Writing a paper: Simple advice on the writing process and the individual parts of a research article

[@capita007]

Just starting to write a paper, and this video helped me a lot. Congratulations on your ability to be so concise, it passes the feeling that you have spent a lot of time to put all this information together the way that it was presented! Thank you very much!

[@larsjuhljensen]

Lucky timing! Yes, it does take quite a lot of time and thought to condense the information down like this, but I think it is worth it.

[@joydeepnag885]

I wish I could magically share this to all the graduate students in the planet. Thank you so much. you are AMAZING!!!

[@larsjuhljensen]

Thank you SO much!

[@Kan_de]

If I become a researcher someday, I will get a lot of help from this video. Thank you ;D

[@larsjuhljensen]

I hope you'll become a researcher - good luck! :-)

[@TheFamousGrainger]

Dear Lars, thanks for the advice. You only missed telling your audience that they also have to focus on spelling and grammar. That can, for some people, be hard. But there is a solution, and it's called Grammarly. It is a plug-in that works in word and will improve the writing using Grammarly's communication assistance that spell check, grammar check, and punctuation check your paper. It works in real-time with suggestions for improving tone and clarity to help ensure your paper writing makes the impression you want.

[@larsjuhljensen]

Thanks Claus - I certainly agree that spelling and grammar matters. The same goes for avoiding overusing passive voice, not writing unnecessarily long (even if grammatically correct) sentences, and all other aspects of "good writing". Indeed much of that can be dealt with with writing tools (or just using the spelling and grammar check of your word processor). I had some of it in an earlier draft but decided to focus on the parts more specifically related to writing a scientific paper to keep it focused.

[@nagpurindia]

Nice description. Good information for novice researchers koke me.

[@larsjuhljensen]

Thanks - happy you found it useful!

[@mikhaeldito]

Thank you for the advice! Do you have tips on how to condense tons of work to the most essential? I have quite some difficulty on finding the story and I end up making a chronology of what I've done instead :(

[@larsjuhljensen]

Great question, but not an easy one to answer in a general fashion. The first step is obviously to have an overview (a list) of your results along with the figures to support them. Next you have to have to prioritize the results; this is not always easy, but think about which of your results are the most novel (while being solid). It can be helpful to to think about it as a pitch: if you were to highlight one result and make it the title of the paper, what would it be? Once you have your list of results and an idea of which are more important, you have to figure out the order in which to present them. If it is complicated, I find it helpful to make a network of possible logical transitions. From which results can I logically transition into which other results? You now have a network of possible transitions between prioritized results, which gives you an overview of all possible workable story lines (not all of them involving all results). Now you can look at them and pick one that has as many important results as early as possible and in a workable order.

[@larsjuhljensen]

Another thing that you may want to consider is, if you are trying to squeeze too many different results into a single paper. A classical situation that I have been in several times is that you do some important methodological work, which enables you to get some really exciting biological discoveries. Explaining all the methodology in sufficient detail and proving that it works well can easily end up drowning the biological story. But the story relies on the method, so you have to explain it. Every time, the solution has been to split it into two papers: a pure methods paper that describes the new method in great detail, shows benchmarks etc. And then a second paper about the biological story, which can then simply cite the methods paper and thereby get straight to the exciting part. If you put up the methods paper as a preprint, you can already cite it in the second paper without waiting for it to go through peer review, thus allowing you to submit both manuscripts in parallel. As long as you play with open cards regarding the existence of both manuscripts (which you obviously do if you put up preprints), this is completely kosher.

[@mikhaeldito]

@@larsjuhljensen I really appreciate your elaborate reply. I find this process is sparsely documented and rarely discussed. Your answer have shed some light!

[@larsjuhljensen]

@@mikhaeldito You are certainly right about that. I don't recall ever having had this explained to me or seen it anywhere. It's just the way I structure the options to know what I have to choose between.