Thread by @RitaVassena

🟠10 things I learned from authoring 100 papers in science/medicine, hope you find them helpful:
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#academia #AcademicChatter #phdlife #scicomm #AcademicTwitter

1. You are telling a story. The story must be clear and easy to follow. Do not make the reader work needlessly.

2. A paper is not for you to show off your knowledge, it is for your peers to learn a piece of information. Write for them.

3. Clarity in titles. Not “uncovering the relationship between X and Y in advance maternal age” but “X is associated with Y in women older than 35”.
If I am interested, I will read further, if I am not, I will still retain the message.

4. Introductions are not reviews, just situate your work. What do we know? Why do we need to know more? What gap is your work filling?

5. Introductions are not results either. Do not tell what you found, that’s for title, abstract, and results.

6. The order in which you did the experiments is 100% irrelevant, report them in the most logical order for the storyline.

7. Don’t be shy with M&M, I need to be able to replicate what you did. Replicate, not improvise.
I need times, temperatures, reagents, primers, and all details.
Use supplementary, expand, clarify.
Me reproducing your work gives you credibility.

8. Organize results by messages and not by assay or experiment, don’t dump all you got on a page and make me figure it out.
I will pick what to focus on, but you must be clear and linear.

9. Discussions are not results, do not tell me all over again what you just showed me.
Tell me how your result will advance the field, what implications it has, and what should we do now that we have your findings.
Discussions are about tomorrow.

10. Never use the phrase “to the best of our knowledge, this is the first …”.

Honestly, if you need to tell me, then you should not care to tell me.