Exploring The Dynamics of Scholarly Writing: From Submission To Publication
Özet
Academic texts go through various stages, including translation, revision, editing, and
proofreading, before publication. These changes may occur before or after submission to
journals, often based on feedback from colleagues, peers, and, more importantly, from
editors. The scholar needs to refine and polish their work to produce concise, and precise
papers. Accordingly, this thesis study aimed to examine the common changes that
academic texts underwent during the revision process and the impact of those changes
on the readability levels of the texts. The study focused on the types of changes made to
the introduction and discussion sections of manuscripts from social sciences. Using data
from an academic writing center in Ankara, a corpus of 64 unpublished manuscripts was
analyzed. Published versions of these manuscripts were obtained online for comparison,
employing a mixed-methods approach that included both qualitative and quantitative
analyses. Qualitative data involved categorizing and comparing the revisions made to the
two versions of the introduction and discussion sections of the texts, while quantitative
data, including word count, sentence count, and readability scores, were compared.
Results indicated that the most frequent changes were additions, rephrasing, and
improvements in language use, while deletions and lexical adjustments were less
common. Although these changes enhanced the readability of the discussion sections,
these changes did not reach statistical significance. Additionally, the introduction sections
still needed further improvement. It is expected that the findings provide valuable insights
for scholars aiming to improve their academic writing skills and enhance the quality of
their publications.
