Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Dr. Pramod Regmi, Senior Lecturer in International Health and Interim Global Engagement Lead in the Department of Nursing Sciences, was invited last weekend to speak at the Third Global Nepali Health Conference, London. He taught on ‘How to write a scientific paper’ with Dr. Om Kurmi from Coventry University and Dr. Bibha Simkhada from the University of Huddersfield (and Visiting Faculty at BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences).
Well done.
This is a reminder about our ‘Virtual Writing Workshop’ on 29 June 13.30 – 16.30pm. We will have 2 blocks of writing (just over an hour each and then a break in the middle to get a coffee and chat to other researchers if you wish). If you can’t make 13.30 you can join a bit later – no worries.
This is for anyone (PhD student, academic, full time researcher) who wants to/needs to write and would like to do that in the company of colleagues from across the university.
Please come prepared with something you are working on. We recommend turning off email notifications and anything else that could distract to help us get the most out of the time – but your decision – it’s your time!
Please click this Zoom link to join us.
Kind regards, BU Research Staff Association
The British Academy informed us yesterday that we have been successful in our application to the Writing Workshops 2021. The project builds research capacity of early career researchers researching gender in higher education institutions in Nepal. The grant will provide training in academic writing and publishing to help improve Nepali staff’s chances of getting published in international journals in English. The workshops will be co-delivered by a team of UK-based (Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhikari, Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen) and Dr. Rashmee Rajkarnikar from Nepal’s oldest university, Tribhuvan University, supported by Nepali scholars/editors from Social Science Baha (SSB).
We have planned three stages: 1) virtual mini workshops, guided discussion/input on academic writing, publishing, journal submission, and review processes ; 2) online workshops where participants present their draft papers/work and receive feedback from peers, mentors, invited speakers/editors and opportunities networking/collaborations (for co-authorship, peer review and peer support); and 3) monthly tutorials (webinars) later in 2021 to provide mentorship and peer support to participants.
This application is third time lucky as two previous applications to The British Academic for Writing Work had not been successful. Over the years the team has build up capacity in academic writing and publishing in Nepal ad hoc. This grant will allow us to offer a more systematic approach to academic writing capacity building in Nepal. It is building on a growing number of paper published by FHSS staff on various aspects of academic writing and publishing. [1-14]
References:
Tuesday 13th April – Thursday 15th April
The three-day Writing Academy will enable you to develop the skills required to improve the quantity and quality of your publications and to develop a publication strategy which best represents you as an academic.
The academy is a great opportunity for academics who are new to publishing or would benefit from some additional direction and coaching.
You’ll have access to an external consultant who will advise you on techniques and style. You will also have the opportunity to discuss your ideas and issues with your peers.
The program and objectives for Writing Academies are as follows:
You will also have the opportunity to discuss your publishing goals and prepare a plan to accommodate writing within your day to day routines.
The trainer for the Writing Academy is Patrick Brindle.
Patrick divides his time between his training and consultancy business – Into Content – and his work for City, University of London. At City he is Programme Director on the Publishing MA and International Publishing MA. Patrick has a PhD in History from Cambridge University, and has worked in editorial positions across the social sciences at Pearson Education, Oxford University Press and SAGE Publications. Patrick provides staff and PhD level training on book and research paper writing, and on general publishing strategy, to a range of universities, including Oxford, UCL, Leicester, Royal Holloway, the SRHE and the ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods. He also has a specialism in helping academics in writing about methodology.
If you are interested in booking a place, please contact RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk.
Last Friday ResearchGate informed us that ‘Writing an Abstract for a Scientific Conference’ [1] published by three Bournemouth University (BU) scholars (Prof. Vanora Hundley, Dr. Bibha Sinkhada and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen and a BU Visiting Professor (Prof. Padam Simkhada) had reached 2,500 reads. 
This paper is one of a series of articles BU academics have published on several aspects of academic writing and scientific publishing. The range of publications includes issue such as: predatory publishers, authors earning from copyright; finding the best title for your paper, and issues of authorship [2-13]. These are great resources for budding academic writers, especially as nearly are Open Access publications and hence freely available across the world.
Other useful BU resources include the work by Dr. Kip Jones, such as his blogs on Organising & Writing a PhD thesis or his advice on Writing Blogs. Another great BU resource is the online publication by Dr. Miguel Moital, who wrote the e-book Writing Dissertations & Theses: What you should know but no one tells you, where he shares valuable practical information about the process of writing academic work, notably dissertations. The book starts with explaining the six criteria, expressed in the form of 6 ‘C’s, required to produce high quality dissertations: Confined, Corroborated, Critical, Coherent, Concise and Captivating. The e-book then goes on to share a range of ‘tips and tools’ which contribute to fulfilling the 6 Cs. 
Moreover, it is also worth pointing out that there are some great web resources on writing and publishing produced by BU Library staff, for example on plagiarism; academic writing; or how to cite references.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwife
References
This past week Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen from the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) presented several workshops on academic writing and scientific publishing to BU’s partners in Nepal. He presented at Nepal’s oldest and largest university Tribhuvan University (TU) on Wednesday. The Faculty of Education had made the effort to produce a personalised banner for Edwin. Prof. Bhimsen Devkota, who invited him to run this workshop, was his PhD student many years ago at the University of Aberdeen
The next day he visited Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIH
S) which has a Memorandum of Agreement with BU, which was signed by Prof. Tee in early 2018 (see BU Research Blog). At MMIHS the audience that day consisted mostly of Master of Public Health students. Edwin recently celebrated his ten-years of being Visiting Professor at MMIHS.
Yesterday he had the honour of running a workshop at BNMT (Birat Nepal Medical Trust), affiliated with the Britain Nepal Medical Trust which started working in Nepal more than fifty years ago in 1967. The audience at BNMT was smaller and this allowed for loads of fruitful discussions.
These workshops are part of BU capacity building approach for health workers, development workers, health students and researchers in Nepal. Writing with colleagues in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, and various UK universities, including with Visiting Faculty based at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and University of Exeter Medical School (UEMS) as well as Visiting Faculty at NHS Poole Foundation Hospital and Hamad General Hospital (Qatar) the BU team as published 12 papers on aspects of academic writing and/or publishing [1-12].
References
Once you have submitted you manuscript to a scientific journal, the editor has a (quick) look at it and sends it out for review. As I remind students and colleagues in training sessions on academic writing and publishing, the editor and the peer reviewers are academics like me and my colleagues who do both the editing and the reviewing, for free and over and above the day job. Being an editor and a reviewer are part of being any academic’s so-called scholarly activity. We are expected to do this as part of the wider scientific community for the benefit of our academic discipline(s).
When an academic receives an invitation to peer review, the journal will send you a copy of the paper’s abstract. On reading this abstract you then decide whether you wish to do the review. If the paper sounds interesting and it is in your field and you have the time you may volunteer to conduct a review. Once you have agreed you will get the full paper (or more likely you are send a link to the publisher’s website). The requirements of the review report varies between disciplines and often between journals. Some follow an informal structure, but others have a more formal approach, sometimes with scoring systems for sections of the paper.
Unfortunately, academics across the globe are experiencing an ‘epidemic’ of invitations to review for scientific journals. And I am not talking about so-called predatory publishers, i.e. journals and publishers that are only in it for the monetary gain, no I am talking about legitimate journals sending out invitations to review for them. Especially scholars with a few decent publications receive several emails a week from often high quality scientific journals. The photo of my email inbox shows three invitations in a row I received in the space of two hours last week (10th July), two are even from different Associate Editors for the same journal! 
I would like to stress that doing peer reviews is very important. It is the backbone of academic publishing. Reviewing is part of our overall scholarly responsibility so we all do it, although some more than others. We all have are favourite journals to review for, perhaps because the journal is high quality, or we like to publish in it ourselves, because we know the editor, or our reviewing is recognised on websites like KUDOS. I would like to urge colleagues who don’t manage to review at least once a month to step up and agree to review a wee bit more often.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
A few times a month ResearchGate alerts me that another paper has reached a miles stone of so having been read some many times. Today the ResearchGate message is about 600 reads for our paper ‘Research Methods Coverage in Medical and Health Science Curricula in Nepal’. [1] This paper was a report on research methods teaching in health-related Higher Education (HE) courses in the health and medical field in Nepal. This paper originates from a DelPHE (Round 4), British Council award. Our study ‘Partnership on Improving Access to Research Literature for HE Institutions in Nepal’ (PARI Initiative) was a collaboration between the oldest university in Nepal, namely Tribhuvan University and two UK university of which BU was one. A further paper from the PARI Initiative was published a year later. [2] The lead author of both papers in BU Visiting Faculty Prof Padam Simkhada, who is Professor of International Public Health at the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University.
The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is a full Open Access journal which means anybody across the globe can access it for free. The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is part of Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) a service established by INASP in 2007, which provides online publication of Nepali journals.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
References:
Yesterday ResearchGate announced that the paper ‘Academic authorship: who, why and in what order?’ [1] has been read 1000 times. The paper addresses two related issues in academic writing: (a) authorship; and (b) order of authors. The issue of authorship centres on the notion of who can be an author, who should be an author and who definitely should not be an author. The paper reminds the reader that this is partly discipline specific. The second issue, the order of authors, is usually dictated by the academic tradition from which the work comes. One can immediately envisage disagreements within a multi-disciplinary team of researchers where members of the team may have different approaches to authorship order. Prof. Vanora Hundley is the lead author and the paper is co-authored with Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, both in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), and BU Visiting Professor Padam Simkhada. Padam is Professor of International Public Health in the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University.
Paper by Hundley et al. published 2013
This paper is part of a larger set of papers by academic in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences addressing various aspects of academic writing and publishing. Many of these papers are in Open Access journals, hence easily available across the globe for anybody with an internet connection. The series has covered papers on selecting an appropriate title for an academic paper, the role of the journal editor, the publication process and many more [2-9].
References
Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (both in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences) have been invited to join the scientific committee of the International Conference on Mixed Methods Research [ICMMR-2019]. This year’s ICMMR conference will be held in the School of Behavioural Sciences at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam (India) on February 22-24, 2019. The two BU academics will run an online panel discussion session on academic publishing under the heading “Meet the editors.” The advantage of such online session is that BU academic don’t have to travel to India saving time and money as well as the environment. This has benefits for their own work-live balance as well as their carbon footprint. 
BU focuses its global collaborations on three geographical areas, one of these is the Indian sub-continent. Connect India is BU’s strategic Hub of Practice for the Indian sub-continent, bringing together a community of researchers, educators, practitioners and students at Bournemouth University to collaborate with colleagues in India and Nepal.
We have received this announcement from CREST (Consortium for Research Excellence Support and Training):
CREST is delighted to be participating in this year’s Academic Writing Month, or #AcWriMo. AcWriMo was created in 2011 by Charlotte Frost, founder of PhD2Published. It is a month long festival of writing hoping to create some good writing habits or help you get some writing done.
The CREST team has developed a set of activities to support you and encourage you with your writing. We will be holding online twitter conversations throughout November, suitable for researchers at any career stage. We will be available online between 8am and 10am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week for writing together sessions on Twitter and Slack.
Your CREST team,
Tijana, Rachel and Matthew
 Join Dr Patrick Brindle from INTO Content on the 3rd October 2018 9:30-16:30 for Writing about Methods course. To book click here
The session will talk about a range of practical approaches they can adopt when writing about methodology in the social sciences. The course focuses on 20 or so writing strategies and thought experiments designed to provide more clarity and power to the often-difficult challenge of writing about methods. The course also looks at common mistakes and how to avoid them when writing about methods. The focus throughout is on building confidence and increasing our repertoire of writing strategies and skills. The course covers:
By the end of the course participants will:
This course would be suitable for PhD students, post-docs and junior researchers in the social sciences. To book click here |
There are spaces available at the following sessions for BU staff. To find out more and to book, simply follow the link to BU intranet and log in:
This Wednesday – 4/7/18:
Forthcoming…
11/7/18:
12/7/18:
24/7/18:
Within the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework (RKEDF), there are a number of events in the coming months to support your academic publishing activities.
The flagship three-day Writing Academy retreats will commence on 11th April and 27th June. To find out more, please see the information page. Please note that you will need faculty to support to attend and cannot book onto these events without this recommendation.
If you have specific needs or wish to ‘dip your toe in the water’, there are shorter sessions available:
Find out more about what is on offer to support your academic publishing and your wider research development.
Places are limited, but the workshop is free. Please express your interest by emailing Kip asap. You will be expected to attend for both days, and attend the lunches. You are asked to buy your own refreshments and lunches, but we will eat together at a restaurant each day. The first day we will go to the International Centre next to EBC for lunch. The second day, we will have a concluding longer lunch at La Piccola Italia Restaurant, near EBC. Writing is a very solitary endeavor. Sharing of experiences and conviviality are important components of a balanced approach.
Summary: The Creative Writing workshop will be a unique event in that it will not be a typical ‘writing retreat’ (with trees to hug and lots of time to ruminate), but rather a very active experience with lots of exercises, suggestions and supportive feedback on participants’ work from Kip Jones and other participants. The point is to encourage both students and academics who would like to include more creative writing in their outputs, particularly those whose writing includes reporting on narrative and other qualitative methods of research. It also helps immensely in the move to publishing in the wider world of blogs and online outlets, moving work to media and film, auto-ethnography and even fiction.
Justification: The important point of Creative Writing for Academics is to help academics and students achieve the goal of seeing more of their work read by wider audiences; in other words, impact. By providing an intense two-day experience for participants to engage in developing writing skills, the playing field is levelled and opportunities for facilitated learning developed. By engaging in creative writing, it becomes possible for all to write more clearly, more simply, even more creatively, when writing not only for academic publications, but also for outlets previously unimagined.
Methods: The workshop will present opportunities to work with academic material and expand its means of production and dissemination to new and creative levels through interfaces with techniques from the arts and humanities, including blog and magazine writing, film treatments and scripts, and poetry and fictional exercises. These intellectual exchanges encourage joint exploration of how researchers can engage with principles and tools from the arts in order to expand and extend the possibilities of dissemination of research data. Concepts of creativity itself will evolve and be transformed by participants’ outlooks and willingness to engage with unfamiliar territory. These processes comprise ‘facilitated learning’—in that knowledge will be gained as a secondary goal through a process of developing new relationships through small group problem-solving and self examination, grounded in personal past experience and knowledge.
KIPWORLD, the personal weblog of Bournemouth University academic, Kip Jones, reached a milestone this week, measuring 250,000 page views in the all-time history of the blog. Jones also writes for other blogs from time to time (LSE Impact blog, LSE Review of Books, Discover Society, Sociological Imagination, Creative Quarter, The Creativity Post, Bournemouth University Research Blog) as well.
As Jones reported earlier,
KIPWORLD is my personal blog where I write about projects that I am working on, but I also use it to develop my writing. A good example is a piece entitled, “How Breakthroughs Come: Tenacity and Perseverance”. First written for the blog, it was then reworked to include some reader responses to the earlier version. Through a Twitter connection, it was then published for a third time on the Social Research Hub, a site particularly aimed at PhD students in the Social Sciences.
Interestingly, the vast majority of the traffic to the site comes from Facebook where Jones moderates several special interest groups.The audience for KIPWORLD is predominantly in the USA, but the blog is viewed widely throughout the world.
The all-time top article on KIPWORLD is A summer holiday, three books and a story has received 17,499 views so far. The format is an exercise in creative autofiction, book review and a short story. This contribution to the site was written on holiday and is very much a personal reflection. A similar formula of tripartite creative writing developed by Jones recently made it to the pages of the academic journal, Qualitative Research Journal. (Interestingly, this ‘blog style’ article in an academic journal has been downloaded 30 times since publication in January 2017).
What might be called “How to” articles (such as What is a Systematic Review? or A Brief Outline for Organising/Writing the PhD Thesis) are also extremely popular.
Jones’ advice on blog writing to others:
Find your own voice, even your own subject material. Use your blog to develop your writing and your personal style. Don’t just assume that it has to look and sound like a blog to be one. Include at least one picture with every blog article. Let people know about the blog through social media—don’t expect an audience to just find it on its own. Promote it.
If the most important thing in your life IS to write about your cat, write about it as creatively as you possibly can. Enjoy the experience!
From time to time, Jones holds an hour-long taster session, “Academic Blog Writing”. If you are interested in joining an upcoming session, please email
Bournemouth University has been working on a small research project with Pourakhi, a voluntary organisation which helps female migrant workers returning to Nepal, for over a year. Pourakhi advocates for the rights of women migrant workers. Last week they invited me to present a workshop session on Academic 
Writing & Publishing, this morning I run such workshop. The content of the workshop is based on years of experience of running similar workshops at Bournemouth University, many Higher Education colleges across Nepal and a COST-funded workshop in Malta a few years ago. The eight people (staff and volunteers) who attended the workshop were generally inquisitive and keen to get their work into print. Most of the paper we have written about aspects of academic writing and the publishing process have been published in Open Access journals. [1-8] 
Therefore, we can easily give workshop attendees copies and/or give them the links to the online version on the web.
Prof Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
References:
BU staff can login below:
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MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
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BU Professor has been invited to a series of plenary and invited lectures.
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