held previously in Cuba. The workshop attendees were from different well-regarded research centers, national health institutes, and hospitals.

All the attendees were very pleased to have the workshop, and many hope that Dr. Barbara Gastel will come over some other time to give a five-day workshop. Thank you very much, Dr. Barbara, for this wonderful and unique opportunity!