Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
In recent years we have witnessed a real revolution in all fields. The irruption of the Internet has radically transformed many areas of our lives, among which are not escaping the systems of access and processing of information.
Until just over a decade ago, researchers in social sciences had a privileged channel of information: the book, an instrument with more or less significant changes remained vehicle five centuries of science.
Today scientific journals have almost monolithically appropriated relevant scientific information, original and curricularly computable. Although books still exist – and hopefully they will last for centuries – their role has been reduced to testimonial in scientific diffusion and even in dissemination. This revolution in the channels of scientific dissemination – which began in the 1970s and 1980s in the Chemical and Health Sciences – has been progressively extended to virtually all social sciences and even humanities, although there are certain areas that resist numanely to this new model that is inevitably called to succeed, especially for its adaptability to the new forms of communication that the Internet has implanted as a dominant model. Globality without frontiers (rupture of spaces), instantaneous information (rupture of time) … generating a global community that interacts incessantly sharing files of all types (visual, written, audiovisual, multimedia …), as well as large databases that allow the access and processing of volumes of information instantly and in any place until now unimaginable.
The scientific article has adapted perfectly to the Internet era: its brevity and conciseness, its internal and external metadata (titles, descriptors, abstracts and references), its standardization and especially its ability to navigate the network in a flexible and universal manner have consecrated it as a privileged channel.
In this Blog of Comunicar, the School of Authors, which complement our other blogs active in Spanish, English, Portuguese and even Chinese, we will offer over weeks, clues, proposals, guidelines … to publish articles in scientific journals more simple and successful.
Designed and written basically by the Comunicars’ Publishers Council, the School of Authors will be a vehicle to serve the community of readers, contributors, reviewers, authors of our magazine – and why not, that is our goal, many other scientific publications – to reflect on basic ideas on how to best manage scientific information to be successful in world-class publications.
Our experience as “Comunicar” editors, with more than 23 years of constant and progressive editing, has allowed us to see how many researchers, who design good publications, are not able to transform them into good articles, that is, published in the best magazines, thus preventing good science from having the diffusion and prestige they deserve.
Clearly, in general, no one has taught us to publish scientific journals in high impact, so we sometimes act with haste, scores and even ignorance, putting in serious danger the real possibilities that our work see the light of the more dignified form than they deserve. In short, there is no generic term «culture of high-impact scientific publications» and we have to inform and form ourselves.
This Comunicar School of Authors wants humbly (and from a modest instrument such as a blog, with simple and brief weekly posts) to collaborate in this urgent need that we perceive both in the Spanish and Latin American panorama. It is our desire that the same one fulfills its objective and is one more resource for the growth and the improvement of the Ibero-American scientific community.
