چکیده:
Due to the importance given to the RAs as the preferred
medium of exchanging knowledge among members of the
academic community, a substantial body of research has
been dedicated to explore the writers’ problems encountered
in writing or publishing the RAs (Braine, 1995; Flowerdew,
2000; Li, 2006). Although, Iranian post-graduate students
(IRPGS), like other non-native English language users, are
most often seen to have difficulties in providing a wellwritten
piece of research for publication, to date, few, if any,
studies have investigated their difficulties in RAs’ writing
for publication in established journals. To this end, a corpus
of IRPGS’ rejected articles for publication was analyzed
guided by a developed evaluation checklist to pinpoint their
main difficulties. Furthermore, a sample of 180 Iranian postgraduates
filled out a questionnaire containing in-depth
details on the basic principles of doing and writing research
papers so as to identify their main challenges in this respect.
Through the questionair, subjects’ perceptions regarding
observing RAs’ conventions were, also, evaluated. Analysis
of the IRPGS’ rejected articles revealed that the writers had
the poorest performance in writing the RAs’ Literature
Review. The results of the questionnaire revealed that the
respondents reported writing the Discussion section as their
major concern in research writing process. There were some
similarities and differences between the writing problems
identified both in the analysis of the corpus and the
perceptions of the subjects answering the questionnaire.
Finally, the respondents demonstrated a moderate level of
awareness concerning observing the RAs’ standard structure
and maxims.