Writing a Review Article: A Graduate Level Writing Class

• Published in: Journal of chemical education 2018-05, Vol.95 (5), p.810-816
• Main Authors: Ogunsolu, Omotola O, Wang, Jamie C, Hanson, Kenneth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Careers; Chemistry; Chemists; College students; Communication; Communities; Community Benefits; Content Area Reading; Content Area Writing; Course Evaluation; Curricula; Feedback; Graduate studies; Graduate Study; Journals (Academic); Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Organic chemistry; Professional development; Student Attitudes; Student Surveys; Students; Topics; Writing; Writing for Publication; Writing Instruction; Writing Skills
• ISSN: 0021-9584; 1938-1328
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838

Despite the importance of scientific writing in a chemists’ professional career, their development as scientific writers is often neglected in undergraduate and graduate curricula. Among the courses that do encourage students to generate written documents like proposals, lab reports, or essays, the scientific community rarely benefits from the resulting product. Here, we introduce an alternative graduate level writing class where the goal is for the students to generate a review article that is submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This course structure allows students to build scientific reading and writing skills, learn about a new topic, and also enhance their resume with an additional publication and subsequent citations. Concurrently, the scientific community benefits from an additional resource. What follows is an outline of the review article writing course as well as the students’ feedback of the course and writing experience. Overall, the students felt the course was a lot of work. Yet, they also reported a greater understanding of the topic, a broadened knowledge base, and a better ability to quickly read and process literature. Despite the challengeswhich included compiling all of the papers for a given topic and managing the time to read and writethe students gained a new found appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into writing a review article, and they unanimously felt the results were commensurate with the work.