The aim of this work is to apply a semi-implicit (SI) strategy in an implicit-explicit (IMEX) Runge–Kutta (RK) setting introduced in Boscarino et al. (J Sci Comput 68:975–1001, 2016) to a sequence of 1D time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) with high order spatial derivatives. This strategy gives a great flexibility to treat these equations, and allows the construction of simple linearly implicit schemes without any Newton’s iteration. Furthermore, the SI IMEX-RK schemes so designed does not need any severe time step restriction that usually one has using explicit methods for the stability, i.e. $$\Delta t = {\mathcal {O}}(\Delta t^k)$$ Δ t = O ( Δ t k ) for the kth ($$k \ge 2$$ k ≥ 2 ) order PDEs. For the space discretization, this strategy is combined with finite difference schemes. We illustrate the effectiveness of the schemes with many applications to dissipative, dispersive and biharmonic-type equations. Numerical experiments show that the proposed schemes are stable and can achieve optimal orders of accuracy.