{"id":223264,"date":"2016-08-23T17:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T20:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=223264"},"modified":"2016-08-24T16:48:51","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T19:48:51","slug":"the-art-of-communication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-art-of-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of communication"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Carreira_Glauco\"Personal archive<\/span>In 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.<\/p>\n

A group of 20 master\u2019s 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. \u201cThe students were unable to discuss the findings of the studies they had conducted in the field,\u201d Machado says. Therefore, he decided to set up a scientific writing course, mainly to present methods for writing articles.<\/p>\n

The result was satisfactory and the course flourished. In 2007, Machado, by then a professor at the Biosciences Institute of the University of S\u00e3o 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 In\u00e1cio Prado and Adriana Martini from the same Institute. He realized that students in the classes had trouble with more than just writing scientific articles. \u201cResearchers need a good grasp of the basics of the scientific method to write papers,\u201d he explains. \u201cHowever, most graduate students are unable to write an introduction, let alone assemble logical arguments that lend perspective to their results in the discussion.\u201d Many students did not even know how to construct a hypothesis, according to Machado.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe walk through all the ins and outs of the process of writing articles, including how to submit them to specialized journals,\u201d Machado says. \u201cWe also discuss how to choose the publications that are most appropriate for the type of research they conducted according to the study profile.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2009 Machado stepped outside the confines of the university. The Environmental Research Institute (IPE) in Nazar\u00e9 Paulista, in inland S\u00e3o 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<\/em> Issue n\u00ba\u00a0144<\/a>), Machado, now 40, also travels throughout Brazil teaching scientific writing classes at universities, NGOs and research institutes. \u201cI have already visited a total of ten states in Brazil,\u201d he says. One important aspect of the course, according to Machado, is ethics in research. \u201cStudents have a lot of questions about misconduct,\u201d he explains. \u201cThey do not yet really know what is considered plagiarism and self-plagiarism, for example.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Biologist teaches scientific writing to graduate students","protected":false},"author":346,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1204],"tags":[],"coauthors":[662],"class_list":["post-223264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/346"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223264"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=223264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}