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

[Music] hi I'm Professor Carr University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry uh I'd like to talk to you this afternoon about how to how to go about writing a research paper um over the years I and my group have uh produced about 400 papers and uh in working with new graduate students I've learned that there's a lot of fear and trepidation and at the same time excitement about writing a research paper especially the first one um and I want to see if I can make it um an enjoyable and productive experience for you I believe that

it doesn't take that much time to produce a first draft and that's what I'm going to focus on this afternoon is is how to produce a first draft which is really important I think one of the the biggest problems in writing a research paper is certainly the first one uh is is suppressing the urge to procrastinate and put off beginning the work uh and that's that's part of my strategy in the way I approach uh writing research papers so before you get ready to write the paper there are some important preliminaries number one uh you

should review your own notes that you've taken on papers that you've read that are relevant to the work that you're writing up and you should renew your literature search this is very important to have this done before you start uh writing your paper the second preliminary issue is very important and it goes back to high school and that is you need to determine who your audience is I'm sure sure you were taught this way back when and this is important in in writing up a research paper you need to know what the purpose of the

paper is is it a research paper is it a review paper is it a tutorial paper um what Journal is it intended for are the primary readers of the paper going to be undergraduates or researchers uh but as always with any paper the real primary reader is the reviewer these are The Gatekeepers and it is very important that you address their concerns and the more you can uh get get them addressed in the first draft the better off you you are in and and finally getting the paper published so PR preliminaries don't count for the

weekend that you're going to write your paper you've got to have your preliminaries done okay now before getting into the details I want you to understand what I consider to be the big picture first of all create producing 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 Stakes as you produce this first draft your job now is to produce a complete first draft not a perfect first draft editing is the second stage of the work

it is the critical thinking analytical part of the job and editing at this point before you've completed your first draft is a waste of time fixing a sentence and making it perfect if it never appears in the paper because it turns out to be irrelevant is a waste of time okay so over the years uh I've developed an algorithm and I've I've talked to a number of of my colleagues and many of them use the same algorithm uh and it runs roughly as follows number one just get started don't procrastinate get something down on paper

paper number two you need to work from an outline the reason an outline is important is you may not finish the paper in one sitting you probably won't finish the paper in one sitting and if you've got an outline you can pick the work up back where you you finished before you're not going to have to read it over uh you're going to know where to begin uh the the third part of this is that the outline is easy to do so it's it it's actually fun to write an outline before you you have a

paper to write in your head you've got your data you've got your your tables of data you've got your figures take those and put them in order arrange them in some logical sequence uh much like you might arrange them for a talk and that list of paper that list of figures and and tables in order is really the outline for the paper now the next point is the following do not write the introduction to the paper at this time the introduction is the hardest part of a paper to write so don't start there because you're

going to you're the the urge to procrastinate is going to kick in again um the easiest part of a paper to write is the experimental it's the part of the paper that you're most familiar with uh you've done the experiments you know how they were done so write the experimental and you will be moving forward it's an easy part to write the next part of the paper that I would focus on would be the results and discussion following the outline that you created from your list of figures and your list of tables um and the

this this is a little bit more difficult to write than the experimental but you're really you're really getting started now okay so so basically you've got a draft consisting of the experimental and the result results and discussion um once that's done the really hard part of writing kicks in and that's doing the hard critical editing but you've got a first draft and that's the important thing now the critical part is when you convert that uh into clear concise and coherent English and make sure that the science that you've written is correct the final part of

the algorithm is is the the the the cleanup write the conclusions personally I like conclusions or summaries that that is a numbered format conclusion one one conclusion two conclusion three where these These are quite clearly separated from one another and it's it's 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 covered in in the introduction number one why was the study done what is its purpose number two you've got to collect the relevant essential background information and put that

together in the introduction you need to be able to give the readers a sufficient background to understand what you did so the the very last step in uh following this Al this uh this algorithm is producing the references for the paper uh actually I think it's a good idea for you to write some notes as you as you go through the the first draft of manuscript indicating what references might be needed what they would be about but not to stop and collect the references at that time because uh it's it's just going to interrupt the

entire flow of the work but when the manuscript is uh just about finished you need to get the exact references uh so that the the reviewers and the readers can really find the information uh without trouble it's extremely annoying to reviewers uh and readers when these are not done properly so so basically you've got the job done now and I want to want to leave you with a few final words um there's there's an old saying attributed to uh Sir Francis Bacon reading maketh a full man conference a ready man and writing an exact man

and each each of those things that we do in doing science we we we talk to our other our fellow scientists uh we go to conferences uh we do a lot of reading but in producing a paper for publication that's when we want to focus on on our critical skills when we want to make sure that our scientific arguments are are correct and logical so writing is the most exacting part of what we do as a scientist um some final points uh always review the manuscript requirements for the Journal of Interest there's no point getting

a paper that doesn't follow the manuscript requirements it will probably be returned unreviewed with a semi nasty note from the editor um and and really finally I want to leave you with a few references on writing uh there are some classic um books here there are some books very relevant to writing a paper uh on chemistry um and I want to point out a a wonderful short paper by uh Professor Royce Murray the former editor of the journal analytical chemistry skillful writing of an awful research paper seven rules to follow uh this this little little

paper is a gem uh it it will it in mock style tells you the worst things you can do in writing a manuscript uh I hope that you'll find this this helpful um and uh it was uh a pleasure being here some reviewers get really bent out of shape especially if it's one of their papers [Music]