Personal archiveIn 2004, at age 29, Rio de Janeiro biologist Glauco Machado, at the time a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), was invited to coordinate a field study in ecology in forest reserves on the outskirts of the city of Manaus in Amazonas State.
A group of 20 master’s and doctoral students, with guidance from him and other professors, spent almost a month in the forest collecting and analyzing data. The final output should be a document in the form of a scientific article written by the students themselves. “The students were unable to discuss the findings of the studies they had conducted in the field,” Machado says. Therefore, he decided to set up a scientific writing course, mainly to present methods for writing articles.
The result was satisfactory and the course flourished. In 2007, Machado, by then a professor at the Biosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo (IB-USP), set up the same system for students in the field study in the ecology of the Atlantic Forest, which he is coordinating in a partnership with biologists Paulo Inácio Prado and Adriana Martini from the same Institute. He realized that students in the classes had trouble with more than just writing scientific articles. “Researchers need a good grasp of the basics of the scientific method to write papers,” he explains. “However, most graduate students are unable to write an introduction, let alone assemble logical arguments that lend perspective to their results in the discussion.” Many students did not even know how to construct a hypothesis, according to Machado.
In the past the course was one day long, but it had to be lengthened. Today it lasts an average of one week. In that period, students learn to communicate the results of their work, write an introduction and organize the description of the methodology, as well as other aspects involved in preparing scientific articles. “We walk through all the ins and outs of the process of writing articles, including how to submit them to specialized journals,” Machado says. “We also discuss how to choose the publications that are most appropriate for the type of research they conducted according to the study profile.”
In 2009 Machado stepped outside the confines of the university. The Environmental Research Institute (IPE) in Nazaré Paulista, in inland São Paulo State, was the first venue for the course, which has become a traveling course. In addition to his work at IB-USP, where he studies the behavior of harvestmen [daddy long-legs] (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue nº 144), Machado, now 40, also travels throughout Brazil teaching scientific writing classes at universities, NGOs and research institutes. “I have already visited a total of ten states in Brazil,” he says. One important aspect of the course, according to Machado, is ethics in research. “Students have a lot of questions about misconduct,” he explains. “They do not yet really know what is considered plagiarism and self-plagiarism, for example.”
Republish