Speaker 1: This one thing has helped me to get my research papers to much better, higher-impact journals in my field. It has also helped me to respond to reviewers' comments even before I get them, and it has helped me to really minimize the number of negative comments and criticisms that I get from reviewers on my research papers, and it has helped me to strengthen my research paper and to defend my approach against potential criticism from reviewers. What is this number one thing? Well, stick around for this video, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. So this tip is a little bit counterintuitive to a lot of people, because when we're writing research papers, most of the time we're told you need to highlight the research gap, you need to highlight the contribution of your study, right? And then, of course, you need to use correct methodology, analyze your data correctly, and then tell a coherent story, right? But we're often told to emphasize the positive about your paper, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. In fact, I have lots of videos about how to present the research gap and how to tell a coherent story in a research paper and so on. But apart from these positive things and highlighting those positives about your paper, I think actually doing the opposite and highlighting some of the negatives can get you into a better journal. Now, this might sound a little bit counterintuitive and strange, so stick around for this video and let me explain how this is done. And if you're new here, my name is Marek Tichkovek, and I run Academic English Now, where I help PhD students and researchers publish papers in high-impact Scopus Index journals. And if you're enjoying this video, hit the like, the subscribe button, so you don't miss future videos like that. Now, what I'm talking about here is really acknowledging the limitations of your study. And as I said, this is counterintuitive because most of the time, what we want to do is highlight the positives. We want to highlight the advantages of our study, highlight the strengths of our study to really show the reviewers why our study is novel, it's making great contributions, and our study is amazing, and they should accept it in the journal. And of course, you should do that. I'm not saying you shouldn't. You definitely should. But you should also acknowledge the limitations of your study. And there are several reasons for that. I think the most important one is basically that you take ammunition away from the reviewers. Because what usually happens when the reviewers come back to you? Well, they just point out all the problems with your study, right? And granted, some of them might be to do with how you presented your work, you know, how you structured it, maybe the language and stuff like this. But 90% of the comments and criticisms are to do with how you did the study and the limitations and problems with your study. So if you do your work and you think hard and acknowledge the limitations of your study, then you will get fewer negative comments because there will be less to comment on by the reviewers because you've already acknowledged those limitations, right? And you basically take away the ammunition with which they can shoot down your paper. They will have less ammunition, which means that your paper is more likely to be accepted, right? Now you might be wondering where in the paper do I present the limitations and how do I actually do this? So in a second, I'm going to show you examples from real research paper to show you how this is exactly done. But let me first explain where you should do this in your paper. So the typical place to do this is either at the end of the discussion section or the conclusion section, right? So very often at the end of the discussion, you might see even a section with a subheading called Strengths and Limitations, right? And this is where people are going to acknowledge the limitations of the study. An alternative way is to do it at the end of the conclusion section, right? Without any sort of additional heading necessarily, but you acknowledge in one paragraph, typically, the limitations of your study. And what you need to do when you're presenting the limitations is, first of all, defend your approach. So don't just like present a list of limitations and that's it, because that's actually counterproductive. That's bad, right? Because you're shooting yourself in the foot. You're just showing everybody why your paper is a load of nonsense. What you should do is like acknowledge the limitation and then, for example, try to defend your approach, right? I'm going to show you an example of that in a second. But what I mean by that is that, for example, you can say that, you know, our study is limited by the small number of participants. And then you want to say, however, bearing in mind the lack of previous studies on this topic, this study nevertheless offers important contributions to the literature, right? And sets the path for future researchers. So you state the limitation and then you defend your approach and you show why your study is still good, right? Now the second trick is to make suggestions for future research. So again, you state the limitation and then you make suggestions for future research. So you always end on a positive note, right? So again, you know, this study is limited by a small number of participants. Therefore, it is recommended that future studies try to generalize the findings of this study by doing a quantitative study and studying a larger sample of people, right? So never make a list of all the limitations. Always state the limitations and then either defend your approach or make a suggestion for future research. So we state the negative and then we end with a positive. And then we can state another limitation and then, again, defend our approach or make a suggestion. Limitation, suggestion, limitation, defend your approach, right? That's how you properly present the limitations of your study. Now with that said, let's see how this is actually done in real published research papers. So there are two main places where you're going to present the limitations of your study. And most typically, this is done in the discussion section. And usually, the writers even give it a title such as limitations, right? So you can see in this paper, we are in the discussion section, right? So a general discussion in here, right? And then we've got limitations, right? So it's got a clear title, right? What's the language here? Well, very typically, you start by saying, you know, several limitations must be considered. This paper has several limitations, you know, we have to acknowledge several limitations of this paper, just something like that, you know. And then you list those limitations one by one, right? You might remember what I said that like, you know, when you point out the limitation, whenever possible, you also want to defend your approach, right? So when we look at the third limitation, right, we did not concern the da-da-da, right? So it's something about what the researchers didn't do, right? But then they explain why they didn't do it and why doing it wouldn't make any sense, right? So they are basically defending their approach. And similarly, what they're doing in here, you know, they're mentioning another limitation, right? And then they are explaining why this limitation was there, right? In other words, you're providing justification for what happened. When it comes to presenting limitations in the discussion, another way to do this is to combine them with the strengths and have strengths and limitations. This is very common in certain fields in the discussion section where you just have a subheading strengths and limitations. And you can see how it's done here. And again, the pattern is very simple, right? We first introduced that there's going to be some limitations of our study. We mentioned the first limitation and then afterwards, right, we say how our study contributes nevertheless. So, yeah, there is this limitation, there is this problem, however, our study still brings this contribution, right? And another way of, you know, sort of minimising your limitation, which I've mentioned to you, apart from defending your own approach, is to mention future research, right? So we've got a limitation in here and then we say what future research can do in order to solve this problem. And again, this helps to kind of minimise a little bit your limitation. Now, a different way of doing it is presenting your limitations in the conclusion section rather than in the discussion. And there is no title in here needed most of the time, right? And the pattern is the same, you know, you have an introductory sentence where you say, you know, this study has several limitations or something like this, right? And then you mention the limitation, right? And then, you know, you defend your approach, right? And then you mention some more limitations and then you can explain those limitations, right? And then you say what future research should do. And then again, you mention a limitation and then, you know, you say why this limitation occurred in this case, in the methodology, why did this happen and why the sample was so small, right? So you provide a justification and then you suggest what future researchers should do, right? So this is the pattern that you want to follow when it comes to presenting limitations. Now you might be wondering, how do I come up with those limitations and how many limitations should I have? Well, what you need to do is just like try to put yourself in the shoes of like an external observer and be as critical as possible of your research paper. So really try to view it as somebody totally external, not yourself, somebody coming from the outside and just be as critical as possible and read the whole paper, especially the methodology, results and the discussion, right? Because there's not much to criticize really in the introduction or the literature review because you're just reviewing previous literature, right? Most of the limitations are to do with the methodology, like the sample and the sample size, the data analysis techniques that you've used, but also there can be limitations to do with the results, right? How you interpret your results and the sort of the conclusion that you make out of your results, right? These can be some of the limitations of your study. So you want to do that, but then also, I would really recommend giving your paper to somebody else, either in your field or outside of your field, both can really help and get them to read it as critically as possible and make a list of any possible limitation of your paper that they can see. And really at this stage, you just want to brainstorm a long list of potential limitations, right? Anything goes at this stage. And once you've got a long list of limitations, then you can start thinking which of these are the most important ones and which of them should I really acknowledge in my paper? Which of these limitations are the reviewers most likely to criticize me for? And these are precisely the limitations you want to put in. The ones that are the biggest, the ones that the reviewers are likely to criticize you for. 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