Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973) was a self-taught engineer who patented the use of carbon paper to make multiple copies of a document on a typewriter. Image.
A graduate student once told me that her advisor only wanted her manuscript draft when it was “perfect”. I was aghast. I told her that writing takes a lot of revision, and that’s not a super realistic expectation.
What is perfect?
Does this mean that the grammar and spelling is perfect? That there is good organization and delineation between introduction, methods, results, and conclusion? Good paragraph and sentence structure? Scientifically sound data analysis? No errors in the data or citations? Meets the word count? Amazing figures?
Most often, this involves all of the above and more!
As an academic scientist, I often have to be a writer as well as my own editor and graphic designer. In my experience, scientific journals do not provide a lot of editorial or design support. They pretty much expect a “perfect” manuscript. If a manuscript has poor writing style (or a style that doesn’t align with their ideas of scientific writing), even if the science is sound, it will likely be rejected, and the editors will suggest extensive writing or revision. One journal even required that I actually format the manuscript according to their journal layout (basically what the pages would look life) which was extremely tedious requiring different fonts, sizes, margins, lines, and onerous table formatting.
In fact, scientific journals thrive off unpaid labor (peer reviewers are NOT paid) while making record profits. So-called “open access” journals (articles are not paywalled), often require thousands of dollars in fees (paid by the research group) to publish while providing minimal support and promotional services to the authors. Which means much of the burden is on us scientists to be our own editors and graphic designers while having little or no training in these areas. Basically, the coauthors need to be their own editors and graphic designers. Very wealthy labs can sometimes hire people to edit manuscripts and design figures. Most cannot afford to and rely on students in the lab to do it.
Given the deluge of scientific papers that are published each year, there is additional incentive to make the paper as “searchable” as possible. This includes adding “keywords” in headers and titles, concise abstracts and importance statements, graphical abstracts, and even highlights. Often, results and discussion headers are complete sentences rather than something generic:
“pH was significantly lower in Lake A than Lake B” rather than “pH results”.
So, it’s super easy as a new writer to be completely bewildered how to go about this process.
I often advise writers to take it one step at a time. Literally. Do not jump ahead of these stages that I lay out below. These steps apply more towards experimental studies but can be used in other types of writing.
The Process of Writing a Scientific Manuscript
Outline the manuscript as you plan the project. A day in the library can save a week in the lab. Make sure to read papers, have clear research questions, and hypotheses. Propose headers and brainstorm figures.
Complete the experiments/investigation, make tables, figures. Make sure all data is correct. When it comes to figures, rarely is a simple bar plot made in Excel going to cut it. “Publication quality” figures often require advanced design skills and knowledge of dpi and other photo skills you likely never learned.
Focus on writing everything down in the manuscript document. Make sure your data is all cleaned, checked, and analyzed properly. Make sure all the details for the methods are written down correctly. Make sure all your tables are correct. Make sure your figures are what you need to convey. Likely you will have to reformat your data to upload it to a public repository as some journals now require it.
Focus on shaping the narrative. Make sure the data you have is relevant to the paper’s stated objectives. If not, dump it in supplementary documents (this always does hurt a bit). Outlining your manuscript ahead of time often helps with this.
Focus on paragraph and section organization. In early drafts, you may not have even bothered writing formal paragraphs and that’s okay. Shape your paragraphs like you learned in freshman composition class, with a topic sentence, wrap up sentence, and sub-points. Organize paragraphs in each section to support your argument.
Go back to the narrative. Make sure every paragraph/sentence is relevant and useful and supports your main objectives.
Fine-tune/polish your writing. Cut out adjectives and adverbs, use strong descriptive verbs and nouns. Make sentences short, no more than 3 typed lines. Make sure terms and abbreviations you use are defined properly for the context of your field. Make sure the dimensions, file type, and dpi on your figures are what the journal needs. Make sure citations are correct. This is often very frustrating and tedious and the least rewarding aspect of writing.
Go back to narrative and enhance searchability. Make sure conclusions and abstracts and titles are strong and convey your message. Make sure you have strong key words and strong headers.
Examples of figures from scientific journals. LEFT TOP. LEFT BOTTOM RIGHT. Making these figures requires mastery of advanced software and hours or days to perfect.
Tips For Writers
The sign of a mature writer and scientific professional is that they can evaluate and ask questions about their own manuscript. Do you think this terminology is precise enough? Are the messages clear? Is my manuscript readable? They can set goals and motivate themselves, separate criticism from their sense of self-worth, and maintain professional relations with their colleagues. You do not want to burn bridges so to speak. Publish or perish is a toxic mindset and can lead to a lot of stress and drama. Avoid it when possible.
Get feedback from coauthors, at every stage of writing.
Be specific about what you want feedback on (arguments, organization, figures, sentence clarity, ect).
Do not be defensive at criticism, even if it can be overwhelming at times.
Separate criticism about your writing from your sense of self-worth
Take breaks if needed. Step away, for an hour, a day, a week if needed.
Be realistic about what you can accomplish in a certain time frame. Don’t promise or rush writing/results to people-please.
Also, don’t procrastinate.
If you are struggling to write, join a virtual or in-person writing group, visit your university’s writing center, check in with a colleague. The National Center for Faculty Diversity has many resources for writing.
If your advisor expects a “perfect” manuscript, communicate to them about what advice and assistance you need. You should also take advantage of your university’s writing resources.
Make use of small-time chunks. It’s rare that we have hours and hours to write. Using a half hour here or there can help.
Track submissions and rejections in a spreadsheet, and make sure to include things like the manuscript ID number and date submitted. Save the password to the journal submission journal. Unfortunately, the peer review process can be slow, and it may take months to hear back!
Understand what writing conditions work for you. What medium will motivate you to write, when you best write. If you work well in the morning, protect that time. Don’t try to fight your brain’s inclinations.
If a coauthor or PI is being abusive in criticism or setting unrealistic deadlines, then it’s time to speak up, either to the advisor or a trusted professional in your academic unit.
Remember that faculty are juggling a lot, but it is their responsibility to communicate clearly. However, women and Black faculty also face additional advising, service and teaching requirements. They are also more likely to have their authority challenged or to face hostility from students. This provides additional stress to the already stressful duties of being a faculty member.
Tips for PIs/Faculty
Set clear expectations for co-authorship at the beginning of the project.
Don’t overpromise on results. Know your limits.
Be honest about the timeframe it will actually take to write and submit a paper. Nearly every single PI I have had has significantly underestimated the time it would take to finish and submit a manuscript.
Be a writing mentor, not a merciless critic. Always include some positive comments with the negative.
Provide your student with resources for learning things like writing, graphic design, and editing. Realize that your student’s time is valuable and they are primarily there to learn scientific skills. Consider paying humans to do graphic design and professional editing. Better yet, departments could hire full-time professionals in these areas that could be accessed by all research groups in the department.
Keep dialogue and communication open about paper progress. Don’t be like this PI:
My own PhD supervisor has tried a number of methods over the past two years to convince me to revisit my doctorate and write papers for publication. At first I was optimistic, due to their assurances that writing papers could be completed quickly, based on the weighty document I had already produced. I began drafting two papers for publication in my spare time, and worked on them for a few months. Early on, I received input from my supervisor and I used the feedback to revise the work and send a new version to them.
Six months later, I received a long email detailing the unsalvageable damage I would do to my career unless I produced publications from my PhD. The email was pure manipulation and easily grounds for a formal complaint to the institution. My supervisor instructed me to complete a full draft of a paper within two weeks.
For grad students interested in continuing in academia, you really need to make sure their paper publication moves along. Not having first author publications post-PhD significantly hindered my job search for me.
If your grad student is not interested in academia and has no interest in publishing, and has left the lab, then that is a great opportunity to bring on a co-author in your lab to revise the dissertation chapter/draft and submit the manuscript. Make sure the additional student gets appropriate credit though.
Remember that women’s writing is often held to higher standards than male writers in academic writing.
Conclusion
Poor mentorship in writing can result in women being under credited or excluded from the author list compared to their male peers in the SAME research group at the SAME rank. Researchers of color are also under-represented in authorship, particularly the prestigious first and last author positions. Leaving people off author credit lists is uncool. Notably, female graduate students are more likely to publish more with female mentors.
The timeline for scientific publishing is long. It can take years from when you develop the initial idea to finally seeing it published online. 1Don’t give up and find resources that can help.