Research Skills Development Program-Mentoring for Excellence
By Prof. Almudena Sevilla
Collaborators: Pilar Cuevas, PhD; Sveva Manfredi
The Science Behind the Contribution of a Research Paper
A Masterclass for PhD Students and Early Career Faculty
Part of the Mentoring for Excellence Series
This masterclass addresses a core professional challenge in research. It focuses on how to frame and communicate your paper’s main contribution in a way that gets it past the editor’s desk. For mentees, the goal is to understand what makes a paper publishable, not just technically correct, but original and important. For mentors, the goal is to turn what you already do instinctively into a teachable process, so you can delegate more effectively and focus on the parts of research where you have the greatest comparative advantage. By codifying this critical part of the research process, the session aims to improve research productivity by offering practical tools to speed up and strengthen research.
For Mentees:
Most papers do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because editors do not see why they matter. This session shows you how to make your contribution and value added clear. What question you are answering. Why it matters. How your paper moves the literature forward. You will leave with a better chance at publication.
For Mentors:
Mid-career faculty, especially women, do not lack expertise. They lack time. Delegating is essential. It lets you focus on your comparative advantage while building core research skills in the next generation. This session gives you a clear framework to help students define their research question, their contribution, and their value added. You will leave with a more effective approach to mentoring that builds stronger students, supports skill transfer, and frees up scarce resources to focus on the work where you add the most value.
Why this Masterclass:
There is no shortage of well-established advice on how to do research, much of which has long benefited the academic community. This guidance lays out what good research looks like in general terms such as what questions matter, what makes a contribution, what a strong paper includes. But much of what makes a paper publishable is tacit knowledge, i.e., unwritten rules, informal judgments, and field-specific expectations that are hard to explain and even harder to teach. This reflects Polanyi’s paradox: “we know more than we can tell.” Those who have this knowledge often do not realise they are applying it, and those who need it rarely know what to ask for. The result is slower learning, weaker mentoring, and deeper inequality in the profession that results in a loss of talent and research quality. This workshop is designed to close that gap. It makes tacit knowledge visible and usable. It offers a clear and repeatable method for identifying the key elements of a paper’s contribution and value added. It is structured. It is teachable. It works.
Now is the time to act.The persistent lack of diversity in academia has led to a growing recognition in the last decade that the field must become more inclusive to maximize talent allocation, improve research quality, and strengthen its relevance in addressing real-world challenges. Concrete steps have followed. Major academic associations have expanded mentoring programs and launched new publication formats to broaden access. Initiatives focused on equity and inclusion are now central to annual meetings and strategic agendas. These are not isolated efforts. They are backed by long-term funding and plans to scale. To build on this momentum, we must address the more subtle barriers to inclusion. Much of what it takes to succeed, like framing a paper’s contribution, remains part of the hidden curriculum. Making this tacit knowledge explicit is a practical next step. It will strengthen current initiatives, support the next generation, and make the research more open, equitable, and rigorous.
Materials:
Mentoring for Excellence
Masterclass Presentations List
2026
- LSE PhD academy (date TBC)
2025
2024
- Universidad de Sevilla - Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales (Sevilla) (October 31, 2024).
- Università di Urbino Carlo Bo - 65th Annual Conference - Italian Economic Association (Urbino) (October 24, 2024). Link.
- Institute of Economics Science & University of Antwerp - Research Skills Program, 3rd Applied Economics Conference (Belgrade) (September 20, 2024). Link.
Watch the recording here.
- University of Naples Federico II - CSEF (Naples) (April 16, 2024). Link.
- IESEG (Lille) (April 4, 2024).
2023
- Royal Economic Society - Mentoring Program (London, online) (December 14, 2023). Link.
- Paris Nanterre University - Gender Issues and Development Conference (Paris) (December 1, 2023). Link.