i just received a message from @ravenclawishlove asking for advice on writing a paper for a journal, so thought i’d share my tips with all of you as well! The process may be daunting but it’s not impossible!

First, a word about scientific articles–remember you are telling a story, and every story has a beginning (a problem), a middle (the journey to solve that problem), and an end (the conclusions). Your data does not have to be presented in the order you did them in lab; it just has to be presented in the way that flows the best for the story you want to tell. 

Ok, let’s break this intimidating thing down piece by piece and make it more bite-size-friendly. (Disclaimer: this is the workflow I use that’s worked for me personally, but I’m sure others may do things differently. So if anyone has other advice, feel free to add on!)

• First things first, go over the guidelines for the journal you want to submit to. They’re different for every journal, so be sure to already have a journal in mind. Read all the instructions. Your paper may get sent back if it doesn’t follow the rules! This is everything from how many colors your figures can have, the format of the abstract, to even the types of controls you must run. Save the instructions and refer back to them regularly. 
  
• Next, I like take all my figures and tables (even ones I know will go into the supplementary) and just lay them out in the order I think tells the story the best (either by printing them out or using powerpoint*). Write a little blurb describing each one (what was the question asked? what method(s) was used? what were the results? and the possible conclusion?), and see if they complete the story. The figures of every paper are crucial–they are what tells the story. So if you can’t tell the story using just your figures, then it’s back to the bench to get that data! So probably best to do this step early on. (And save those blurbs! They’ll come in handy soon!) *Just fyi most journals do not accept figures done in powerpoint. Just a note. 
• Before you start your actual writing, get sample articles–from both papers your lab has published in the past, as well as articles from the journal you’re submitting it to. Your lab’s previous articles may have methods/citations you can use for your current paper, and well, the articles from your journal of choice has the right formatting. Study them for a bit, and have them next to you when you start writing yours. 
• Then write the Results and/or the Methods. Don’t worry about the intro and discussion yet. Some people like to write the methods first (since it’s quite brainless), others the results (and then from that you can talk about the methods you used). I bounce back and forth because some days I have less brainpower than others. The methods should have enough detail so others can repeat your experiment, but not too much extraneous/common stuff. Use your writing samples as a guideline. The results should be very concise–the format I use is: state the question I’m trying to address, brief description of the method (sometimes mingled in with the result, depending on the flow), the notable observations (now refer to the figures), and a brief conclusion. (aka the blurbs you just wrote for your figures! told ya they’d come in handy)
• Now write the Introduction. With the results in mind, what information should the reader know before diving into the paper? This is where you brief them on the current state of things, and then present them with the knowledge gap your results fill. An outline really helps here to make sure you cover everything. And don’t worry if you ramble too much–you can always copy+paste stuff into the Discussion.
• Then onto the Discussion! My first draft of the Discussion is always kind of a brain vomit, because not only do you speculate about your results in a big-picture-kind-of-way and what it means for the field, but you can kind of also ramble about future directions and whatnot. It’s usually always better to write too much the first time round and cut stuff out than not have enough. Outlines are good here too. 
• Lastly, write your abstract by taking the most important points from each section (Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion) and squishing it down into a movie trailer of sorts. This may be the hardest part, and it takes practice to condense an entire paper into just a few lines. 

Other tips in general:

• Have a reference manager!!! Do not do your citations yourself! EndNote is a popular program, but it costs $$ so I use Mendeley. Also note that every journal has a different citation format. 
  
• Set a dedicated chunk of time to write every week aside, and treat it like a class. It’s been shown that people who write regularly are more productive than those who write sporadically. My writing time is Thursday mornings from 9 am to noon. And even doing things like editing figures, editing, or reading up on the paper format counts! 
• Do not write this paper on your own! Work very closely with your mentor by sending them outlines, drafts, etc. Even if you’re the only author, please seek out advice and help and editing eyeballs from your mentor, other students, and your collaborators. And do this especially if there are other authors–you need to ethically keep them in the loop and get their approval. 
• Save everything you delete onto another word doc, and save each manuscript version as its own document. That way, if you change your mind about a section, you won’t have to rewrite it. Before I do any major work on my manuscript, I save it as a new doc with that day’s date in the file name.
• It’s going to take a lot of time. Not just the writing portion, but the editing, and addressing the reviewer comments, etc. The date we all hope to get our paper published by is always inevitably pushed back by weeks, months, even years. So it’s ok to be frustrated, but know you’re not alone!
• Pay attention to the little details: making sure the fonts on all the figures are consistent, nothing is too blurry, etc etc, and oh nothing unethical has been done to the data. I’m always surprised what counts as unethical data manipulating, so make sure to go over this with someone knowledgable. 
• Have fun! It’s a lot of hard work, but just think–you’re letting the world know something super cool that you just discovered! How neat is that? You’ve worked so hard to get all this data together, so time to show it off!

Phew! That’s all I have for now! For those who have written articles for peer-reviewed journals, feel free to add your own advice! 

Good luck!!! I hope this helped a bit! And if you have any other questions (or want to vent about the process), you know where to find me!

Read this! It’s such great advice!