Professor Debby Cotton – Director of Academic Practice & Professor of Higher Education Post-Graduate Research Coordinator for Education – Deputy Vice-Chancellors Office delivered the above workshop.
The workshop focused on a range of issues related to getting publications that would meet REF requirements. There was a discussion about how to choose the appropriate journals and factors to consider. These included the need for REF to have an international perspective, where others in the discipline have published, the impact factor of the journal and taking account of the length of time between submission and publication. We also discussed what were the top journals most likely to publish pedagogic research and Debby referred to the 2014 REF where 356 education papers where published but 50% of these were in 10 journals. Debby outlined the importance of getting the choice of journal right first and ensuring that your paper was appropriate to journal’s scope, aims and objectives. Debby also discussed the need to start to develop a publishing profile which means being focused on the appropriate journals and planning your writing time. Tips were outlined about how to get the introduction right which would attract the reviewers’ attention but also help you plan the rest of your paper. This involved four steps:
1) Establishing the field with the rationale and importance of this topic
2) Previous research what is already known about the topic
3) Links to present work with identification of the gaps in the literature and possible new hypothesis
4) Introducing the present work so the aim of this study was
There was also discussion of submission and what to do about reviewers’ comments. This led to a lively discussion about a range of experiences. The workshop did involve some hands on exploration of part of an article and discussion of the need to find time to write and make this a regular habit.
