Publishing your results is a vital step in the research lifecycle and in your career as a scientist. Publishing papers is necessary to get your work seen by the scientific community, to exchange your ideas globally and to ensure you receive the recognition for your results. The following information is designed to help you write the best paper possible by providing you with points to consider, from your background reading and study design to structuring your manuscript and figure preparation.
By the end of the tutorial you should know on how to:
- prepare prior to starting your research
- structure your manuscript and what to include in each section
- get the most out of your tables and figures so that they clearly represent your most important results.
You will also have the opportunity to test your learning by completing a quiz at the end.
Before you begin writing
A good research paper begins long before you start writing. Giving some deep thought as to the topic you are researching, the question you are answering and the study design, as well as ensuring you follow appropriate research laws and regulations, all contribute to making a publishable paper.
In the first half of the module we will cover:
- Identifying hot topics and background reading
- Study design
- Reference managers
- Types of journal manuscripts
Identifying your research question
Making informed decisions about what to study, and defining your research question, even within a predetermined field, is critical to a successful research career, and can be one of the hardest challenges for a scientist.
Being knowledgeable about the state of your field and up-to-date with recent developments can help you:
- Make decisions about what to study within niche research areas
- Identify top researchers in your field whose work you can follow and potentially collaborate with
- Find important journals to read regularly and publish in
- Explain to others why your work is important by being able to recount the bigger picture
How can you identify a research question?
Reading regularly is the most common way of identifying a good research question. This enables you to keep up to date with recent advancements and identify certain issues or unsolved problems that keep appearing.
Begin by searching for and reading literature in your field. Start with general interest journals, but don’t limit yourself to journal publications only; you can also look for clues in the news or on research blogs. Once you have identified a few interesting topics, you should be reading the table of contents of journals and the abstracts of most articles in that subject area. Papers that are directly related to your research you should read in their entirety.
TIP Keep an eye out for Review papers and special issues in your chosen subject area as they are very helpful in discovering new areas and hot topics.
TIP: you can sign up to receive table of contents or notifications when articles are published in your field from most journals or publishers.
TIP: Joining a journal club is a great way to read and dissect published papers in and around your subject area. Usually consisting of 5-10 people from the same research group or institute they meet to evaluate the good and bad points of the research presented in the paper. This not only helps you keep up to date with the field but helps you become familiar with what is necessary for a good paper which can help when you come to write your own.
If possible, communicate with some of the authors of these manuscripts via email or in person. Going to conferences if possible is a great way to meet some of these authors. Often, talking with the author of an important work in your research area will give you more ideas than just reading the manuscript would.
Study design
You must have a good study design to get publishable results. When designing an experiment you will need to decide:
- What is your hypothesis or research question?
- What are the aim(s) of your study?
- What are the best methods for achieving your aims?
- Do you have the necessary resources to carry out your methods?
- Which positive and negative controls will you use?
- Do you have the required ethics and regulatory permissions? For example, if your experiment will have animal subjects, you will probably need approval from your institution’s review board. If you are publishing a clinical trial then you need register it in a clinical trials registry. Not getting the correct permissions will stop you from publishing your work in reputable journals.
- Will your experiment have enough statistical power to give useful results? Is your sample size large enough to draw valid conclusions? Which statistical tests will you use for your analysis? If you are not sure, consult a statistician; they can provide you with expert advice that may save you a lot of time.
Reference managers
Reference managers (or reference formatting software such as BibTeX for LaTeX documents) make it easy to organize and format citations. They can also assist with managing libraries containing citations, PDFs, and image files by organizing important documents by subject and allowing you to search your library using keywords. Add and organize any papers that are relevant to your research as you read them. This will help you remember to appropriately cite articles that you have read.
Some widely used reference management and formatting software applications are:
BibTeX
EndNote
Mendeley
Papers
RefWords
Zotero
ReadCube
TIP: When using a reference manager, make sure you have the correct style file for your target journal. The reference style used by the journal can usually be found in the Instructions for Authors on their website. Formatting references using a reference manager with a style file is very simple.