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One of the key tasks every researcher must perform is publishing their work, and most of this publication will occur in peer-reviewed journals. These publications are essential for promotion, recognition, and creating a dialogue with your colleagues around the world. Unfortunately, writing publication-quality manuscripts and guiding them through the peer-review process is a difficult, time-consuming, and often frustrating task. In this book, I'll teach you how to make the process easier based on what I've learned from more than 25 years of helping authors publish more than 6000 papers in some of the world's most prestigious journals (including Nature, Science, and PNAS). Writing for Science Journals explains the details of every section of a journal manuscript, including tips and tricks you won't find elsewhere about how to deal with the peculiar ways that journals work with authors and reviewers. I'll also deal with some of the implications of statistics and experimental design that you may have learned in school, but possibly not in an integrated form that guides you through the steps necessary to perform publishable research. In each chapter, I'll provide a list of key points that you can use as the basis for developing a learning plan. I've also provided links to relevant online resources via a Links page that is available only to purchasers of the book, and an errata and additions page (see below) that will provide a forum for expanding on the book until the 2nd edition is available.
Publish or Perish. This old adage illustrates the importance of scientific communication; essential to research, it also represents a strategic sector for each country's competitiveness. An often-neglected topic, scientific communication is of vital importance, with new information technologies accelerating and profoundly changing how knowledge is disseminated. The necessity of optimally disseminating experts' findings has also become crucial to researchers, institutes and universities alike, which has prompted the recent advent of Impact Factors for the evaluation and financing of research, the goal being for scientific knowledge to be equally distributed to a very broad audience, especially to the media, entrepreneurs and sociopolitical players. This handbook presents the "golden rules" for publishing scientific articles. In order to do away with major recurring errors, the author explains how to easily structure an article and offers support for the typical mistakes made by native French speakers publishing in English, tips on how to make the style more academic of more general to fit your intended readership and, in the book's closing section, suggests new publishing techniques of the Internet age such as the micro-article, which allows researchers to focus their findings into a single innovative point. The major principles presented can be applied to a broad range of documents such as theses, industry reports, publicity texts, letters of intent, CVs/resumes, blogs and press releases, as all of these documents involve presenting information on advances, discoveries, innovations, or changes to our previous knowledge.
"Margaret Cargill's background as a linguist and research communications educator and Patrick O'Connor's experience as both research scientist and educator synergize to improve both the science and art of scientific writing. If the authors' goal is to give scientists the tools to write and publish compelling, well documented, clear narratives that convey their work honestly and in proper context, they have succeeded admirably." Veterinary Pathology, July 2009 "[The book is] clearly written, has a logical step-by-step structure, is easy to read and contains a lot of sensible advice about how to get scientific work published in international journals. The book is a most useful addition to the literature covering scientific writing." Aquaculture International, April 2009 Writing Scientific Research Articles: Strategy and Steps guides authors in how to write, as well as what to write, to improve their chances of having their articles accepted for publication in international, peer reviewed journals. The book is designed for scientists who use English as a first or an additional language; for research students and those who teach them paper writing skills; and for early-career researchers wanting to hone their skills as authors and mentors. It provides clear processes for selecting target journals and writing each section of a manuscript, starting with the results. The stepwise learning process uses practical exercises to develop writing and data presentation skills through analysis of well-written example papers. Strategies are presented for responding to referee comments, as well as ideas for developing discipline-specific English language skills for manuscript writing. The book is designed for use by individuals or in a class setting. Visit the companion site at www.writeresearch.com.au for more information.
This book takes an integrated approach, using the principles of story structure to discuss every aspect of successful science writing, from the overall structure of a paper or proposal to individual sections, paragraphs, sentences, and words. It begins by building core arguments, analyzing why some stories are engaging and memorable while others are quickly forgotten, and proceeds to the elements of story structure, showing how the structures scientists and researchers use in papers and proposals fit into classical models. The book targets the internal structure of a paper, explaining how to write clear and professional sections, paragraphs, and sentences in a way that is clear and compelling.
From Research to Manuscript, written in simple, straightforward language, explains how to understand and summarize a research project. It is a writing guide that goes beyond grammar and bibliographic formats, by demonstrating in detail how to compose the sections of a scientific paper. This book takes you from the data on your desk and leads you through the drafts and rewrites needed to build a thorough, clear science article. At each step, the book describes not only what to do but why and how. It discusses why each section of a science paper requires its particular form of information, and it shows how to put your data and your arguments into that form. Importantly, this writing manual recognizes that experiments in different disciplines need different presentations, and it is illustrated with examples from well-written papers on a wide variety of scientific subjects. As a textbook or as an individual tutorial, From Research to Manuscript belongs in the library of every serious science writer and editor.
This is an open access book. The book provides an overview of the state of research in developing countries – Africa, Latin America, and Asia (especially India) and why research and publications are important in these regions. It addresses budding but struggling academics in low and middle-income countries. It is written mainly by senior colleagues who have experienced and recognized the challenges with design, documentation, and publication of health research in the developing world. The book includes short chapters providing insight into planning research at the undergraduate or postgraduate level, issues related to research ethics, and conduct of clinical trials. It also serves as a guide towards establishing a research question and research methodology. It covers important concepts such as writing a paper, the submission process, dealing with rejection and revisions, and covers additional topics such as planning lectures and presentations. The book will be useful for graduates, postgraduates, teachers as well as physicians and practitioners all over the developing world who are interested in academic medicine and wish to do medical research.
The third edition of this book aims to equip both young and experienced researchers with all the tools and strategy they will need for their papers to not just be accepted, but stand out in the crowded field of academic publishing. It seeks to question and deconstruct the legacy of existing science writing, replacing or supporting historically existing practices with principle- and evidence-driven styles of effective writing. It encourages a reader-centric approach to writing, satisfying reader-scientists at large, but also the paper's most powerful readers, the reviewer and editor. Going beyond the baseline of well-structured scientific writing, this book leverages an understanding of human physiological limitations (memory, attention, time) to help the author craft a document that is optimized for readability. Through real and fictional examples, hands-on exercises, and entertaining stories, this book breaks down the critical parts of a typical scientific paper (Title, Abstract, Introduction, Visuals, Structure, and Conclusions). It shows at great depth how to achieve the essential qualities required in scientific writing, namely being clear, concise, convincing, fluid, interesting, and organized. To enable the writer to assess whether these parts are well written from a reader's perspective, the book also offers practical metrics in the form of six checklists, and even an original Java application to assist in the evaluation.
A thorough guide to all stages of preparing, writing and publishing high-quality scientific research papers in academic journals.
Many scientists and engineers consider themselves poor writers or find the writing process difficult. The good news is that you do not have to be a talented writer to produce a good scientific paper, but you do have to be a careful writer. In particular, writing for a peer-reviewed scientific or engineering journal requires learning and executing a specific formula for presenting scientific work. This book is all about teaching the style and conventions of writing for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. From structure to style, titles to tables, abstracts to author lists, this book gives practical advice about the process of writing a paper and getting it published.
