How To Write A Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-Help Guide for PhD Students

4.6/5 ( ratings)

What if writing scientific papers was faster, easier, and a bit less painful?

This book provides a step-by-step, top-down approach that makes it easier to turn your hard-won results into research papers that your fellow scientists want to read and cite.

"I just wrote a first draft of a paper during a 3-hour flight, and if it wasn't for these teachings, this would have taken me days !" -Talayeh Aledavood, James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Helsinki

The book's systematic approach builds on what I've learned through coauthoring close to 100 research papers with students. You'll learn how to outline your paper from top to down, how to develop your story, and how to think about what to write before you write it. You'll also learn how to deal with many issues that writers of science commonly face, from the fear of the blank page to dealing with critical reviews.

Here's what you get:

A complete step-by-step plan for writing a scientific paper, from choosing which results to include to wrapping up the paper in the Discussion section
Concrete, actionable, and practical advice, from a paragraph-level template for the Introduction to guidance on preparing plots and figures
Lots of writing tips, from placing signposts in your text to shortening and straightening your sentences
This book has been written for the PhD student who is aiming to write a journal article on her research results, but it should also be useful to any scientist who has ever found writing difficult. Whatever the stage of your career, if you'd like to learn how to write research papers systematically and efficiently, this is the book for you!

The book includes
PART I: STORY
1. How To Choose The Key Point Of Your Paper
2. How To Choose The Supporting Results
3. How To Write The Abstract
4. How To Choose The Title

PART II: OUTLINE
5. The Power Of Outlining
6. How To Write The Introduction, Part I: Structure
7. How To Write The Introduction, Part II: A Four-Paragraph Template
8. How To Write The Introduction, Part III: The Lede
9. How To Write The Materials And Methods
10. How To Write The Results, Part I: Figures
11. How To Write The Results, Part II: Text
12. How To Write The Discussion

PART III: WORDS
13. How Does Your Reader Read?
14. How To Write Your First Draft
15. How To Edit Your First Draft
16. Tips For Revising Content And Structure
17. Tips For Editing Sentences

PART IV: IT'S NOT OVER YET
18. How To Write The Cover Letter
19. How To Deal With Reviews

About the author

I am a professor of computational science and an experienced academic with around 100 published papers. My research is interdisciplinary, to say the least: I have studied the social fabric of smartphone users, the genetic structure of ant supercolonies, the connectome of the human brain, networks of public transport, and the molecular biology of the human immune system, to name a few. So one could say that I have a broad range of scientific interests . But that's exactly the way I like it!