Being a great researcher is no guarantee for getting your research published in high quality peer reviewed journals. PhD students and junior faculty often struggle to understand why their best work is rejected with sometimes very little constructive feedback. Yet, getting your papers published or to a level that is worthy of publication remains crucial for obtaining your PhD, tenure, or your first academic job.

Good academic writing takes a lot of practice and the development of skills that are often different from research skills. While you can obtain these skills the “hard way” through getting your papers rejected, you are likely to get there faster by learning from the experience of others. I have published over 40 articles in high quality, peer reviewed journals. Additionally, for every published paper I probably have had five papers rejected by these journals. In this course, I will share my experience on good academic writing, and provide insights into what it takes to get a paper published in a good journal. We will put particular emphasis on discussing and improving your own writing.

This course is particularly useful for students/faculty working in general business subjects, such as, management, international business, marketing, strategy, entrepreneurship, HRM, or similar. While students/faculty in other subject areas, such as economics, finance, OR, etc. will benefit as well, reviewer expectations in these latter areas will differ from those in the former. Participants should have at least one (draft of a) paper to work on.

The broad themes we will be covering are:

• Writing process
• Structuring journal articles
• Playing the publishing game
• Writing for publication and getting published

• To improve students’ writing skills
• To improve students’ ability to write journal articles
• To improve students’ chances of publishing journal articles

Attendance compulsory.

• Discussions, exercises, presentation and discussion of participants’ writing
• examples of good and bad writing
• extensive individual coaching

• Active participation in class (exercises and discussions) (30%)
• Proof reading exercise (30%)
• Written coursework (1200 words) (40%)

A good command of the English language.

Please log in with your WU account to use all functionalities of read!t. For off-campus access to our licensed electronic resources, remember to activate your VPN connection connection. In case you encounter any technical problems or have questions regarding read!t, please feel free to contact the library at readinglists@wu.ac.at.