For undergraduate students at Oregon State, publishing in a peer-reviewed research journal might feel far out of reach, but a growing number of faculty are encouraging them to push beyond their comfort zone to benefit from the experience and confidence gained through publishing.
“It’s a tool for developing a sense of belonging in the field,” said Stephanie Ramos, associate director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. “For students’ self-efficacy, how they feel they’re going to perform can be an indicator for future success.”
In academia, “publish or perish” is a motto students hear early and often, emphasizing the importance of publishing peer-reviewed findings from research projects if they hope to secure graduate positions or internships down the road.
Publishing also builds many skills students need for resumes and job applications such as writing, attention to detail, interpersonal skills and teamwork, Ramos said. Learning to communicate findings is an essential component of research, both to disseminate and implement new information and to secure funding and jobs.
Students also learn resiliency from going through the editing process, she said. Receiving feedback from reviewers can be jarring at first, but it helps students learn to respond thoughtfully while staying firm in their own beliefs.
“I’m very much of the mindset that everything we have students do in the publishing realm in higher education should be skills they’re going to be able to build on in the workforce,” Ramos said.
But not all undergrads get the opportunity to learn how academic publishing works, said Regan A.R. Gurung, professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts.
“The process of doing a research project and publishing it is very alien from what students do in the majority of most classes they’re taking,” he said. “The first day of my lab meetings with students, I tell them, ‘I’m going to change your whole mindset. Together, we’re trying to find out the answer to a question; we’re not doing something you’re just going to get a grade on.’”
In psychology, the Psych 301 research methods course can be taken as early as spring term freshman year, but most students hold off until the end of their junior year or senior year to take it, Gurung said. That means they have to catch up on the fundamentals of research processes and academic writing when they start working with faculty and upper-division or graduate students.
“There’s a very, very steep learning curve for students. Even if they have taken a research methods class, the mindset of ‘I’m going to do this research project now and I have ownership of it’ is very different from what the majority of them are used to,” he said.
To help students acclimate without having to repeat himself every term, Gurung has put together very detailed written guidance to help students learn the basics of working in a research lab and contributing to academic articles.
Once they have completed a research project, Gurung encourages undergraduates to present their results at the Office of Undergraduate Research’s Spring Presentation Symposium and a regional conference, the Western Psychological Association meeting that takes place each spring. From there, it’s not a huge leap to write up their findings for publication. The writing process takes about three months on average, he said.
Honors College students are required to complete a thesis project to graduate, and writing their thesis gets them most of the way to a finished research paper they can then submit for publication, so their process might be faster, Gurung said. Of the 18 psychology undergrads he’s mentored through journal publication, eight were Honors students.
Not all faculty make undergraduate students contributors on their journal articles for publication. It varies by discipline and by how researchers were taught, so Ramos encourages students and faculty to discuss their criteria early in the research process.
Students can publish or contribute to papers that are published in standard academic journals, but they can also publish in undergraduate-specific journals like the University of Oregon Undergraduate Journal. The Council on Undergraduate Research has a list of all the student journals available, which are reviewed and published by student researchers.
“For new faculty who may not have any idea these things exist, we want to show that students have an avenue to publish that is student-led,” Ramos said.
Connecting with URSA Engage and the resources they provide makes it easier for faculty to cultivate strong undergraduate students, Gurung said.
“Research universities have such a bad rap sometimes, with faculty doing their own thing for their own purposes, but that’s not what I’ve seen here,” he said. “I really think that for an R1 university that prides itself on its student focus, this is exactly the kind of thing that should be getting more attention.”
