Workshop on Academic Writing – 44 Faculty, Research Scholar and Students have participated in the above online Workshop

On the first day i.e. 22nd June, 2020, the workshop was started with the welcome speech delivered by Dr Sharmistha Bhattacharjee, Head, Department of Social Engineering, RGNIYD. She welcomed the Director, the learned resource person Prof Lakshmi Lingam, Prof.TRA Devkumar, Registrar, Dr S Laitha, Head Department of Social Work, Dr Kumaravel and Dr Rambabu Botcha. She also welcomed all the 45 Participants (faculty and scholars from other universities and faculty and scholars of RGNIYD). The inaugural address was delivered by Prof Sibnath Deb, Director RGNIYD. In his speech he enlightens the participants with the need of academic writing in the contemporary society and publication of papers in reputed journals.  After his speech, Dr S. Lalitha introduced the resource person Prof Lakshmi Lingam, School of Cultural and Media Studies, TISS Mumbai.

 

Prof. Sibnath Deb, Director, RGNIYD was requested to address the participants. In his address, Prof. Deb emphasized the need for cultivating academic scholarship through reading and writing scholarly papers and publication in reputed journals. He expressed his motive to elevate RGNIYD with a full-fledged academic ambience soon. He appreciated and acknowledged the scholarly sessions delivered by Prof Lakshmi Lingam on academic writing.

 

Prof. Lingam highlighted the purpose of research, stages in research, the purpose of the literature review and access to e-sources. She also elaborated the stages in reading critically which illuminated the academic rigour among the participants. She enthusiastically addressed the queries raised by the participants on the themes related to review of the literature. She then interacted with the participants on annotations writing in detail.

 

Prof.Lingam started explaining about various courses that are being offered from SWAYAM platforms particularly on Ethics. The session on Plagiarism, Ethics and Academic Integrity was started by emphasising on what is plagiarism, publication ethics, different kinds of publications that are considered as ethical violations and authorship issues

 

She highlighted on the adherence to norms of plagiarism and explained about the plagiarism checking softwares such as Turn-it-in, Urkund and other softwares.  She explained the importance of publication ethics by connecting with integrity in the publication process, respecting the rights of authors, reviewer, editors and publishers and accountability for what is published.

 

After that she explained various tips to avoid inadvertent plagiarism including source of all items, paraphrasing, direct quotes within quotes, inserting author’s name, year and page number immediately after sourcing the information, precaution on self-plagiarism or text recycling etc. She also emphasised to be careful on redundant publication and salami publication. Later on moved on to explain about authorship which is matter of credit and accountability.

 

Prof.Lingam highlighted about the contributors to claim authorship and not to claim  authorship explaining about the Gift, Ghost or Paid authorship which come under violation of publication ethics. She advice the authors to follow the guidelines, clarify the roles while working with colleagues, and conflict of interest such as funding, affiliation etc.

 

About publication plan which includes identification of journals of publication, orientating the paper for the journal specification and following scholars and placing your research on research community sites. While emphasising on the planning, she told to all the participants ‘if you want to succeed, you need to plan’. After that Prof.Lingam explained about the identification journals for publication. She suggested looking for high impact factor journals, quickly published journals, open source journal etc. by visiting the journal guide (the American journal expert) website and UGC CARE list. It was explained that every academic writer should have ORCID identity number with which one can share their writings without any ambiguity. After that Prof.Lingam clarified about various aspects pertaining to paper submission and revision. While writing for international journals, one should refer more.