Abstract:

Students in Masters with a research orientation should be aware that the ultimate goal of scientific research is the publication of their results to be shared with the rest of the scientific community which can validate, corroborate or refute them. For this purpose, the journal Avances en Ciencias de la Tierra (ACT) was born with a twofold objective scientific and educational. The publication aims to be a test where students learn the techniques of scientific publishing and achieve the necessary scientific rigor in the content.
Some of the teachers of the Master in Climate Science: Meteorology, Physical Oceanography and Climate Change have led some of the students of Masters in the different steps to be followed to prepare a scientific paper text on their research. Students must learn that write an article has different steps that can be summarized as follows:
An article is a report on the results on a scientific problem. The language must be correct and concise, avoiding vague or speculative statements.
Students should start by describing the state of the art of the scientific problem under study and encouraging the research work carried out.
Students must give clear and concise information of data used. In addition, all mathematical, physical, chemical and/or biological methods used in the article must be described in detail.
Results must be original, sound, reliable and reproducible, so they can be compared to those obtained by the rest of the scientific community.
In the discussion section, results should be critically discussed putting them in context with similar works elsewhere.
The article should end with a conclusions or a summary section that lists clearly and concisely the groundbreaking achievements obtained in the research.
Once the student already has a clear version of the article he/she can proceed easily to develop an abstract. The abstract must answer why and how the study has been carried out and which are the new results that it brings to the scientific community.
In the particular case of ACT, the manuscript must have a scientific content which represents a significant advance in knowledge, for this purpose several quality control mechanisms have been designed. First, the supervisors of the work were involved in the preparation of manuscripts bringing their experience in writing and structuring of scientific articles. Furthermore, the scientific quality of manuscripts has been evaluated by two reviewers.
As a result of joint efforts described above, the first volume of the ACT journal (ISSN 2172 – 9328) was published online in December 2010. This issue is available in http://ephyslab.uvigo.es/index.php/revista-avances-en-ciencias-de-la-tierra-act.