Communicating Research (Workshop 2)

So in today's Communicating Research workshop 2, we have 3 invited guests.

We started off with the panel discussion by 2 speakers, in which we were given the overall idea of academic journal vs conference papers.

We learnt about getting constructive feedback from the peer reviews, and how should we react to the comments made by the reviewers. Some discussions about taking criticism were in place. One good thing that I have learnt form the speakers is to separate/filter the comments from the reviewers to check if some comments are similar from different reviewer, hence we can treat them accordingly. Writing for journal/conference can brush up our skill in preparing our thesis.

In the Q&A, we have some insights on the following matters:

• suggesting the right people as the reviewers; 
• the readership of our paper;
• about the importance of citation of our paper;
• about authorship and publication; 
• about paper of good impact factor

Later we have another speaker on the topics of preparing and publishing our paper. In the context of publishing our research, we have to be clear about the scope, the reader, and especially ourself. We are writing from the point of knowing the outcome of our research at the time of publishing. Global significance, disciplinary significance, and technical significance are the 3 key areas that we can look at our project scope. Adding with the consideration of how much should we write about the literature review, the technical approach being used and the design of evaluation, a paper is good to go.

When our paper is reviewed and feedback is provided to us, we still need to communicate with the editor by reacting accordingly to the reviewer's feedback. For example, we might need to make corrections, or re-explain a context using different frame of understanding, or even refine the sentence due to language issues.

The above learning points are just some to be mentioned in this blog. Indeed, I really learned a lot. To conclude, this session is particularly very helpful for me.