Responsible Bragging Posted on January 20, 2009 Antonio Cepeda-Benito (bio) talks about cultural differences in article-writing.

I think the international folks are really interested in establishing contacts and partnerships in part because the business of publishing, of basically selling your work, requires a set of skills that they cannot learn in their own countries.

So there's something cultural about how you present your work. So to give you a simple example, I do a lot of reviews for journals, they send me articles. And somehow they know that I have interests in Latin America and Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. And, so, if anybody from those countries submit a paper to these journals, they send them to me.

But one of the things that I noticed, the papers from these countries, the introductions were overly long. I mean they start telling you about the problem from the very beginning. So they will give you too much background, things that are common knowledge that is not necessary to repeat and that basically is not the time and place to talk about them, rather than focusing on the gaps. Of what it is the particular reason that motivated you to do this research and what is the contribution that advances knowledge? What is the conclusion you can reach from the data you collected and the analysis you conducted that teaches us something new?

But because of the, there were cultural differences on how you write a paper. Hispanics are, I mean, the culture is a little bit modest. People don't like to brag about things. So these folks wouldn't, maybe they had a very good finding or were very interested and they would not brag about it.