Scientific writing: a student and supervisor perspective. Needs, support and reality

Abstract

Scientific and technical writing are key competences for scientist within the technical field, it is the way to communicate ideas, knowledge and scientific progress. During the PhD studies the student need to develop skills in writing, to write scientific articles and the final thesis. This makes scientific writing one of the most important things that supervisors need to teach their PhD students. In the present work supervision of "performance writing" is investigated from PhD student and research supervisor points of view. PhD students and supervisors at LTH have been given the opportunity to fill in questionnaires about the first major writing task a PhD-student is taking part in. The PhD students have been given open questions concerning the supervision they got on their first major written task, about the main difficulties and how the supervision ideally could have been. The supervisors were asked how they supervised the first written task, but also what type of supervision they experienced that the students asked for. Our survey shows that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the support provided by the supervisors – mostly given in form of comments to a first written draft -- and the expectations of the PhD students, who experience a major difficulty with structuring their first manuscript. Supervisors seem to underestimate the challenge represented by writing a student’s first manuscript, and they prioritize a “hands on” approach; to present this strategy with a metaphor: throw the students in the water, they will eventually learn how to swim. Another interesting aspect also emerged in our survey is how the order of authorship seems to be unlinked from the actual writing of the manuscript.