Writing scientific paper

Berkeley Lab organized yesterday short workshop focusing on writing for scientific journals. The workshop took 2 hours and it was mainly focused on the “schedule” we should follow during the publication preparation.

The first part summarized the journal selection. I will not go to much details here, because we probably already know in which journals we want publish (Anal. Chem, J. Chromatogr. A and B, J. Sep. Sci., Talanta, Anal. Chim. Acta, Electrophoresis, Chromatographia, Trends in Anal. Chem., to name few of them).

Journal selection is very important, in some cases 95 % of manuscripts is rejected where 50 % are rejected because of wrong journal selection. I have already mentioned it previously in the post from the other side: what editors want.

Very important part of the manuscript preparation is reading the journal’s guidelines. Usually, you can find there a lot of useful information about the content and focus of the journal, format of manuscript, subsections and heading, and references and graphics arrangement.

Next part – the abstract writing – was the most important for me. We have discussed the structure of the freely accessible Nature summary paragraph example.

After one to four general sentences with theoretical background follows section describing general problem of our work together with our results summarized in two three sentences. On the end of the abstract we can put the results into a more general context and (if possible) provide a broader perspective of our work.

Finally, we have focused on the revision and corrections. The better you revise before submission, the less you will revise later. Few simple things usually helps:

1. ask someone to read it for you
2. read it aloud (not always helping, sometimes you read what you want to read)
3. use the computer reading program (can have problems with technical stuff, but will clearly show you problems with your sentences)
4. with writing software, you can also easily find repeating words such as prepositions, be forms, empty qualifiers such as quite, very, really and so on)

Further reading: How to write a scientific paper at Nature website.

How to write world class manuscript?

Do you know how to write the scientific paper? Are you looking for step by step procedure you should follow? Download Editor’s Presentation on “How to write a world class paper” prepared by the Elsevier.

The presentation covers each step of preparing manuscripts and submitting them to scientific journals for publication, and is delivered by Guowang Xu, Editor of Journal of Chromatography B.

I wanted to prepare outline of the presentation. However, it is full of the very interesting and comprehensive information and I didn’t want to omit any important one. Therefore I have chosen only one slide, which summarize all in one:

What gets you accepted?

• Attention to details
• Check and double check your work
• Consider the reviews
• English must be as good as possible
• Presentation is important
• Take your time with revision
• Acknowledge those who have helped you
• New, original and previously unpublished
• Critically evaluate your own manuscript
• Ethical rules must be obeyed

Nigel John Cook, Editor-in-Chief, Ore Geology Reviews

If you are interested in more information, visit the website with the presentation.