Writing a journal article can feel overwhelming. Especially when you consider it is actually many distinct challenges fused into one task: writing. Here’s how I break them down:
Establish your goal
What are you trying to achieve? In practice, this means:
- Where do you want to publish your work?
Go to: Choosing a journal
Understand the product
What exactly are you trying to produce? Yes, a journal article. But what is a journal article supposed to do? What does your reader expect to read? Specifically:
- What information/knowledge do they expect to find?
- In what structure/order do you they expect to find that information?
- What language expectations to they have?
Go to: Know the Product
Tip
The information in this hub is skewed towards question-driven IMRaD papers. See also Potential biases.
Build the knowledge
For most students, a large part of scientific writing isn’t actually writing — it’s understanding and interpreting their research; making meaning out of it, which happens to happen during the (Discussion) writing. Specifically, that means understanding:
- What questions are you addressing?
- What do your findings mean; i.e. what do we now know that we didn’t know before?
Go to: Two types of writing
Write the paper
This is the stage where you actually assemble everything you’ve got — questions, methods, data, figures, interpretations, conclusions — and turn it into a paper that makes sense to your reader.
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Manage the project
This a task that runs in the background of all other tasks. It entails the collaboration and communication with your supervisors, co-authors, as well as the editors and reviewers, and the publication process.