CIOM’s Third Meet-up: The PhD Trajectory and a Scopus Paper as One Logic of Research Quality
On 22 January, the CIOM office hosted the third meet-up in a series of meetings for doctoral candidates and early-career researchers titled “The Road to a PhD Dissertation and a Scopus Article: From a Personal Strategy to an International Publication.” The series is developing with the strategic support of CIOM Director Gulzhan Toktamysovna Alimbekova, who has been consistently building an infrastructure for professional dialogue and strengthening a national research school within the Center. The meet-ups’ format, program framework, and organizational delivery were designed by CIOM project manager and KazNU PhD candidate Ainur Aibynkyzy Bakytzhanova. This combination of institutional leadership and bottom-up initiative helps preserve the core principle of the series: discussing not abstract slogans about science, but the real mechanisms through which evidence-based knowledge is produced.
Participants included PhD candidates, master’s students, and practicing researchers from a range of academic and applied institutions in Almaty. A distinctive feature of the audience was the mix of experience levels. Those just entering the research profession interacted with colleagues who already run applied projects, teach, collect data, and publish. This set a practical tone: the focus was not on generic advice, but on reproducible practices how to structure the research cycle, which recurring mistakes systematically lead to journal rejections, and what “quality” actually means in international scholarly communication.
The meet-up’s central frame was articulated clearly: refusing to separate “PhD as a process” from “Scopus as an outcome.” The discussion treated international publication not as an external bonus or a final formatting stage, but as a test of whether the research architecture has been built correctly throughout the PhD. This means a clearly defined gap, an appropriate design aligned with the research question, transparent procedures (sampling, data collection, analysis), and conclusions grounded in measurable evidence with well-stated limits of generalization. In this sense, the “Scopus logic” is a language of trust: an interesting topic is not enough journals require a verifiable argument.
What did the speakers discuss?
Nazym Bilimovna Saparova (PhD candidate, lecturer at the Higher School of Humanities of Caspian University) in her talk “The Scientific Path in PhD Training: Challenges and Strategies (a Personal Case)” examined doctoral study as work under uncertainty and constrained resources. Her main point was methodologically practical: a sustainable PhD trajectory is secured not by motivation, but by managing the research cycle through intermediate outputs and explicit quality rules. She emphasized that uncertainty in field access, delays in data collection, competing obligations, and the difficulty of synchronizing with a supervisor make it essential to translate a large goal into measurable steps: an instrument and pilot, a codebook and analysis plan, regular drafts of key sections, and pre-designed scenarios for responding to disruptions. This was presented not as “management for management’s sake,” but as a condition for reproducibility. Without documenting decisions as the project evolves, procedural transparency and therefore trust in results cannot be ensured.
Mereke Zeinollakyzy (MA in Social Sciences, MBA, PhD candidate, independent research consultant) in her talk “Prerequisites for Publishing in Scopus-Indexed Journals” unpacked the editorial logic of international journals as a system of early quality signals. She highlighted typical reasons for desk rejection and major revisions: a title indicating an unclear construction; an abstract missing the link between gap–method–results–contribution; insufficiently transparent descriptions of sampling and procedures; the absence of required components (ethics statement, limitations, reliability/validity, data statement); and weak Results/Discussion architecture, where the discussion merely repeats findings instead of interpreting them and positioning them in the literature. A key analytical point was that strong journals do not publish a report of completed work they publish an evidence-based claim. Therefore, the language of the paper must clearly state contribution and empirical support (demonstrates / provides evidence / contributes), and every claim must be anchored either in data or in a precise reference.
At the start of the meeting, a short interactive poll served a diagnostic purpose: identifying the main barriers and training needs of participants. Responses confirmed that the most difficult challenges are not about “knowing theory,” but about organizational and methodological practice: managing time and research workload; moving from data to writing; fear of submission due to uncertainty about editorial expectations; and the lack of a supportive environment for reviewing errors and weak decisions (pilot, recruitment, interpretation). This feedback will be used to plan future topics and select speakers so that the series remains practice-oriented and aligned with the real needs of the doctoral community.
The closing discussion focused on a practical question: what does “researcher responsibility” mean in contemporary Kazakhstan? The conversation showed that responsibility is not limited to declarations about the importance of science and is not reducible to career metrics. It appears in methodological integrity, careful interpretation, and clear boundaries of inference especially in research addressing social inequality, access to services, regional disparities, and trust in institutions. Within this frame, the requirements of international publishing were seen not as external pressure, but as a discipline that reduces the risk of arbitrary conclusions and increases the public value of research.
For CIOM, the meet-up series is part of its institutional mission to develop Kazakhstan’s research ecosystem. The Center provides a platform for dialogue and expert support, creating a space where not only results but also processes are discussed: research design, data work, standards of evidence, publication strategy, and professional resilience. The series is built on horizontal professional exchange doctoral candidates, master’s students, and practitioners interact through shared learning and critical discussion rather than formal reporting.
Looking ahead, this series is positioned to become a sustainable independent platform for building a community of young Kazakhstani researchers, where collective methodological memory can accumulate: typical mistakes, effective solutions, working approaches to design and writing, as well as new professional connections and collaborations. For Kazakhstani science, this means strengthening human capacity not only quantitatively, but qualitatively through the growth of a culture of evidence-based, reproducible, and socially responsible research.
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