Writing a Scientific Paper with Master’s Students in Five Weeks — One Example of How It Can Be Done & Lessons Learned

Writing scientific papers is a key skill for researchers, and increasingly also for professionals in geoscience and engineering. It is very time-intensive and challenging, especially for PhD candidates or master's students doing it for the first time. In interdisciplinary contexts, the process can be tough even for seasoned professionals. Courses and other resources on academic writing help, but they might leave the actual process – from ideation and data collection to editing and publishing – quite unfamiliar. Some educators have made losing the research paper virginity easier by facilitating co-writing of real-life papers together in short timeframes through courses or workshops. This process can be a win-win for everyone involved: academic staff can finally develop that lingering research idea into a paper with the help of others, and early-career researchers can complete the usually daunting first paper much earlier than they otherwise would. Additionally, scientific writing and incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives becomes much easier once you have experienced the process once.

 

Unfortunately, scientific works or other materials on such hands-on writing processes are difficult to find. In this presentation, we hope to showcase one way of facilitating such a student co-writing process from start to finish. This process was piloted as part of Aalto University’s Sustainable Global Technologies Studio course in 2024, where multidisciplinary master’s student teams tackle real-life problem-based learning cases with the help of mentors and stakeholders. As part of this course, students travel abroad to work on their case. In this instance, students explored a small Mexican artisan village, studying artisan practices and changes in their environment that impact their livelihood. After returning to Finland, the mentor facilitated a systematic writing process to produce a qualitative academic paper on the students’ work. In short, the team first analyzed the interview data with a coding guide, wrote results into representative sections guided by academic frameworks, and after lengthy albeit educative editing, the paper was submitted to a journal.

 

The initial five weeks during which students participated in the writing worked well, and progress was speedy. This intense writing process with clear responsibility division, weekly deadlines, and progress meetings yielded the desired outcome – an article draft. Finalizing the paper took longer than expected, but the paper was submitted at the end of 2025. Here, we hope to present one way of facilitating such a process and discuss the lessons learned.

 

Our experience is that such a systematic approach has high potential to effectively teach both master’s and PhD students about scientific writing and to produce interdisciplinary papers effectively in different kinds of teams. Furthermore, our experience illustrates the potential of project courses in generating impactful outcomes beyond the course itself, which can be of interest for educators interested in practical approaches that deepen the professional relevance of such courses.