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

Write outstanding papers using a systematic top-down approach

Writing a scientific paper is hard, especially if you want to publish in top journals. It’s even harder if you are a PhD student who is still learning the craft.

But don’t worry, this book is here to help! It shows you a straightforward, step-by-step method that makes it easier to turn your hard-earned results into clear and exciting papers, ready for top journals.

Instead of dwelling on technicalities, this guide breaks the process down into manageable chunks. How to choose the message of your paper? How to craft its abstract, sentence by sentence? How to effectively outline the paper, and how to turn the outline into a first draft and then into a finished manuscript? What to do if you get stuck? And finally, how to deal with critical reviews?

Here is 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 is tailored specifically for Ph.D. students who are aiming to write journal articles based on their research results. However, its insights and guidance can be highly beneficial and recommended to academics at 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 more than 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!

"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