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!
