Course framing and the publication landscape
Week 1 · 2105620 Research Communication Skills for Chemical Engineers
6 August 2026
Three hours, five blocks
Today
- 12 min Why this course exists
- 15 min Activity 1 — the 60-second research pitch
- 15 min Debrief: communication as argument
- 18 min The publication landscape
- 10 min Break
- 35 min Six genres of scientific publication
- 15 min Activity 2 — Six Papers, Six Purposes
- 15 min Debrief: genre determines structure
- 10 min Break
- 25 min How credit works · assessment · AI policy
- 10 min Baseline survey · Zotero · Week 2
A research paper is not a report
of what you did.
It is an argument that a claim
is warranted by evidence.
Everything in the next thirteen weeks follows from this one sentence.
The work is not finished when the data are in
Why this course exists
Unread
A result nobody can follow does not enter the record. It is, functionally, not a result.
Unfunded
Proposals, reports, and theses are all the same skill under different constraints.
Unhired
Your writing is the only part of your work most people will ever see.
This course treats writing as a designed object — something with a structure you can inspect, test, and repair.
Take it apart, then build one
How the course is built
Part I · Weeks 1–6
Analysis
You reverse-engineer published papers. You write nothing of your own. You learn to see structure.
Part II · Weeks 7–14
Design
You build one manuscript of your own, section by section, in the same order you learned to take one apart.
Every session in Part I sets the criteria that the matching session in Part II asks you to satisfy.
The 60-second research pitch
Activity 1 · 15 minutes
Everyone speaks. Exactly sixty seconds.
The clock is on screen and I will cut you off.
This is your introduction — and it is also the first thing this course measures.
Four sentences. No more.
Activity 1
- Who I am ___, and I work on ___.
- The problem The difficulty in this area is that ___.
- The attempt What I am trying to do about it is ___.
- Why it matters If it works, ___ becomes possible.
Sentence 2 is the one most people cannot finish. Notice that while you listen.
You are not an audience. You are reviewers.
While you listen
Pick any two classmates. For each of them, write down:
- Could you state their gap in one sentence?
- Could you state what they will actually do?
- Mark each: yes / no / almost
Keep the slip. We will look at it again in Week 15.
What just happened
Debrief
- Sentence 1 was easy Everyone can say what they work on. Topic is not the same as contribution.
- Sentence 2 was hard Most gap statements came out as “not much work has been done on X.” That is an absence, not a gap.
- Sentence 3 drifted Several of you described methods instead of an aim. Method is how; aim is what you will settle.
- Sentence 4 disappeared The significance often vanished under the time limit — exactly as it vanishes under a word limit.
Weeks 5 and 7 are about sentence 2. Week 10 is about sentence 4.
The publication landscape
Block 2 · 18 minutes
Where your paper goes, who touches it,
and what each of them is deciding
Seven gates between your bench and a citation
The journey
1Resultin your notebook
2Claimone sentence
3Manuscriptthe argument
4Deskeditor screens
5Review2–3 referees
6Revisionand response
7Recordcited, or not
Weeks 12 and 13 bring in editors who work gates 4 to 6 for a living.
Most manuscripts die at gate 4, before a single referee reads them. Nothing about that gate is about your science.
You are never writing for one audience
Four readers
~3 minutes
Editor
Is this in scope, and is it worth three referees’ time?
~2 hours
Referee
Do the methods support the claim?
~40 seconds
Skimmer
Title, abstract, figures. Then leave or stay.
~a week
Builder
Can I reproduce this and build on it?
The abstract is read by all four. That is why Week 11 spends three hours on it.
10
minute break
Back at the time on the board
Six genres
Block 3 · 35 minutes
Same findings. Six different documents.
The difference is not style — it is purpose.
What each one is for
The six
Research paper
A new claim, with the evidence that warrants it
Communication
A result too urgent to wait for the full study
Review
A map of what a field currently believes
Data paper
A dataset described so others can reuse it
Technical report
An account for a client or an institution
Thesis
A demonstration that you can do research
Choosing the wrong genre is the most expensive mistake in this list — it wastes months before anyone reads a word.
You can tell the genre without reading the science
Structural evidence
| Length | 2 500 words says Communication. 14 000 says Review. Nothing else is close. |
| Reference count | Under 40 means original work. Over 150 is almost certainly a Review. |
| Section headings | IMRaD means an argument. Thematic headings mean a survey. |
| Methods section | Absent, or in supplementary material? Communication. |
| Figure-to-word ratio | High and rising · Communication. Low · Review or report. |
| Front matter | Executive summary means an institutional reader, not a referee. |
This is the skill Activity 2 asks you to use. It is also the whole of Week 4.
The research paper
Genre 1
- Makes ONE claim.
- Everything else in the paper exists to warrant that claim.
- IMRaD is not a template — it is the shape of an argument: here is the question, here is how I answered it, here is what I found, here is what it means.
- The Methods section is a promise of reproducibility. It is what separates this genre from journalism.
Typical shape
- Words
- 6 000 – 9 000
- Figures
- 5 – 8
- References
- 40 – 80
- Review time
- 3 – 9 months
- Headings
- IMRaD
Weeks 5–11 build one of these, section by section.
Two opposite answers to “how much?”
Genres 2 and 3
Communication
- Speed is the argument — you are claiming this cannot wait
- Methods usually pushed to supplementary
- One figure carries the whole claim
- Rejected hardest for lack of novelty
Review
- Synthesis is the argument — a new way to organise what is known
- A list of papers is not a review; it is a bibliography
- Thematic headings, not IMRaD
- Usually invited — check before you write one
Both are “a paper.” Neither can be written the way you would write the other.
The three you will also write
Genres 4, 5 and 6
Data paper
The dataset is the contribution. No hypothesis is required — but the description must be complete enough for someone else to reuse it without asking you a question.
Technical report
Written for a client or an institution, not for referees. Executive summary first, because the reader may stop there. Not peer reviewed, and not part of the permanent record.
Thesis
Its purpose is not to report findings but to demonstrate that you can do research. That is why it contains material a journal would cut — failed attempts, full derivations, the reasoning behind choices.
Your thesis is not a stack of papers, and your papers are not chapters. Converting between them is real work.
Six Papers, Six Purposes
Activity 2 · 15 minutes · in pairs
Six dossiers. Titles, three lines of abstract, headings, counts.
The journal name has been removed.
Work out what each one is — from its shape alone.
What to do
Activity 2
- 7 min · in pairs For each of the six dossiers, write down three things.
- 8 min · report out We take them in order. Number 6 last.
For each dossier, record:
- Which genre is it?
- The two strongest structural clues
- Who is the intended reader?
If you could tell the genre
without reading the science —
what were you actually reading?
Structure. Proportion. Where the argument sits.
That is the whole course in one line — and it is why Part I comes before Part II.
10
minute break
Then: how credit works, and how you are graded
How credit actually works
Block 5
- Authorship is earned, not granted Contribution to design, execution, or interpretation — plus drafting, plus approval, plus accountability. Supervising a project is not automatically one of them.
- Order carries meaning — and it varies First author did the work; last author ran the group. In some fields. Never assume; ask before the first draft, not after.
- Citation is the currency It is also the audit trail. An uncited idea that is not yours is misconduct, whatever the intention.
- The record is permanent Retractions stay visible. So does everything you sign your name to.
Next week Prof. Supareak takes this apart in full — ICMJE criteria, COPE guidance, and the course AI policy.
Four components
How you are graded
30%
Midterm
Held after Week 6 — analysis of published work
30%
Final
Application: revise, and respond to a reviewer
20%
Assignments
Three of them: critical appraisal, Introduction and Methods, and a figure set
20%
Final project
A complete manuscript, which you also present
Every assignment carries an AI-use declaration. The policy permits more than you expect — and it requires you to say what you did.
Announced in full next week.
Three things
Before we meet again
- Baseline survey On myCourseVille. Ten minutes. It is not graded — it tells me where this cohort starts.
- Install Zotero Desktop client plus the browser connector, and create an account. Week 3 is a laboratory and assumes it is working.
- Bring a paper One published paper from your own area, printed. We take it apart in Week 4.
Week 2 · 13 August — Research integrity, authorship, and generative AI · Prof. Supareak Praserthdam
Not: what did I do?
But: what do I claim,
and why should anyone believe it?
See you next Thursday.
Before you go · 45 seconds
How was today?
Five questions. Anonymous — no name, no email, no login.
The fourth question is the one I actually use.
The two most common answers open next week’s session.
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