How to Write a Paper in a Weekend (By Prof. Pete Carr)

Hello, I'm Professor Carr, Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota. I would like to talk to you this afternoon about how to

write

a research

paper

. Over the years, my group and I have produced around 400

paper

s and have worked with new graduate students, I have learned that there is a lot of fear and trepidation and at At the same time, I am excited about writing a research paper, especially my first one, and I want to see if I can make it an enjoyable and productive experience for you. I think that doesn't take that long to produce a first draft and that's what I'm going to focus on this afternoon is how to produce a first draft, which is really important.

I think one of the biggest problems when writing a research paper is, without a doubt, the The first is suppressing the need to procrastinate and postpone starting the work, and that is part of my strategy and the way I approach the research paper writing, so before you prepare to

write

the paper, there are some important preliminaries. Number one, you should review your own notes that you have taken on articles you have read that are relevant to the work you are writing and you should renew your literature search. It is very important to do this before you start writing your article, the second preliminary.

The topic is a very important one and it goes back to high school and that is that you need to determine who your audience is. I'm sure you were taught this way in the past and this is important when writing a research paper, you need to know what The purpose of the paper is: Is it a research paper? Is it a review article? Is it a tutorial article? What magazine is it intended for? The primary readers of the article will be university students or researchers, but as always with any article, the true primary reader. you are the reviewer, these are the gatekeepers and it is very important that you address their concerns and the more you can get them addressed in the first draft, the better off you will be and your final publication, so the prelims don't count towards The Weekend in which you are going to write your article, you must have the preliminaries well done before going into details.

I want you to understand what I consider to be the big picture. First of all, creating your initial draft is the creative part of the job and what I want you to do, what I think you need to do is resist the temptation to correct mistakes while producing this first draft. Your job now is to produce a complete first draft, not a perfect first draft. Editing is the The second stage of the work is the analytical critical thinking part of the work and editing at this point before you have completed the first draft is a waste of time fixing a sentence and making it perfect if it never appears in the document because it turns out to be Irrelevant is a waste of time.

Well, over the years I have developed an algorithm and I have talked to several of my colleagues and many of them use the same algorithm and it runs more or less as follows. Number one, just start. Don't procrastinate, write something on paper number two, you need to work from an outline. The reason an outline is important is that you may not finish the document in one sitting, you probably won't finish it in one sitting, and if you have an outline you can pick up where you left off before, you won't have to. Read it again, you'll know where to start.

The third part of this is that the outline is easy to do, so there it is. It's really fun to write an outline before you have a piece of paper to write in your head you have your data you have your data tables you have your figures take them and put them in order organize them logically The sequence is very similar to what you could organize for a talk and that list of articles that list of figures and tables in order is really the outline of the article. Now the next point is the following. Do not write the introduction to the article at this time.

The introduction is the hardest part of an article to write, so don't start there because you'll feel the need to procrastinate and it will come back. The easiest part of a paper to write is the experimental part, it is the part of the paper that you are most familiar with, you have done the experiments, you know how they were done, so write the experiment and you will move on. It's an easy part to write. The next part of the article I would focus on would be the results under discussion following the outline you created from your list of figures and your list of tables and this is a little harder to write than the experimental one, but you're really starting now , OK?

So basically you have a draft that consists of the experimental and the results and the discussion. Once that's done, the really hard part of writing begins and that's doing the critical editing, but you have a first draft and that's what's important now. The critical part is when you turn it into clear, concise, coherent English and make sure the science you've written is correct. The final part of the algorithm is the correct cleaning of the conclusions. Personally, I like conclusions or summaries that are a numbered format from conclusion one to conclusion three, where they are clearly separated from each other and it is easy to see the contributions of the work.

Now we have to do the introduction and there are two very important things that need to be clarified. covered in introduction number one, why the study was conducted, what is its purpose number two, you should collect the relevant and essential background information and put it together in the introduction, you should be able to give the readers a sufficient basis to understand what you did and The last step in following this algorithm is to produce the references for the article. In fact, I think it's a good idea to write some notes as you go through the first draft and manuscript indicating which references.

You might need to know what they would be about, but not stop and collect the references at that time because it will just disrupt the whole flow of work, but when the manuscript is almost finished, you will need to get the exact references so that the reviewers and readers can actually find information without problems. It's extremely annoying for reviewers and readers when this isn't done correctly, so you've basically got your work cut out for you and I want to leave you with a few final words. an old saying attributed to Sir Francis Bacon reading makes the conference Fullman a clever man and writing an exact man and each of those things that we do in doing science, we talk to our fellow scientists, we go to conferences, we read a lot but in producing An article for publication is when we want to focus on our critical skills, when we want to make sure that our scientific arguments are correct and logical, so writing is the most demanding part of what we do as scientists.

Some final points. always check the manuscript requirements for the journal of interest, there is no point in being an article that does not follow the manuscript requirements, it will probably be returned unreviewed with a semi unpleasant note from the editor and finally, I want to leave you with some references on writing there some classic books here are some very relevant books for writing a paper on chemistry and I want to point out a wonderful short article by Professor Royce Murray, former editor of the journal of analytical chemistry, skillful writing of a terrible research paper Seven rules to follow.

This little item is a gem. It will do so in a mock style. It tells you the worst things you can do when writing a manuscript. I hope you find this helpful and it was a pleasure being here as reviewers. becomes deformed and especially if it is one of your papers that you