This Expert Workshop is part of the RES Doctoral Training Programme.
Presenters
- Almudena Sevilla, LSE
- Pilar Cuevas Ruiz, UCL
Most papers do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because editors do not see why they matter. This session shows you how to make your contribution and value added clear. What question you are answering. Why it matters. How your paper moves the literature forward. You will leave with a better chance at publication.This session addresses a core professional challenge in research. It focuses on how to frame and communicate your paper’s main contribution in a way that gets it past the editor’s desk. For mentees, the goal is to understand what makes a paper publishable, not just technically correct, but original and important. For mentors, the goal is to turn what you already do instinctively into a teachable process, so you can delegate more effectively and focus on the parts of research where you have the greatest comparative advantage. By codifying this critical part of the research process, the session aims to improve research productivity by offering practical tools to speed up and strengthen research.Why this Session:There is no shortage of well-established advice on how to do research, much of which has long benefited the academic community. This guidance lays out what good research looks like in general terms such as what questions matter, what makes a contribution, what a strong paper includes. But much of what makes a paper publishable is tacit knowledge, i.e., unwritten rules, informal judgments, and field-specific expectations that are hard to explain and even harder to teach. This reflects Polanyi’s paradox: “we know more than we can tell.” Those who have this knowledge often do not realise they are applying it, and those who need it rarely know what to ask for. The result is slower learning, weaker mentoring, and deeper inequality in the profession that results in a loss of talent and research quality. This workshop is designed to close that gap. It makes tacit knowledge visible and usable. It offers a clear and repeatable method for identifying the key elements of a paper’s contribution and value added. It is structured. It is teachable. It works.
