A Scientific Approach to Scientific Writing

This guide provides a framework, starting from simple statements, for writing papers for submission to peer-reviewed journals. It also describes how to address referees’ comments, approaches for composing other types of scientific communications, and key linguistic aspects of scientific writing.

Essential Steps Before Writing a Paper

Having completed a study and acquired all the data required to present it, you are ready to begin preparing a paper. However, before beginning to write, you have to take several critical preliminary steps: Your notes must be gathered, a suitable place for writing must be found, a selective literature review may be helpful, a target journal must be identified, linguistic limitations must be recognized, the study must be defined and delimited, and the information must be arranged. Failure to take these steps will make writing more difficult and seriously compromise the chances of publication. Therefore, this chapter outlines what needs to be done in each of these steps.

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A Journal Editor's Tips to a Good Reviewer

Peer review is one of the foundations of science. To have research scrutinized, criticized, and evaluated by other experts in the field helps to make sure that a study is well-designed, appropriately analyzed, and well-documented. It helps to make sure that other scholars can readily understand, appreciate, and build upon that work.

Of course, peer review is not perfect. Flawed studies are published, and peer reviewers may miss critical problems or errors in particular studies. Reviewers often do not have the time, nor the inclination, to dig deeply into a study’s methods, or assumptions, or supporting materials, in order to find errors or flaws in a research paper.

Even though peer review is not perfect, as a journal editor I rely heavily on the evaluations and advice provided by peer reviewers. We spend a great deal of time trying to find the right reviewers for each and every paper that we put through the peer review process, and an equally large amount of time reading, evaluating, and putting into appropriate context the responses that we receive from our reviewers.

What is ironic, however, is that despite the importance of peer review in science, it’s not a skill that we typically directly address in our graduate programs, nor in our professional societies. I’m not aware of graduate seminars in “how to be a good peer reviewer”, nor are there materials easily available for scholars to reference when they are asked to undertake a particular peer review task for a journal.

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Source: OUPblog