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

Writing a scientific paper is hard. In particular, if you are a Ph.D. student, you probably know what the fear of the blank page means—writing can feel overwhelming. But a systematic approach helps. This book provides a step-by-step, top-down approach that makes it easier to turn your results into research papers that are focused, exciting, and readable. The book focuses on the process of writing instead of technicalities, breaking this process into manageable chunks. How to choose the main point of your paper? How to write its abstract, sentence by sentence? How to outline the paper? 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 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!