OKANYA, Patrick (Dr)

“The publish-or-perish principle has become a fact of academic life in gaining a position or being promoted” (Dalen, 2021). They say numbers don’t lie and this was also clearly exemplified by Lord Kevin’s dictum “When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind” (Merton et al 1984). Most students enroll for doctoral studies with an aim of contributing to knowledge. From the onset, they are fully aware that they need to conduct research and publish their findings in refereed journals. Doing research and giving presentation of their findings is usually easy when compared to writing the final thesis for examination or preparing a manuscript for publication. In the 21st century, most universities insist on publication of at least two articles for a doctorate degree to be awarded. The quality and quantity of the publications would then determine the employability of the fresh graduate either as a post doctorial staff, member of the academic staff or simply to join the labor industry. With the stiff competition on placement the doctorate student has no choice but to think publication. While doing research, most students especially in the science field assume that writing comes at the tail end of the research or when certain specific objectives are accomplished to be churned into manuscripts. Unfortunately, those students who do this, experience lots of writers block that slow down their progress. Prof. Botha in his tutorial on Supervising Doctoral thesis writing and giving feedback to doctoral students says that “writing is much more than simply a technical “writing up” phase that can be left to the last phase of the doctoral study” this means that the writing should be continuous and not left for last in the PhD progress. This can be accomplished by writing small chunks of information as you move along the research process. The chucks may include the synthesis of the literature review of the articles you read, the principles, methodologies and data collected on the experiments performed in the laboratory journals and a discussion of what the results mean. However, when writing a manuscript for publication, several factors need to be considered. They include but not limited to; whether your results are significant and contribute to the existing knowledge, are the results reproducible, choice of the journal where you want to publish, adherence to the rules of the journal and to be sure that indeed your results are solving a problem. Significantly, though, you need to properly plan your writing.