Tag Archives: paper

How to write a paper

22.11.2023 admin

There are numerous tips on the internet, I have been even teaching “paper writing” for a while, but here are the ultimate recommendations

I’ve handled the review of > 1000 papers at @nature. Over time, you notice aspects of presentation on which reviewers tend to comment. In the interests of minimizing hassles during review, I offer the following suggestions (a bit targeted to climate papers).

— Michael White (@MWClimateSci) March 29, 2019

Just in case, as Twitter is dying soon and the thread archive is not working anymore, there is also a local copy.

Genetics, Philosophy

I never read the introduction of an article

24.08.2023 admin

I never read the introduction of an article, seldom the discussion section, but I always scan the methods and sometimes (if the methods warrant it) also the tables and figures. It seems that I am not alone here.

The survey indicated that individuals at different career stages valued different sections of scientific papers, and skill in reading the results section develops slowly over the course of an academic career.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0189753

So why do we still write papers with an introduction that is longer than 1 sentence?

Noteworthy, Philosophy

Please do not try to tell a story but report your results

4.09.2022 admin

When I prepared a lecture last year on scientific paper writing I have found countless advices how to tell a story – it made it even into elife.

Don’t do that – there are lies and damned lies (Disraeli) while you are easily running into a trap when trying to “tell a story”. Preregister your study plan, tell the world what you did right from the beginning, what did not work, why you repeated an experiment or why changed your opinion.

Writing a story from the backend distorts the proportions and misdirects attention. Ulrich Dirnagl highlighted this problem in an earlier talk here in March using the following two slides.

How we present results in a basically linear way – story telling. By NIH QUEST/Dirnagl.

How it would be fair to tell the story with numerous inputs, non working assay (primer, antibody, other samples), new literature and conference talks, where we constantly change our opinion that could have led to alternate papers. By NIH QUEST/Dirnagl

Philosophy

Peer Review Lottery

10.05.2012 admin

From a recent call for a conference in my mailbox ( July 17th, Orlando, Florida, KGCM 2012

Richard Smith also affirmed that regarding peer review there is “more evidence of harm than benefit…[and] Studies so far have shown that it is slow, expensive, ineffective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and abuse, and hopeless at spotting errors and fraud.”

Smith, R, 2006, “The trouble with medical journals,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 99, March, 2006, p. 116 (accessed at http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/3/115.full.pdf)

Allergy, Philosophy

Do we need scientific journals at social networks?

7.01.2010 admin

It is interesting to see, how journals are trying to increase their market visibility – Nature has becoming famous for their investment in Second Life? Just recently I received an email that JACI – the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology – has now opened an account at Facebook. Continue reading Do we need scientific journals at social networks? →

Joke, Philosophy

Paper cemetry (is La Sombra del Viento)

19.08.2006 admin

-moblog- Probably inspired by reading Carlos Ruiz Zafon “La Sombra del Viento – Shadow of the Wind – Schatten des Windes” telling about a cemetry of books I wonder whether it would make sense to
have also a cemetry of rejected papers. Would that be useful to have an arXiv.org-like access to papers that will otherwise be forgotten? Yea, yea.