Write a Scientific Paper in 37 Easy Steps: An Absolutely Useless Guide
Ensure you have your caffeine, snacks, imposter syndrome, and 398 open browser tabs ready before you start.
1. Clean your office. You cannot—I repeat, cannot—write surrounded by a fossilized banana, 8 illegible notebooks, and that dried-up SDS-PAGE gel that should never have made its way out of the lab. So, obviously, the first step is to not write at all. Clean your whole office instead. That ancient filing cabinet full of paperwork from 2001 is going to hold you back if you just let it sit there. There might even be a jar of chemicals in the bottom of it from the 1960s. OSHA very much wants you to check.
2. Make a writing playlist. Your productivity absolutely hinges on your choices here, so choose wisely. Slapping on a 2-hour YouTube playlist of Dark Monastery Gregorian Chants might feel like a power move, but it’s a gamble between warding off interruptions and accidentally summoning campus security. Take your time.
3. Scroll LinkedIn to see what your peers are up to. Dr. Productivity just published her 5th paper this month and ran a marathon before 8am. Toxic MD fired his whole team again and has been nominated for 6 awards. That guy who always wears sunglasses inside and never speaks “accidentally” autoclaved his grad student last week. You can’t write until you know exactly what happened.
4. Choose a working title. It is critical to title your paper before you know what it’s going to be about. Don’t forget the colon, alliteration, and a vague reference to some obscure TV show that nobody will get and has nothing to do with your research.
5. Take a break. You’ve worked hard. Go to Florida for two weeks or something.
6. Rewrite your title. (Three times).
7. Open your PDFs. All of them. Every single article you’ve downloaded since 2014. None will be relevant. Several will be duplicates. You need all of these. In fact, you should print them out and write on them so you know which ones you’ve read and which ones you still need to read. Write “Read!” at the top of the ones you’ve read. Write “Read!” at the top of the ones you still need to read. Now you’re getting organized.
8. Highlight everything important. Make sure there’s no white space left.
9. Shred all the papers. If you need one again, you can go to PubMed and redownload it.
10. Write one sentence.
11. Delete one sentence.
12. Write another sentence. Begin it with “This study aimed…” as if a study is capable of having aims.
13. Take a short break. Ask yourself why you chose academia. Why this research topic? Do you actually care about any of this anymore? Take a moment to browse bakeries for sale on the Amalfi coast.
14. Write a paragraph. Now we’re getting somewhere.
15. Reword your paragraph. Look at the date. It’s suddenly three weeks later.
16. Google the etymology of that word you just used. Spend six hours reading about wind instruments from the 15th century (you’re not a music historian).
17. Make coffee.
18. Write 20,000 words. Suddenly, it all makes sense. You’re a genius. A writing god.
19. Read what you wrote. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
20. Re-read what you wrote. It sounds like a Trump speech.
21. Change the font. Nonsense sometimes sounds better in Arial.
22. Revisit the title. It’s describing an entirely different study. Delete 10K words so you can write what you intended to write when you started. This is much easier than changing the title. (You’ve already done that 3 times, after all.)
23. Rename the document. If you’re not at ihatethis_final_FINAL_finalversionusethisone_v11_lastversionever yet, you’re doing something wrong. Go back to step 1.
24. Write 10K words. God mode is back!
25. Forget your research question. What was your argument? Do the data actually support your hypothesis, or are you hallucinating again?
26. Consider replacing the title with a song lyric. Maybe the reviewers will appreciate the insight into your state of mind. It used to work on AIM. “So Close, No Matter How Far: It couldn't be much more from the heart” wouldn’t even be bad for that pericardiac fibroblast study.
27. Revisit the introduction. You hate it. You also now hate the whole paper (and yourself).
28. Switch the font back again. That fixed it.
29. Write the conclusion. More research is needed. Of course it is. In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and the fact that research never ends.
30. Email the paper to your coauthors.
31. Email the paper to your coauthors again.
32. Email the paper to your coauthors again with a vague threat.
33. Email the paper to your coauthors again with a retraction of the vague threat and a promise to buy them a beer if they give you the feedback today.
34. Spend 3.5 weeks addressing coauthor comments and making changes.
35. Email the paper to your coauthors again. Provide beer preemptively this time. Get responses faster than you wanted them. Spend another 3.5 weeks removing everything you added last time. Coauthors preferred the original.
36. Upload paper for submission. Press the submit button with your eyes closed. Check the file you uploaded. Just to make sure. Find a typo in the title.
37. Go back to step 1.