Academic Publishing Demystified
This guide has been developed specifically for graduate students who wish to learn more about academic publishing.
Can I get help with writing?
Beyond the support and mentorship offered by instructors, supervisors, and peers in your discipline, you may be seeking assistance in developing good writing habits, improving your written communication, or finding a supportive community to write with.
The Student Support Centre offers a number of different options for graduate students:
Many students and mentors discussed other helpful ways to learn the craft of writing:
- Look for a journal club in your lab, department, or faculty. Journal clubs can help you identify important journals in your discipline, learn the anatomy of a journal article, and have discussions with peers about strengths and weaknesses of different journals.
- If appropriate for your situation and discipline, look for opportunities to co-author a piece with a more experienced academic author. This can help you learn about academic writing and publishing in a more supportive environment.
Citation Tools
Libraries and Cultural Resources provides support for two citation tools. While there are many citation tools available, these tools have been selected because of their functionality and their compatibility with campus IT infrastructure.
- Zotero (free): Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. Available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS. More information
- Endnote (paid): Some users prefer the functionality of Endnote, and the library continues to hold workshops and provide support. More information.
Writing: Your Questions Answered
Who gets to be first author on a paper?
This is a very difficult question to answer on a general guide! The conventions of ordering authors differs greatly from discipline to discipline, individual researchers may have their own conventions that don't follow disciplinary "norms," and the practice of co-authorship itself is quite rare in some disciplines.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) offers this helpful baseline: "Two minimum requirements define authorship across all definitions – making a substantial contribution to the work and being accountable for the work and its published form" (COPE, 2019).
Generally, if you're working with co-authors, it is a good idea to have a conversation about author order before you begin writing a paper together. Some research groups will use tools like a points system or a matrix to help make these decisions. Publishers may also have their own specific criteria for what constitutes authorship, this should be located in the "instructions for authors" section of their website.
That being said, here are some helpful resources to help you learn more about the ordering of author names on publications:
- Authorship: who's on first: a helpful article with links to learn more and examples of practical strategies; STEM focused.
- Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors: Developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, this guide lays out four criteria for authorship. Although developed for medicine, the criteria are likely applicable to many STEM and social science fields.
- How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers: From the Committee on Publication Ethics, this document lays out general principles for handling co-authorship. Applicable to all disciplines.
- UCalgary checklists of expectations for graduate students and supervisors and intellectual property: These documents, from Grad Studies at UCalgary, also lays out the expectation that authorship will be discussed ahead of time between supervisor and student.
Resource recommendations
During our focus groups, both faculty mentors and graduate students provided recommendations on books and other resources that had helped them in the past. Where available, links to borrow the books from University collections are provided.
Draft No. 4 by ISBN: 9780374142742Publication Date: 2017-09-05The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer's craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative while observing that "readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone's bones." The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising--and revising, and revising. Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.
How to Write a Lot by ISBN: 9781591477433Publication Date: 2007-01-15All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. In this practical, light-hearted, and encouraging book, Paul Silvia explains that writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field of psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends, and vacations. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives detailed advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles, how to improve writing quality, and how to write and publish academic work.
Write It Up by ISBN: 9781433818141Publication Date: 2014-09-01How do you write good research articles -- articles that are interesting, compelling, and easy to understand? How do you write papers that influence the field instead of falling into obscurity? Write It Up offers a practical and revealing look at how productive researchers write strong articles. The book's guiding idea is that academics should write to make an impact, not just to get something published somewhere. Your work will be more influential if you approach it reflectively and strategically. Based on his experience as an author, journal editor, and reviewer, Paul Silvia offers systematic approaches to problems like picking journals; cultivating the right tone and style; managing collaborative projects and co-authors; crafting effective Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion sections; and submitting and resubmitting papers to journals. With its light-hearted style and practical advice, Write It Up will help graduate students struggling with writing their first paper, early career professors who need advice on how to write better articles, and seasoned academic writers looking to refresh their writing strategy or style.
Writing Science in Plain English by ISBN: 9780226026374Publication Date: 2013-05-24Scientific writing is often dry, wordy, and difficult to understand. But, as Anne E. Greene shows in Writing Science in Plain English,writers from all scientific disciplines can learn to produce clear, concise prose by mastering just a few simple principles. This short, focused guide presents a dozen such principles based on what readers need in order to understand complex information, including concrete subjects, strong verbs, consistent terms, and organized paragraphs. The author, a biologist and an experienced teacher of scientific writing, illustrates each principle with real-life examples of both good and bad writing and shows how to revise bad writing to make it clearer and more concise. She ends each chapter with practice exercises so that readers can come away with new writing skills after just one sitting. Writing Science in Plain English can help writers at all levels of their academic and professional careers--undergraduate students working on research reports, established scientists writing articles and grant proposals, or agency employees working to follow the Plain Writing Act. This essential resource is the perfect companion for all who seek to write science effectively.
Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century by ISBN: 9781554813049Publication Date: 2019-08-30Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century offers guidance to help writers succeed in a broad range of writing tasks and purposes in science and other STEM fields. Concise and current, the book takes most of its examples and lessons from scientific fields, such as the life sciences, chemistry, physics, and geology, but some examples are taken from mathematics and engineering. The book emphasizes building confidence and rhetorical expertise in fields where diverse audiences, high ethical stakes, and multiple modes of presentation present unique writing challenges. Using a systematic approach-assessing purpose, audience, order of information, tone, evidence, and graphics-it gives readers a clear road map to becoming accurate, persuasive, and rhetorically savvy writers.
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition by ISBN: 9780226499918Publication Date: 2019-06-07"Wow. No one ever told me this!" Wendy Laura Belcher has heard this countless times throughout her years of teaching and advising academics on how to write journal articles. Scholars know they must publish, but few have been told how to do so. So Belcher made it her mission to demystify the writing process. The result was Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, which takes this overwhelming task and breaks it into small, manageable steps. For the past decade, this guide has been the go-to source for those creating articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. With this new edition, Belcher expands her advice to reach beginning scholars in even more disciplines. She builds on feedback from professors and graduate students who have successfully used the workbook to complete their articles. A new chapter addresses scholars who are writing from scratch. This edition also includes more targeted exercises and checklists, as well as the latest research on productivity and scholarly writing. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is the only reference to combine expert guidance with a step-by-step workbook. Each week, readers learn a feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. Every day is mapped out, taking the guesswork and worry out of writing. There are tasks, templates, and reminders. At the end of twelve weeks, graduate students, recent PhDs, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct instructors, junior faculty, and international faculty will feel confident they know that the rules of academic publishing and have the tools they need to succeed.
The Sense of Style by ISBN: 9780670025855Publication Date: 2014-09-30From the author of Enlightenment Now, a short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker. Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care? In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn't carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
- Preparing to PublishThis book offers a wealth of instructional material on the topic of research article writing for publication and thesis or dissertation completion. The text provides graduate student writers with helpful information, strategies, and tips on navigating disciplinary writing in their fields and how to understand, dissect, and ultimately, construct their own research article. The text is organized according to a standard research article format, breaking down each section of the empirical research in a simple and straightforward manner to help graduate students build a quality, argument-driven manuscript as they write up their empirical study findings.