Workshop on Writing and Publishing High Impact Research Papers Organized at KACST

A workshop entitled, “Writing and Publishing High Impact Research Papers” was organized by King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST), on 16 May 2017. The main objective of this workshop was to discuss the best research strategies for writing high-quality papers and underscore the importance of publishing in high-impact journals.
Prof. Muhammad Khurram Khan from the Center of Excellence in Information Assurance (CoEIA) at King Saud University was the speaker of the event.
In the workshop, Prof. Khurram discussed the steps of writing research papers from inception to final publication, including the needs of writing a research paper, anatomy and structure of a research paper, peer-reviewing process in journals, and highlighted the prominent international publishing venues, which are covered by prestigious indexing services e.g. Web of Science and Scopus etc. He also elaborated on the quantitative measures based on citation metrics that are commonly used by the academia as an indicator of the influence for research and researchers.
“Dissemination of research output is an integral part of the research process and publishing research papers is indispensable throughout the career-growth of a researcher. However, writing research papers is a difficult and nerve-wracking job, which needs comprehensive training and skills”, stated by Prof. Khurram during the lecture.
He also shed light on the new strategies in scientific publishing and discussed about the open access publishing models that are changing the publishing landscape and making a positive impact on society, funding agencies, community, and performance of the researchers alike. He also discussed about the predatory and hijacked publishers and journals, which are polluting science and making a bad impact on the academic field. In addition, he stressed the importance of academic social networks which are playing a key role in developing research collaboration and helping researchers to learn from each others experiences.
 At the end, Prof. Khurram shown that the research performance of Saudi Arabia, by its publications in Web of Science indexed journals, is commendable and scientists and researchers from the Kingdom have published 75,269 research papers during 2006-2016. It is worth mentioning that King Saud University is the most prolific institution in the Kingdom with a record of 21,300 research publications.
The event was attended by a large number of attendees from universities, research institutions, and industry etc.
Prof. Khurram is a distinguished and prolific scientist and has published over 300 research papers. He also holds several USA patents in the field of Cybersecurity. He is the Editor-in-Chief of a prestigious ISI-indexed international journal ‘Telecommunication Systems’ published by Springer since 1993. He is on the editorial board of numerous top-class journals and actively participates on the organizing committee of well-esteemed international conferences. He is a serial speaker and delivers talks/keynotes/lectures related to his specialization and other topics locally and internationally. He is a recipient of King Saud University Award for Scientific Excellence (Research Productivity) in 2015. He is also a recipient of King Saud University Award for Scientific Excellence (Inventions, Innovations, and Technology Licensing) in 2016.