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The Craft of Scientific Research - Chapter 6: How to write and publish a scientific paper

Chapters six and seven move to two of the most fundamental crafts of our profession: how to write a scientific research paper and how to give a scientific research presentation. It is with these two seminars that the “business” of doctoral training began many years ago; I was tired of always repeating the same things to my students, so I started giving a seminar once a year.

In Chapter 6, after addressing the basic question “Why should you publish?”, we discuss how communication first implies comprehension, and we offer some advice on written language. We introduce the concept of International English, a written form distinct from any spoken dialect of English, and direct non-native speakers to Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style”. 

We then move to a short history of science and of scientific communication, to reach January 5th, 1665, only 27 years after the publication of Galileo Galilei’s “Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze”, when the first issue of the Journal des Çavans, today considered the first scientific journal, was published.  We tell of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest journal in continuous publication, and of many other scientific journals that were published in the second half of the 17th century. Our little history of moving from Pasteur’s work to confute the spontaneous generation theory brought us to the IMRAD structure that almost every scientific paper today uses. Last, we explain how the USSR’s Sputnik space mission sparked the space race, the beginning of Big Science, and the birth of modern bibliometrics. 

After this historical framing, we provide a step-by-step guide to writing a scientific paper, first explaining what a shelf journal is and then providing practical suggestions for each section of a scientific research paper. Then we follow the process from manuscript completion to submission and introduce the concept of real-time writing.

We open the topic of Open Access by advising on the reuse of figures, reporting the birth of Green and Gold Open Access models, and reflecting on the abuses of these models, which inevitably brings us to consider the crisis of scientific publishing and peer review. 


Enjoy the reading!


Summary of Chapter 6 of “The Craft of Scientific Research”, by Marco Viceconti, self-published and Green Open Access book on the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18069190. 


 

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