Writing an excellent academic paper and having it accepted by top international journals are always challenges for graduate students and early-career researchers. To help the young researchers, IAHR has been organizing lectures on paper writing in the past years. The latest effort is another live-streamed lecture given by IAHR president Prof. Joseph Lee, who was also the editor of the Journal of Hydro-environment Research from 2007 through 2019. This event was jointly organized by IAHR and its institute member, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), on March 26, 2021 both in a lecture room of IWHR’s Graduate School and online.

Watch video (subtitled, English + Chinese)

Watch playback (subtitled, English + Chinese)

In this lecture titled “How to Write a Good Paper for a Top International Journal,” Prof. Lee talked about the do’s and don’ts of writing a good manuscript for an international journal (preparations before starting, construction of an article, and the technical details), the revisions and response to reviewers, and the ethical issues.

In the major part of his lecture, Prof. Lee talked about literature review, originality checking, journal selection, guide for authors, content v.s. presentation, general structure of a full article, figures and tables, submission and revision, and response to review and rejection, with real examples. The good practices and pitfalls of writing each components of an academic paper were explained in detail. Prof. Lee emphasized the deadly sins of unethical behaviors, including self-plagiarism and data fabrication, and also called for the authors to stand against forced citation by unethical reviewers.

Some quotes from this lecture:

“If you want to write a good paper, you have to convince yourself that, really, this is worth it.”

“A good manuscript leads readers to scientific significance immediately.”

“Figures and tables are the most efficient way to present results.”

“Nobody gets it right the first time and my suggestion is still write and re-write; there is no shortcut.

“You would rather have a good paper appear at a later date than a poor paper appear earlier.”

More than 100 graduate students from IWHR sitting in two rooms listened to this lecture that also attracted more than 3,800 views online by the end of the event (the number exceeded 7,300 in the following three days).

Prof. Yicheng Wang, Dean of IWHR Graduate School, opened the lecture, introduced the lecturer and chaired the Q&A session.

In 2020, IAHR also organized another two webinars on writing a good paper in July and December. More information can be found below:

For more online events, please visit IAHR > Events > IAHR Webinars.