Tag Archives: scientific writing

11.11.21
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Science — stories or pure data?

Writing a scientific paper

In his recent post, Petter Holme presents an entertaining inner dialogue about whether one should market one’s scientific output or not. Much of this centers around the concept of stories — and the discussion on whether we should publish papers that have storylike narratives or just plain data has been going on for a while.

Being an advocate of papers-as-stories, let me add another point of view to the mix.

I feel that there are two dimensions here. The first one is the axis from facts to fiction, and being scientists, we all know where we should place ourselves here. The second dimension is about pure data versus understanding/insight, and it is this dimension that in my view necessitates some storytelling.

Let me explain my reasoning by starting from pure data. Suppose I have carried out an experiment/done some simulations/analyzed a bunch of data I found on the Internet. Now, if I wanted my output to be pure data, I could just release the numbers as tables or graphs or whatever, and maybe an explanation on how the experiments or simulations were carried out. Pure data — no story.

However, my pure data would probably not make sense to many people, if any. To take a step in the direction of meaning, I should at least explain what the research question is that the experiment/simulations/analysis project was designed to answer. I might also feel compelled to tell how the data answer this question, i.e., to give the numbers some meaning.

Notice the elements of a story sneaking in? There is a question, there is an answer.

But even after these additions, only an expert reader would be able to see the meaning in what I have done. For anyone else, more would be needed — why should this question be asked? What is the context for the question? And why should one care about the results?

Add these elements, and we have arrived at the typical structure of a scientific paper that begins with an introduction and ends with a discussion. We have also strayed pretty far from pure data, and are now firmly in the realm of stories. First, we introduce the world and the characters that inhabit it, then we create tension with an open question, and release this tension with an answer.

But such stories of science are not works of fiction; they are told with facts. This, to me, is why papers should be stories — stories provide clarity, understanding, and meaning. They help the reader to connect the dots. Of course, one can and should release pure data too: numbers, results, code, everything. But these only get their meaning through stories.

11.06.21
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Podcast interview on writing

How to Write a Scientific Paper book cover

I was recently interviewed by Daniel Shea for his podcast Scholarly Communications — you can listen to the interview here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/how-to-write-a-scientific-paper

We discussed my writing book and writing in general. This was a very enjoyable discussion & Daniel had plenty of good points and new perspectives that I could immediately agree with — do have a listen, highly recommended!

03.06.20
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How to Write an Excellent Master’s Thesis

How to Write and Excellent Master's Thesis [slideset cover]I was asked to give a talk on how to write a Master’s Thesis at our department’s Comms & Coffee event this morning; here are the slides.

This talk is an adapted version of my paper-writing system (no, I haven’t written a book about writing Master’s theses, at least not yet). You’ll notice that companies & businesses are mentioned—Aalto is a technical university, so many MSc theses are in fact done as interns/trainees in companies.

I hope the slides are useful. Feel free to share with your students!

09.19.19
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How to write a press release that journalists want to publish?

pressrelease_blogpost

[This post has been co-written with sci comms coordinator Anu Haapala].

If you happen to come across research results that are worth sharing with the general public through online publications or traditional newspapers, you’ll usually need to approach them with a press release. As the inner workings of press releases are notoriously difficult for scientists to grasp (what, you have to present things in the wrong order??) and as no-one actually teaches scientists how to write them, I have teamed up with our specialist Anu to provide some help.

Of course, if you live in fairyland, your university has a scientific communications team that simply reads your paper, understands its content and implications better than you, and compresses all this into a readable, exciting press release that instantly makes you a media superstar. But if you live in the same world as the rest of us, you might actually have to work a bit with said comms team as your results might not be as comprehensible to non-specialists as you think. Also, it might help if you’d understand what it is that the comms people are trying to achieve — what is their output? And, more often than not, you might, unfortunately, even need to write the press release yourself because there are not enough comms people around… so how should you do it?

There are two key things to understand here: 1) the intended audience and 2) the structure of the press release.

Let’s begin with the audience. In fact, a press release has two audiences: the first is the journalists who act as gatekeepers, and the second is their audience, the general public or its subsets such as tech-savvy readers or wannabe astronomers or similar. The gatekeeper role of the journalists comes from their need to serve their own audience: they only publish your story if they think it is of interest to their audience.

This has direct consequences on the form and structure of a scientific press release. First, the press release has to be written in a way that journalists are used to seeing and they can make best use of it (which is very different from scientific writing!), and second, its language and content should be comprehensible to laypersons.

The way journalists would write any news story – and the way you should write your press release too – is to put the most important thing first, followed by other things in decreasing order of importance. This inverted-pyramid structure has historical reasons: there is limited space in a newspaper, and shortening a story is easier if the editor can just chop off a few last paragraphs without doing much damage to the central point. At the same time, this structure makes the story more readable: the readers do not need to wonder what the point of the story is if this point is the first thing that they encounter. In other words, they see immediately what all the fuss is about and whether they want to read more about it.

The problem is that we scientists are really not used to writing this way: it almost physically hurts us to give away the main result immediately, in the very first sentence, without lengthy motivation or background or methods or anything to prep the reader with. But no pain, no gain: this is what you should do. Always begin with the main result, formulated in plain language that even your grandmother who never went to high school can understand. This is difficult, we know, so coming up with the proper words might take quite some time. But it’s worth it.

After introducing the main result, you should tell why the results matter and what follows from them, again in plain language and using only words that your audience can understand. What is now possible? What new and wonderful things can now be achieved? How has your result made the world a better place? And after this, you can continue to add in paragraphs in decreasing order of importance (to your target audience!). These paragraphs can add further details to your result, talk about the setting where it was obtained (your research group, an international collaboration…), sketch some future directions, and so on. It is probably safe to leave methods last, unless they contain something that would be especially interesting to your target audience (of non-scientists, remember!).

Journalists are used to killing their darlings, though, and you should, too. This means that you should critically evaluate each paragraph you write. If any of them seems unnecessary or trivial to anyone outside your own research community, don’t hesitate to press the delete button. News desks receive dozens of press releases each day, which means that journalists are ready to give their precious time only to a selected few. The shorter and snappier your press release is, the more likely journalists are to read your release through and publish it as such.

Leaving blanks in the right places can even encourage them to grab their phones and call you with follow-up questions. For this very reason, always remember to include your phone number and email address at the end of the press release. Journalists want to contact you, the specialist, directly and right now instead of trying to catch you through your university comms for days. (Believe us, they can hardly imagine anything more frustrating than an interviewee who is playing hide and seek!) So when you send out a press release, make sure you do it at a time when you are actually available to pick up your phone and discuss your research, even if just for five minutes.

What should not be the first thing that you leave out of your press release, however, are quotes. Good press releases contain an element of human interest in the form of quotes, things that you or a colleague of yours say about your results or research. “We had never thought about X until we figured out that Y”, says N.N., a postdoctoral scientist. “Then, the solution practically presented itself, and we knew how to do Z.” Quotes are an easy way to build bridges from one topic to another in the storyline of your press release: it might be even easier to use a quote than to write something up as a full paragraph (see the example above). In addition, humans (your readers) are always interested in other humans, so quotes make your press release more appealing.

Please remember that your press release is NOT a scientific publication: it does not need to tell everything (like the details of your methods). That’s what your original paper is for. You should leave out things that are too difficult (or too boring) for the intended audience. You may need to invent analogies or to simplify your results a lot: as long as you are truthful, this is perfectly fine! The only thing to avoid is over-generalization or exaggerating your work (despite some sci comms folks and some journalists craving for sexy headlines): make everything simpler, but keep it real. Also, send your release out in a format that is easy to copy, paste, and edit. Most comms teams use centralized press release services, but if you cannot access one, send out a simple email message! This is much better than hiding your release in an attachment: here, creating a nice-looking PDF will only slow you down.

Finally, timing counts too. Remember your first target audience: the gatekeeper journalists. Journalists want NEWS, they want things that happen right now, and they want news before their competitors! This means that you should send out your press release so that as soon as the result is out (some journals have press embargoes), they can run their story. A week or a month later won’t do; it’s very hard to make a journalist interested in a result that was published weeks ago. So as soon as you know your publication date, contact your sci comms people and start preparing your press release.

01.21.19
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How to Choose the Title for Your Paper

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” ― Stephen King

How to Write a Scientific Paper book cover

This post is a chapter from the book “How to Write a Scientific Paper.”

After you have written your abstract, the next task is to consider the title of your paper. If the abstract is a compressed version of your storyline, the title of your paper is even more so. Titles are hard—it is often surprisingly difficult to come up with a short, informative, and catchy title. For me, this has at times felt like the hardest part of writing a paper.

The title of the paper serves a dual purpose: it delivers information by telling readers what your paper is about, and it serves as a marketing tool that makes others want to read your paper. Unfortunately, unlike the abstract, there is no general-purpose formula to follow when thinking of a title. There are, however, some points that you should consider.

The title has to be in perfect sync with the abstract—they have to tell the same story. Make sure that your title and abstract use the same words and concepts. Also, make sure that everything that is mentioned in the title is discussed in the abstract.

Use words that everyone in your target audience can understand. Avoid subfield-specific jargon. Simply does it! The paper’s title should only contain concepts that can be understood on their own, without any explanation. While there is some room in the abstract for explaining one or two important concepts in brief, there is no such luxury in the title: the reader should already be familiar with every word used in it.

The title should be focused and clear. If it is possible to give away the main result in the title, do so. Avoid vague titles, such as “Investigating Problem X with Method Y”. Instead, go for something more concrete: “Investigating Problem X with Method Y Reveals Z.”

A small request: please never, ever use a title of the “Towards Understanding Problem X” variety. Just don’t do it. Pretty please. If your research is worth publishing, you have arrived somewhere. Just be confident and tell the reader where this is, instead of telling them where you would rather have gone! It is OK to say something about the bigger picture in the title, as long as your key point plays a leading role. But to keep your title concise, it may be better to describe long-term goals elsewhere in the paper.

It helps if the title is catchy as well as informative. But do not exaggerate—consider how your title will look 10 years from now. Will it stand the test of time? If the title is too gimmicky or contains a joke that becomes stale after you’ve heard it a few times, it won’t. You should also avoid jargon and buzzwords that may go out of fashion before the paper gets published.

Consider search engines and online search. Your paper needs to be found if it is to be read, so the title should contain the right keywords or search terms. As a network scientist, I almost always include the word “network” in my paper titles, even if this makes the title longer or if other network scientists would understand the title perfectly well without networks being explicitly mentioned. Without the word “network”, they would not necessarily find my paper when they hunt online for new reading material.

Keep your title short. Research has shown that shorter titles attract more citations—see Letchford et al., R. Soc. Open Sci. 2(8):150266 (2015). This should not come as a big surprise: long and cluttered titles are not as contagious as simple, focused ones. If the title is convoluted and hard to grasp, then the paper probably is too.

Sometimes there are field-specific conventions that you should be familiar with. In some biomedical fields, for example, the paper’s title often expresses just the key result—“Transcription Factor X is Involved in Process Y”—and the titles can be fairly long. In some areas of physics and computer science, shorter and less informative titles are the norm. Have a look at other papers in your field, and try to imitate their best titles.

If you get stuck at this point and find it hard to decide on the title, it might be easier to initially lower your bar a bit. Just come up with some candidate titles that do not have to be perfect. Then ask your colleagues—your fellow PhD students, your supervisor, anyone—to have a look at the list and to pick the most promising candidates for refinement and final polishing.

Get the ebook from your favourite digital store! Paperbacks are available too (Amazon only!)

11.22.18
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Cheatsheet: How to Revise Your 1st Draft (2/2)

Here is the second cheatsheet on how to revise the first draft of your scientific paper, focusing on sentences and words. (Here is the first one if you missed it). Enjoy!

For a hi-res PDF, please click here!

Want more? In my book How to Write a Scientific Paper you’ll learn a systematic approach that makes it easier and faster to turn your hard-won results into great papers. Or check out the series of posts that starts here.

Cheatsheet: How to Revise your 1st Draft

11.15.18
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Cheatsheet: How to Revise Your 1st Draft (1/2)

Hi all,

as I hinted at earlier, I’ll be releasing a couple of cheatsheets on scientific writing based on the writing series/book, mostly because I love to play with Adobe Illustra^H^H^H because I’m sure you’ll find them useful 🙂

Here’s the first one; click here for a high-res PDF version.

Want more? Get my little writing guide where you’ll learn a systematic approach to writing papers that makes the whole thing easier, faster, and less painful: How to Write a Scientific Paper!

Cheatsheet: How to Revise Your 1st Draft

10.01.18
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How to deal with reviews (2/2) (paper writing for PhD students, last part)

This post continues directly from part 1/2.

One way of making the referees happy is to always acknowledge that they have been heard, whatever it is that they say. Never treat a referee with disrespect, even when what they propose is wrong, or when they have misunderstood things because they obviously didn’t bother to read your manuscript carefully enough. Always give them something.

If the referee misunderstood something that is obvious, write another sentence on whatever the obvious issue is and add it somewhere. Thank the referee for pointing out that your paper was not clear enough on the issue, and tell her that you have now added a clarifying sentence. If the referee’s comment or question is so confused that you cannot even figure out what it is that the referee wants from you, do something about it nevertheless. Pick some sentence or paragraph that might be related to whatever is confusing the referee. Then rewrite it: try to make it more clear, or at least rearrange the words… Finally, write a polite answer to the referee: tell that to the best of your understanding, her problem was probably related to the issue discussed in this sentence or paragraph, and that you have now tried to make it more clear. At times, the referee is confused enough not to know herself what the original issue was, and gladly accepts this act of repentance from you.

The above does not mean, however, that you should always do what the referee tells you to do. If the referee asks you to do something that you feel is wrong or doesn’t make sense, don’t do it. You should, however, explain in detail in your rebuttal letter why you chose not to do it. But, if possible at all, change something in the text, however small. Then, the referee will feel that she has been heard.

It is common for the referees to get speculative and to come up with so-called bright ideas. While this may be genuinely helpful, it can also be a nuisance if those ideas are tangential to whatever it is that you are doing. If the referee asks you to do something that sounds sensible but is clearly outside the scope of your paper, insert a sentence into your discussion section where you mention that it would be useful to do in the future whatever it was that was suggested by the referee.

It may also be that the referee is both hostile and wrong: you know that your results hold, but the referee does not believe you and does not want to believe you. In this case, you must make your stand and defend your results. Be polite, constructive, and firm. Why does the referee act this way? If it is because you have not provided enough evidence to support your conclusion, apologise for lack of evidence and provide more (even if there was enough already). If it is because the referee feels left out (often indicated by requests to cite some of her own work), you can give her credit for some earlier work in the introduction or discussion, but you should not cite papers only because you are forced to do so.

There may even be more nefarious reasons for referee hostility – the referee trying to block competition for instance – that may be hard to detect or disentangle from general grumpiness: perhaps the referee simply had too low blood glucose levels, you never know. Even if you suspect something like an attempt at blocking, be polite but firm while writing your responses in a way that they are also meant for the editor’s eyes. If someone has decided to block your work, you cannot turn that person’s head, but the editor might be able to spot what is happening. And if a referee is clearly being unethical, you should confidentially let the editor know this.

But most of the time your referees have good intentions: being critical is not the same as being mean. If you treat your referees with respect, if you make sure that they feel that they have been heard, and if you always give them something, they will be happy or at least happier, and because of this, they will accept your paper more willingly.

This concludes the series (for now). I may post summaries, cheat sheets etc later. Thanks for reading!

Breaking news: the ebook based on this series is out! Go get it!

 

09.24.18
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How to deal with reviews (1/2) (paper-writing for PhD students, pt 18)

Previously in the series: how to write the cover letter. 

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After several weeks or months of letting your paper out of your hands and into the cold and hostile world of scientific publishing, the dreaded moment of judgment finally arrives—if you haven’t been desk rejected by the editor in a few days, that is. There is a letter from the editor in your inbox, telling that you are either rejected outright or requested to revise your manuscript so that it can have a second chance. This statement is followed by detailed referee comments that may or may not make sense to you (or anyone else, for that matter). In theory, it is also possible to have the paper accepted as it is, but this is very rare: it has happened only once or twice during my career. Therefore it is safe to assume that there is more work to do now and that you have to get back to your paper. Often, this feels, at least to me, inexplicably painful, because the submitted paper has been neatly wrapped up and archived in my mind. I’ve gone on to think of other things, and now that perfect and beautiful wrapping has to be torn open – what a pain!

When receiving the letter, my suggestion would be to first take a few deep breaths and to try to calm yourself. This gets easier after dealing with tens of rejections and criticisms, but it never gets easy. Especially to PhD students who have put a lot of effort into their work and to whom this manuscript may represent 100% or 50% of their publication record, the moment of realising that someone is critical of their work is a difficult one.

What often happens at this stage is that you directly rush to the referee comments, and read through them at top speed. This is because you want to know RIGHT AWAY what it is that the referees find wrong with your beautiful work. And because you really speed through the comments, you only see the surface, and only pick up words that criticise your work. Your view is distorted.

Then, being a human, you get all emotional: angry, embarrassed, frustrated, depressed, or any linear combination of these. You may feel that your work is worthless, and therefore you are worthless. Please do not worry, feeling like this is as normal as it gets. You are certainly not worthless! We have all felt like this. This is what a career in science is about. Those who survive learn to persist and to deal with these emotions. It will get easier, and part of why it gets easier is that you learn that the process of peer-review can be very noisy and the referees can be wrong (they often are). And when they are not, you can use their criticism to learn and to improve your work.

When faced with a letter from the editor where referees UNJUSTLY criticise your work, my recommendation is to take a few more deep breaths, relax, calm down, and maybe do something else for a while. In particular, if the reviewers are very critical, your fight-or-flight-response prevents you from seeing what is really being said and what the really important problems are, and from assessing how difficult it would be to fix them for a revised version. So, get some distance first. Breathe, get a cup of coffee, look at a video of playing kittens or cute animals, and only then read the letter again, this time more slowly and analytically.

First, focus on what the editor says because this is the most important thing of all. As an example, I and my colleagues successfully got an article published where the referee hated the paper and asked for a total rewrite from a different and quite alien perspective. This rewrite would have been impossible for us to do. But the editor seemed to like the paper and told us that only a few minor things remain to be done. These two requests were completely at odds, but we chose to listen to the editor instead of the referee (nevertheless, we picked some of the referee’s points and cosmetically revised a few sentences, just in case). The paper was immediately accepted after resubmission.

So always listen to the editor! If the editor encourages you to submit a revised version, she is already on your side. Do it. If the editor uses less encouraging words like “should you wish to resubmit a revised version”, do it nevertheless, because even in this case the door is still open. Sometimes what you receive is a standard, copy-pasted response, and the editor takes no stance but leaves you to deal with the referees. In this case, just move on to the referees’ comments. But if there is anything in the editor’s words that you can use, use it.

Next, read through the referee comments carefully and with an analytical mind. First, look at the science and look at the positive side of things: did the referees spot any obvious flaws in your work? If so, great, now you can fix those flaws! Did they misunderstand your results? If so, great, this shows that you need to be more clear in your writing (even though referees often miss explanations that are already there in the manuscript…) Do the referees require some extra experiments or calculations to back up your conclusion? Do these make sense? If so, great, these experiments or calculations will make your paper more solid and you should do them, even if this takes time.

After you have gleaned useful and actionable information from the referee comments, look at what is left. There may be comments that you do not understand, comments that you understand but that you know are wrong, and all kinds of weird debris. The worst comments read like “I am sure that I have seen a similar result somewhere but cannot be bothered to find a reference”. Now, take off your scientist hat for a while, and put on your psychologist hat. You don’t have one? Get one, it’s tremendously useful. It pays off to realise that the referees are human. Humans are not analytical machines; humans have feelings. Your referees have feelings too. Figure out how they feel and what to do about it.

It is really worth the while to try to see the world through the eyes of the referees. Read the negative comments again, and try to understand what the referees think, feel, and expect from you. Do they feel irritated? Left out? Bored? Insecure, needing to bolster their confidence? Confused? Just plain cranky?

The key to getting your revised paper accepted to understand what makes the referees happy, and then give them this (while maintaining your scientific integrity, of course).

TO BE CONTINUED…