Students’ research articles in the context of academic writing: analyzing the Studarctic forum journal publications

the article addresses the problem of improving the quality of students’ research articles, which comprise one of the important areas of undergraduates’ research activities. The paper presents the results of the diagnostic analysis of articles published in the StudArctic Forum academic journal founded at Petrozavodsk State University in 2016. In order to assess the quality of the selected publications the author used the modified scale of academic literacy criteria developed by I. B. Korotkina. The analysis identified certain trends related to the quality of the students’ articles and enabled to identify the criteria met and overlooked by the authors of the manuscripts. It was revealed that the vast majority of the students meet the journal’s formal requirements concerning keywords and references, properly formulate their research problem, and select sufficient factual information for the publication. However, after six years of its existence, the journal still has prob-lems with ensuring the quality of abstracts, paragraph structure, logical coherence of the text, and the formulation and argumentation of the authors’ research positions. The conclusion is that there are certain prerequisites for improving the quality of students’ academic publications at Petrozavodsk State University. The author proposes a set of measures to improve the students’ academic literacy with the help of the journal’s editors, students’ research supervisors and experts in academic writing.