Writing an article for a student publication

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the appropriateness of writing an expository article for a college science magazine that relates to research conducted by the author over the summer. The author seeks clarification on potential issues regarding originality and publication ethics, especially since the article is closely related to their unpublished research.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant expresses concern about writing an article that is closely related to their summer research, despite the article not containing original work, and seeks reassurance on ethical considerations.
  • Another participant suggests that writing such an article is acceptable, citing examples from their field where similar practices occur, and emphasizes the importance of not including figures from the journal submission due to potential copyright issues.
  • A later reply indicates that the author has not used figures from their journal submission, but notes that they did not mention the connection to their summer work in the article.
  • Another participant questions why there is still concern if the editors have already approved the article.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants generally agree that writing the article is permissible, especially since the editors have approved it. However, there are differing views on the necessity of disclosing the connection to the summer research and the implications of copyright issues.

Contextual Notes

There are unresolved concerns regarding the relationship between the article and the author's summer research, particularly about whether mentioning this connection is necessary or beneficial.

modnarandom
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Is there is a problem in writing an expository article in a college science magazine run by a student group on a topic similar to research that I did over the summer? I thought it was very interesting and included some material from articles which I looked at then. The main reason why I'm concerned is that I have some results from research over the summer which I submitted for publication. The expository article doesn't contain any of the original work which I did, but discusses a topic which is very closely related to what I worked on. Thoughts? The editors said it was fine, but I just want to make sure.
 
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If I understand what you're saying, I think it's perfectly fine.

In my field, for example there's a weekly publication called Medical Physics Web that posts reviews of recently published work, usually with a brief interview of one of the lead authors, and some of the figures from the papers.
http://medicalphysicsweb.org/

E-zines like Science Daily do this on a larger scale for publications that come out of some of the bigger journals like Nature.

In these cases though, the "popular" articles come out after the journal articles and cite the reference, the idea generally being that the popular articles will draw attention to the journal.

I might be a little careful about including figures that are part of your journal submission. There may be copyright issues with those.

But if you're writing an article for a student rag that basically says "I got a position working in X lab, studied how Y relates to Z and had a great time discovering a constant of proportionality of K," then you don't have anything to worry about.

Unless of course, X lab made you sign a non-disclosure agreement and k is considered proprietary information.
 
Phew! That's good. It's a student-run publication and I'm not using any figures from my journal submission. The only remaining problem is that I just wrote an expository article but didn't mention that it was related to summer work (had references though).
 
modnarandom said:
The editors said it was fine, but I just want to make sure.

If so, where is the problem?? They told you it is ok...
 

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