Academic writing for research publication purposes

the author considers the problem of improving the quality and number of scientific articles published by the Russian scientists in high-rated journals included in the databases Scopus and Web of Science. The first cause of low publication activity of Russian authors is their insufficient level of the English language proficiency. The second cause stems from the authors’ unawareness of rhetorical and publication conventions common in the world academic community. First few academic writing centers in Russian universities are not able to affect the publication activity due to some administrative and financial factors. The author provides an example of her course “Introduction into academic writing for research publication purposes” that is based on the bilingual approach and is designed to help the faculty and postgraduate students learn some basics of academic writing in both Russian and English. In the course of study the participants get some idea about the conventional structure of a research paper (IMRaD), learn to construct academically correct sentences and analyze the meaning of Russian polysemous words to find pertinent English words. They learn the conventional ways of citation that help them to avoid plagiarism. At the end of the course each participant writes an abstract or an article section in English. The author comes to the conclusion that academic writing and writing for publication should be included into the universities’ curriculum and delivered both in Russian and English.