How to Write a Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-Help Guide for PhD Students - Softcover

Saramäki, Jari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173078416X ISBN 13: 9781730784163

Publisher: Independently published, 2018

Synopsis

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 are readable, focused, and exciting.

The focus is on the process of writing: how do you choose your paper's key point? How do you plan and outline your paper? How do you turn those plans into a first draft? How do you turn that draft into a polished manuscript? What to do if you get stuck? And, eventually, how do you deal with critical reviews and the dreaded letter from the editor?

The book's systematic approach builds on what I've learned through coauthoring close to 100 research papers with students.

Here's what you get:

• A complete step-by-step plan for writing research papers, 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 can be recommended to academics of all levels.

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. I am also interested in scientific writing as a craft. So one could say that I have a broad range of interests--or that I just can't choose, but that's exactly how I like it!

About this title

Review

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

"Writing the first draft of a scientific paper is like facing a giant wall of white. There is so much to do - motivation, a logical sequence of results, and the actual meaning of it all - that the task may seem impossible at first, especially during the first years of your PhD. Jari's book provides a comprehensive set of step-by-step rules and tips to create small building blocks of text and quickly transform your research into an actual draft. Following this book's advice is painless, even fun, and before you know it, you'll have one of the best papers you've ever written. If I could complain about anything, it is that this book didn't already exist 10 years ago!"
-Gerardo Iñiguez, assistant professor, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

"I finally finished and submitted my first paper a few weeks ago thanks to advice given on your website! Your new book is good news for students like me." -Timothee Aubourg, PhD student at Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France

"Lucky to be doing a Ph.D. in 2019 - we don't need to learn writing as if by osmosis; we can absorb it systematically from this book!" - Tzu-Chi Yen, PhD student at University of Colorado Boulder, US

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 173078416X
• ISBN 13: 9781730784163
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 120