Writing a Scientific Paper: The Early Career Researcher’s Guide.

By Simon Langley-Evans

For researchers in health and life sciences, publishing research findings in the form of peer reviewed journal articles is critical part of their professional role. Although publication is the final stage of all research projects, PhD students, postdoctoral scientists and newly appointed academics frequently struggle with the basics of preparing a high-quality manuscript and as a result often fail in their paper submissions to the best journals in their discipline. This is because their skills in data collection and the execution of research projects may not be matched by their writing skills.

This book is a practical guide to writing for scientific journals.The reader will learn about the processes that go on behind the scenes at the journal office, before moving on to toolkits, tips and advice on how to organise and write their manuscript. As responding to critique from peer reviewers is an important element of the publication process, advice is given on how to write effective author rebuttal letters and on how to reflect on and learn from rejection. By the end of this book readers will have more confidence to take on the task of writing a paper.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781446663660

Book preview

Contents

Cast of characters

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Research and publishing Why do we do research?

Why do we publish?

Research metrics as a driver of publishing behaviour DORA and the new age

Booming trends in publication The publication cycle Understanding editor behaviour

Chapter 3: Planning the paper

Learn some simple writing tricks Authorship and accreditation What’s the story?

Which journal to target?

Open Access Predatory journals

Fraud, plagiarism and other sins

Chapter 4: How to write the paper

Effective titles

How to write the abstract Format

Practical techniques for writing the abstract How to write the introduction

What the introduction is for Where should we start?

Length and structure

An introductory toolkit How to write the methods section

What is the purpose of the methods section?

What the methods section include?

Methods for measuring the endpoints Statistical analysis

What shouldn’t the methods section include?

How to present the results

The function of the results section How to go about it

Mistakes to avoid How to write the discussion Getting the basics right

Chapter 5: Peer review

Models of peer review

How to respond to peer review comments

The myth of the third reviewer

Working with the editor

Writing an effective rebuttal letter Learning from rejection

You could be a peer reviewer too

Chapter 6: Other ways to disseminate research findings

Writing a conference abstract

Paths less travelled

Preprints and registered reports

Social media

Blog posts

Video and sound clips Visual abstracts

Chapter 7: Some final thoughts

The cast of characters

This book is a book about writing and in a few pages time I am going to advise you that writing a scientific paper is a bit like writing a story. This book also needs to tell a story about how to write a scientific paper. All good stories need to have interesting characters. I will start off by introducing you to those characters and hopefully by the end of this section you will have decided that you want to read on and pick up some useful hints on how to write.

Me

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My name is Simon Langley-Evans and I am going to be your guide to the art of writing a scientific paper for the health and life sciences. I am Professor of Human Nutrition at the University of Nottingham where I have worked since 2001. I graduated from the University of London in 1986 with a first class honours degree in Biochemistry with Microbiology and studied for my PhD in the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Southampton. I graduated in 1990 and after a period of postdoctoral work at both Southampton and the United Medical and Dentist School in London obtained a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship.

Since that breakthrough in my career, I have held lectureship positions at the University of Southampton, University College Northampton and University of Nottingham. I was awarded my personal Chair in Human Nutrition in 2005. My research expertise lies in the area of nutrition in pregnancy and infancy, with a primary focus on the developmental origins of adult disease. In this book I will be sharing my perspective on the process of scientific publishing, bringing you the benefit of my experiences over 35 years. I am the author of more than 150 peer reviewed papers and in 2009 I published my first book, which was an undergraduate textbook entitled, Nutrition: A lifespan approach, for which a third edition was published in 2021. I have also contributed chapters to more than 20 books. As well as sharing my experience of writing in this book, I can offer you the benefit of seeing how science journals work from the editorial side. I was an associate editor of the International Journal of Obesity for 9 years and in 2013 took on the role of Editor of the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.

In this book I aim to guide you through all of the key steps involved in writing up research in the form of a paper. I have tried to keep the style informal, simple and clear. This is a book that you should be able to read quickly and access as a ‘how to guide’, rather than a dense academic tome.

You



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The intended audience for this book is you. You are a PhD student or new postdoctoral researcher and you’re considering how to write a scientific paper either because you’ve got some great data that you want to share with the world, because it’s essential to disseminate the findings of your funded project, or because you need to get some publications onto your curriculum vitae.

My assumptions as I write are that you’re perhaps writing your first paper, or maybe you’ve been through the process before and the experience was uncomfortable and it didn’t fill you with confidence for future papers.

The Dinosaurs

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Every good story needs some villains or dark figures that menace the main protagonists from the shadows. In academic life this group are represented by the ‘dinosaurs’, who will occasionally be mentioned in this book. Academic dinosaurs are predominantly white, male and obtained their PhDs in the 1970s and 80s.

It’s a sad truth that our research environments are sometimes not as happy, inclusive and enlightened as we would want them to be. These toxic ways of working are generally promoted by the dinosaurs as they try and recreate what was considered to be the ideal, competitive lab ethos of the 80’s. This means that they take the view that time off from work is time wasted (it isn’t- taking all of the holidays that you’re entitled too is essential for your sanity); that a PhD cannot be completed on a 9am-5pm Monday-Friday scheduled (yes it can- I’ve done it myself) and; that it is fine to undermine and criticise you in front of others. This wasn’t healthy or desirable back then, and it certainly isn’t now.

From the point of view of publishing your paper, the presence of dinosaurs could, though won’t necessarily, be a problem. Being aware of them and their ways will help to limit their impact on your progress and I will be providing some hints on how to tackle them. If you are very unlucky, your supervisor is a dinosaur. If that’s the case, don’t expect much encouragement as your write your paper and be prepared to find support from a mentor who isn’t your supervisor.

The most positive thing about dinosaurs is that they are doomed to extinction.



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The Editors

So much of what goes on in scientific journal publishing takes place out of view of the community that needs to publish research findings. As a result, the editorial teams that work with journals are often unknown and unrecognised. All journals will have an individual who is effectively the editor-in-chief (though many are simply called The Editor). These individuals may work alone on the journal, or may be supported by a team of Associate Editors, of which there may be just one, or for some journals several dozen. Between them, the team will do all of the handling of the manuscripts submitted to the journal. In almost all cases (this differs for some of the very high profile journals) the Editors are not employed by the journals and are actually academics. They carry out all journal work in addition to their day job and regard the editorial work that they do as an element of the academic service contribution that they make to their research discipline and community. Some journal editors receive a small honorarium payment for their services. Some do it unpaid.

Unfortunately some, though thankfully not many these days, editors are dinosaurs.

The Peer Reviewers

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Peer review is a cornerstone of our research culture. Without peer review we don’t accept the validity of a piece of research and the message communicated by a research report. The accepted view of peer review is that it is carried out by experts in a particular field, but this isn’t accurate. It’s about ‘peers’ considering the work of others to consider whether the methodology is sound and the ideas are original. In the scientific community we are all peers, so whether you’re a PhD student or a professor you should be involved in the process.

Colleagues who take the time to carry out peer review assignments for journals are mostly wonderful people. Peer review, done well, is a major commitment that can take up half a day of work and is done without pay. Sadly, a majority of people who are invited to peer review don’t even take the time to respond to decline the invitation, so those who engage really deserve our respect.

The best reviewers are actually people like you. As an editor I have noticed that PhD students and postdocs tend to invest time in writing peer review reports and are very objective in their critique and recommendations. The process of peer review is where you are most likely to have an unfortunate encounter with a dinosaur. I will be explaining how to deal with this later in the book. You will not be surprised to hear that dinosaurs make poor peer reviewers.

1. Introduction

This book has been 35 years in the making and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to write about one of the things that I have enjoyed most in my career in science. Writing papers is still the most important and respected way in which we present our science to the world and share research findings among our peers and competitors. Across the 35 years that I have been publishing papers I have made the transition from being someone who was predominantly at the lab bench collecting the data, to being the researcher who is desk- bound and focused on generating the ideas, supervising a team, carrying out data analysis and writing. That transition has also seen me learn to support my students and postdocs to write up their work for themselves, taking part in peer review to help authors enhance their papers, and acting as an editor. I like to think that through these experiences I’ve accrued some expertise and wisdom that merits writing this book.

‘Writing a scientific paper’ started life as a blog post about abstracts, associated with the journal that I edit and following that initial post it became a series of blogs covering all elements of writing a paper. These posts under the umbrella ‘How to Write’ were the most informal and casual pieces of writing that I had ever produced and I must admit that I wrote most of them with a laptop on my knees as I watched the TV. The upshot of this was that they came from the heart. The blog series became very successful and over 7 years attracted more than 10000 visitors from all over the world. The next step for me was to write the material in a more formal style and How to Write appeared as a short article (J Human Nutr Dietetics 2019;32:551-558). The article was too short to do the subject justice though and so I have decided to expand into this book, which I hope will be useful in guiding others through the writing process.

The need for such a guide arises because almost everyone who works in science struggles with writing. The natural skills that earn us careers in science, such as observation or technical abilities tend to leave us disadvantaged relative to those with a flair for the arts or languages. There are also many aspects in the way we are trained that don’t equip us forsomething that (at least in academia) we end up doing on a daily basis. Most young scientists don’t perfect the art of writing until they have written a PhD thesis, but that particular writing exercise leaves them ill-equipped for writing papers. The thesis rewards excessive length and detail, whilst the scientific paper requires brevity. At the early stages of our writing careers we are not trained to deal with this format. To learn how to write a paper we need good mentoring and practice. I myself was unlucky early in my career as my supervisors were unsupportive and dismissive of my efforts. I have had to learn the craft for myself and really attribute my success to learning from the experience of rejection by journals and the comments of peer reviewers. This has not been a comfortable way to learn and my intention is that the tips in this book will save you some of the pain that I’ve had to suffer.

The intended audience for this book is hopefully expressed by the cast of characters that I presented earlier. This text will be most useful for PhD students who are producing papers as part of their PhD (either as a part of the production of a thesis in the contemporary