The Official Blog of the Journal of European Psychology Students
As stressed throughout The JEPS Bulletin, an important part of research is writing the report to acquaint the public with your findings. Such publications serve as a platform for academic communication and exchange of opinions. It is very important to follow certain standards and writing style if you intend to cultivate further research based on your results. Here’s what you should keep in mind when forming your message to the scientific community.
Germany’s Minister of Defence, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (or more correctly: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg), faces allegations and extensive proof of plagiarism as well as consequences for his mistakes. Obviously, plagiarism has much finer shades than plain copy-paste. It now seems to be most appropriate to talk about what could be considered as taking credit for someone else’s (or one’s own previous) work and how to correctly refer to the original source.
It may seem to be impossible to cut down 30 pages to just into some 120 words*. Still, this is the part of your work upon which readers will decide whether they want to keep reading your paper. Therefore, you should carefully plan what to tell researchers who stumble upon your work in a database.
The people with the most thorough and the most comprehensive insight into the world of scientific publishing in psychology are probably the editors of the many scientific journals. These are the people involved in every part of the way of a manuscript becoming a published article. From the first technical review when a manuscript is received, through the peer-review and to the final touches in layout editing, the editors take part in the process. This is why we have decided to include interviews with peer-reviewed journal editors to the JEPS Bulletin. The first in this series of interviews will be the one with Dr. Renata Franc, a researcher at the Ivo Pilar Institute for Social Sciences in Zagreb, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for General Social Issues.
Dr. Franc offers comments and suggestions on how to write compelling and top quality scientific papers, with this advice aimed especially for students who are usually new to the whole idea of publishing their work in journals. If you hope to someday publish a scientific article, or you wish to improve your writing, you will find the following interview with dr. Franc more than useful!
Writing scientific texts is inevitable in Academia. Publishing good articles is a crucial factor in one’s scientific career. Nevertheless, the students often concentrate on what to write, rather than how to write. This blog is launched to help students to become acquainted with the latter.
The JEPS Bulletin will elaborate on many different aspects of writing and publishing. First, we introduce you to the authors’ experience starring students who have published in JEPS or somewhere else, so that they could share their endeavour with you. Of course, we then cannot neglect the opinions of the reviewers, who undoubtedly gain many insights having read tens or hundreds of manuscripts before they have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Read more about their insights under reviewer’s experiences.
Having had a sneak peak into all those experiences, you will probably feel inspired to go for it yourself. At this point we will take you by the hand and guide you through the process of writing a scientific text providing all the information you would need to produce a high standard scientific text of your own. We aim underpin all the important points, and to further enhance your practical knowledge on writing techniques, structure, dos and don’ts etc. Furthermore, we will demonstrate to you a full manuscript analysis of different texts written by other students and analysed by experienced reviewers. Naturally we cannot overlook the APA manual (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association). We’ll look into the rules of APA style, which has been adapted by many disciplines and is used by academics around the world.
We hope that all of the above will fully equip you to write a text that will make you proud of yourself. Once you are done and eager to share it with peers, you can seek guidance under publishing in scientific journals.
Furthermore, as source of inspiration and encouragement, we will bring interviews with a number of interesting people who have great knowledge on these topics.
To sum, our aim is to establish a good quality medium for online knowledge and experience transfer in the field of scientific publishing. In order to achieve this aim, we welcome your contributions. You can post to this blog, share your experiences – may they be good or bad, or simply suggest us what would you like us to write about!
Don’t hesitate to contact us: journal@efpsa.org!
We wish you the best in your future endeavours of scientific writing and publishing. Enjoy the blog!
