Development of graduates’ and post-graduate students’ publication competence

academic literacy and publishing competence make currently an integral part of a researcher’s general competence enabling him to publish successfully his research results in high-ranking journals. However, the abundance of rejections from the editorial boards that Russian authors receive indicated the need to develop their publication competence starting with the training of graduates and post-graduate students. This article presents the concept of «publication competence» as the author’s ability to prepare the manuscript for publication in the target journal in accordance with the problems and mission of the journal and to follow the discursive and rhetorical positions adopted by the academic community of the journal. Based on the analysis of Russian and foreign articles we have identified four levels of the competence: epistemological, discursive, rhetorical and technical (editorial). Our analysis of the knowledge and skills necessary to master these levels showed that teaching graduates and post-graduate students allows achieving the two latter ones. It is proposed to teach students within the framework of the course «Academic writing for Publication Purposes» or through a special (elective) course starting with the development of the lowest (technical) level of publication competence. At this stage students will acquire the ability to comply with requirements of the journal’s editorial board for manuscript design and to learn how to write abstracts in Russian and English. At the stage of the rhetorical level development students will learn how to analyze and practically apply rhetorical strategies that are typical for the academic community of the target journal in the process of writing, citing and critically analyzing the positions of other authors. As the result students will get hands-on experience of writing manuscripts that could be published in students’ and research journals.