Exploring The Dynamics of Scholarly Writing: From Submission To Publication

Abstract

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 Using data from an academic writing center in Ankara, a corpus of 64 unpublished manuscripts was analyzed.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.