Write for us and support others by sharing your experience!
Our mission is to inspire and motivate PhDs and early career researchers to achieve their full potential and succeed in their academic careers while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Thanks for contributing to Motivated Academic!
We’re teaming up with some of the best minds in the world of research and academia to build a platform for sharing experience and promoting good practice. By working with you, we want to showcase your thought leadership and promote your academic profile.
With that in mind, here are some guidelines and recommendations for each piece of content that you submit.
what we're looking for?
In general, articles we accept for guest content fall under the following themes:
Motivation for researchers
Wellbeing in academia and work-life balance
Academic productivity and time management
Research tools and funding
what we also accept
We also accept articles that aim purely to share your experience, especially when you demonstrate how you overcame a specific challenge in your research and academic career.
While brainstorming what to write about, ask yourself these questions:
- Will this topic be relevant to the Motivated Academic audience?
- Will this post offer solutions, tools, or frameworks?
- Am I qualified to write about this topic?
- What insight can I bring to this topic that nobody else can?
When in doubt, get in touch with me at team@motivatedacademic.com
Note: We accept content from people with experience at different career stages in the industry (R&D) and academia. If you’re a PhD, postdoc or already hold a permanent academic position and want to share your experience – feel free to submit your article!
Guest article content
The guiding light behind our blog is to share content that’s educational, engaging, and entertaining… not product-focused or promotional.
We’ve built a high level of trust with our audience because they know we care about the quality of content we produce for them. We always try to give more than we promised. That is why we want to keep our content focused on the practical aspects of working in academia and research. Tailor your content to answer the following question of our audience: what can I take away from this article and apply today in my research project?
Use our blog to showcase your experience, tips, good practice and reflections. If people find your content valuable, they’ll connect with you directly. We’re also happy to make introductions if our audience asks about your piece of content.
As academics, we like the rules of thumbs. So here are the rules we apply to our content:
We find this is a sweet spot with our readership, and you’ll fit in with the rest of our blog this way. Longer is good, too.
This means including headings, subheadings, bullets, and any other visual elements to increase the readability of your piece. Make sure to fully acknowledge the sources for your figures, images and tables. If in doubt, check out our Academic Talk on plagiarism.
We want to share content that is authoritative, but not robotic. We’re producing blog content – not Wikipedia pages. We encourage you to write it as you were discussing your topic during an academic conference. Don’t shy away from showing off your sense of humour. That said, make sure you respect the audience that will read your article.
We don’t accept duplicate or syndicated content as guest articles. If your article has already been published anywhere else on the web, we can’t publish it on our blog. You wouldn’t submit your research paper for publication in two different journals. Let’s keep our work to the highest ethical standards. If you quote other content, link to it.
We understand that you’re an expert, but our audience might not be so sure. If you’re going to use statistics, pictures, diagrams or tables, link back to the original source.
Talk about mistakes you’ve made, plans you’ve built, and strategies you’ve executed. Draw on your own personal experience to speak authoritatively about what you know.
If you disagree with common wisdom on a topic, talk about why the mainstream point of view is wrong or misleading. Back up your perspective with facts. Take screenshots. Include interesting data. Support your arguments with external references.
Other things to include in your guest article
In addition to the main body of your article, you may want to include additional elements that will enhance the understanding and experience of our audience, as well as will help you build your academic profile.
You may want to include:
- Statistics. Numbers make insights more believable. Use numbers to support your arguments and include verifiable first- or third-party research, statistics, and data in your post.
- Outbound Links. Does somebody else have a great point of view on a topic? Want to make sure people know a certain definition of a word or concept? Link to it. Make sure these links are to authoritative sites or academic journals. Only link to your other content if it’s highly relevant to your blog article.
- Lists and Bullets. We’re fans. Readers are fans. Most people skim articles until they find the value. Bullet points make this easy.
- Actionable Takeaways. Recap the takeaways of your article as bullet points at the end of your post.
- Bio. Include your short bio (~50–100 words), a link to your website and your preferred social media account – so that our audience can know who you are and where to find you!
NOTE: *Motivated Academic reserves full editorial control and may edit or tweak submissions as we see fit. These tweaks include anything from removing too much self-promotion to optimizing for SEO, edits both small and large, and more.
Guest article logistics
If you want to write an article for us, here’s what you need to do:
- Use the contact form below and include your details, proposed topic and a brief outline (up to 5 sentences). Don’t start writing until we’ve done this!
- Once we’ve agreed on the topic, give me a deadline for when you expect to submit the article for us to review.
- Once you’ve drafted the article, get in touch and we’ll share more details on how we’ll proceed with the editorial process.
- Once we’re all happy with the draft, we’ll let you know when the article will go live.
Guest article promotion
Please feel free to promote your post through your social media, newsletter, or link to it from your blog.
You can even include a snippet of the post on your blog, with a link back to the original content on our site (this is important so that we both avoid duplicate content penalties).