Struggling for International Publication: The Potential Rhetorical Problems for Indonesian Scholars in Social Sciences and Humanities when Writing in English

Indonesian faculty members and postgraduate students are encouraged to publish their research results in reputable international journals such as those published in English. This is to boost the participation as well as prestige of Indonesian scholars in the eyes of international scholars. However, the majority of scholars in Social Sciences and Humanities find it very difficult to succeed in international journal publication. This paper is aimed to present several potential problems experienced by Indonesian scholars in preparing their research article (RA) manuscriptin English before submitting it to a main-stream journal. The data in this paper were obtained from relevant discourse studies on RAs in Indonesian and English written by Indonesian scholars. The results of these studies suggest that the most serious problem for Indonesian writers in Social Sciences and Humanities is in writing argumentative abstract, introduction and discussion sections. Unlike international authors, Indonesian authors tend to write these sections descriptively although their research topic and findingsare interesting and important. They also tend to justify their research projects only by practical problems and rarely discuss their research findings in relation to the results of previous studies found in the literature. It is believed that if they can write convincingly argumentative articles the possibility of their manuscripts to be accepted by a prominent international journal will increase.